Spring's beauty ripens as the days lengthen and the sun strengthens. But, as there are two sides to every coin, so there are two sides to Spring. The Yin and Yang of Spring, so to speak. If the Yin is the beauty, the Yang is the beast.
The Beast(s) of Spring
We gardeners are an ungrateful lot. In the face of burgeoning life, we can always find something to bitch and moan about. The beast of spring is basically this gardener's moan about the inevitable. I'm sure you have your own personal moans about your own personal beasts of spring.
Seasonal Chores Made More Interesting by the Weather
My garden has a lot of oak trees (among others). Basically, I like them. However, they do have one trait that gets on my nerves. All deciduous trees drop their leaves in the fall. Gardeners with deciduous trees expect this and expect to deal with them then. But, oaks have this habit of dropping only about half their leaves in fall. They hang on to the other half (for reasons known only to them), and let them go as their new buds burst in spring. You can see one of them hanging onto dead leaves as though they were precious gems in this photo. This permits me to enjoy removing major leaves as a part of spring clean up. It's a chore, but doable unless the weather, and other interesting aspects of life, conspire against the gardener, as they did this year. Then, this chore becomes even more interesting as the leaves have to be retrieved from emerging plants - a delicate, painstaking and time-consuming business, instead of a general raking.
The Time Is NOW!
There comes a time in every garden when those projects you've been putting off simply have got to be done. This is that sort of time in my garden. General clean up just has to wait.
The very first thing that simply had to be done was to dig up all the inhabitants of my Polygonatum (Solomon's Seal) bed, divide them, refresh the bed and replant. For the past couple of years, they've been migrating under the flagstones in the adjacent walk and Circle Garden. Since this operation meant lifting flags and resetting, I had managed to find other things that needed doing instead. But this year it had to be done. This sort of action needs to be done just as growth commences. Once they get going, it's impossible to do this without great damage to the stems.
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