When I moved to Michigan I learned a new term — shoulder season. This being Ann Arbor and Brady Hoke’s football team being where it was then, I thought it meant crying on someone’s shoulder between sports seasons. I was fond of Brady Hoke and hoped he’d do better, because he said he’d walk to get to Michigan and that was how I felt about it. But now here I was, and as winter slid into a spring too warm for sweaters and too cold for shorts, the meaning of the term came clear to me: not on the main path; sloping off from one place to another; like the shoulder of a road. Transition.
Here are my red poinsettias, out enjoying the sunlight that will slowly turn them green, a color they will keep until I bring them inside come fall, and daylight lessens, and they turn red again.
Here are violets in strong profusion, while morning glories in pots to either side are barely sprouting. The violets will wither in the coming heat, but the morning glories will move in and take over.
Here are yellow alliums and purple chives in bloom, while behind them milkweed has a long way to go before it flowers and feeds the monarch butterflies.
And here are Siberian iris spearing their way into a showy blue drift under the ornamental pear tree, whose flowers are already turning into fruit the deer will eat in August. Deer can be total pests but it’s strangely comforting that, despite my efforts at deterrence, they come back, resilient in the face of adversity. Fight the good fight, deer. I appreciate that more today than I ever have.
One of the joys of the spring garden is surprise. Where did these ultra-fluffy, double pink columbine come from? Not only don’t I remember buying them, I don’t remember even knowing they existed. Could they have arrived as seeds embedded in bird droppings? Such an ignoble origin. Could there be a Johnny Columbineseed at large in Ann Arbor, spiriting unusual flowers into unsuspecting gardens under cover of night?
Then over here, how did one tiny patch of forget-me-nots take over the entire flowerbed, even crowding out weeds? A blue haze under the fading spikes of daffodil leaves, it manages to be really in your face despite such tiny petals. It should be called I-dare-you-to-forget-mes.
Moving around to the back yard, a flower pot that once held cosmos has come up with a crop of these little purple flowers, small enough to be violets but somehow I wasn’t convinced. Pansies were in the pot next to it last year. My garden books say four petals up and one down makes it a pansy, two petals up and three down is a violet. Two up, one down, and two sticking out to the side? Panselets?
And then there’s the asparagus patch. I’ve seen it every year since we moved into this house, but it still makes me laugh to see the way it comes up out of the ground, looking for all the world like someone has snuck out to the garden and stood a bunch of asparagus spears upright in the dirt as a practical joke. But no, they’re growing right out of the ground. The second joy of the spring garden: that dirt, water, and sunlight turn into food and beauty, whether the way we expected or not.
The dearth of snow continues. Can we still call these little early flowers “snowdrops” when there’s no snow? “Raindrops” is already taken. Lawndrops? Not only are they coming up in lawn instead of snow, but the lawn is already turning green.
It’s hard to know how much temperature shift to take into account for next year’s plantings since change, including climate change, proceeds in a zigzag fashion. Even if the long-term trend is higher up the zone chart, it could still be cold again next winter. On the other hand, it could just keep right on warming up. I worried about my scilla, also known as Siberian Squill, but it turns out not to be native to Siberia at all, and is said to be able to flourish up to Zone 8. So I have two zones to spare.
Hellebores turn out to be native to the Mediterranean, which makes me wonder what on earth they’re doing blooming in Michigan in February and March – in snow, when we had any. Apparently they’ll be fine if Ann Arbor warms up.
I was able to grow paperwhite narcissus outdoors when I lived in Southern California, but had mixed results with other daffodils and tulips. In my front yard here I have an extremely satisfying collection of daffodils that bloom from March through April and into early May. The first of these are out and dancing right now, in the rain, little happy suns.
Deer do not eat any of these – the tulips they would love to feast on are coming up inside the fenced part of the garden. Rabbits will nibble on the emerging buds of grape hyacinth, but the hawks and owls are keeping the rabbits in check at the moment. That balance of power shifts sometimes for reasons I haven’t figured out. The bunnies are not abroad yet, but as Easter approaches my little window of Bunny Appreciation opens. Critters responsible for lovely baskets, brightly painted eggs, chocolate candy, and new beginnings, surely deserve to be cut a little slack while I check the garden fence for break-ins.
Still February, the trees still hung with snow, but the bulbs on my windowsill are talking spring. They’re cozy enough on the plant stand Doug made for them, at a sunny, south-facing window with a heat register on the floor below. You can see Zerlina down there on her cushion, showing her appreciation with a nap.
I mostly keep the amaryllis going from year to year, setting them outdoors when the weather warms up, lifting and storing the bulbs indoors in the fall, and potting them up again after Christmas. But every year I lose one or two, so every year I buy one or two new ones.
This is a close-up of my new bulb this year, an Amadeus. Is it named for Mozart, or is it Beloved of God? Amaryllis is named for a shepherdess Virgil wrote about, in Latin, but the name apparently comes from Greek amarysso, to sparkle. And it’s native to South Africa. I would love to know its indigenous name, but the internet has not been forthcoming. There’s an International Association for Plant Taxonomy that oversees official plant names, but any seed catalog will reveal that common names are a mix of history and marketing. The names of tomato varieties are always fun, and frequently informative. Early Girl and Longkeeper are useful to know, while Mortgage Lifter and Supersteak evoke the plump and sizeable. Tomato is pretty close to its indigenous Nahuatl name, Tomatl. Far preferable to solanum lycopersicum.
Meanwhile, the narcissus is starting to nose up through the snow. Narcissus should have a name joyfully recognizing how the flower announces spring, instead of being named for the fellow who fell in love with his own reflection. Is some kind of warning implied here, like not getting carried away by spring? Maybe Greeks, with their Mediterranean climate, didn’t understand the impact of spring on the rest of us. Our common name, daffodil, is a corruption of Asphodel, also Greek but a totally unrelated flower. It was good to corrupt it, since asphodel is associated with the underworld, but daffodil sounds like happy fun.
Hellebore is also a Greek name, possibly having to do with it being toxic, but it’s starting to bloom here in my yard, pushing the snow out of its way, right on time for its common name, Lenten Rose. It’s not a rose at all, but when you finally see a flower, even one that isn’t sweet, where no flower has dared go for months, let us call it a rose.
Robin Richstone 