Spring: Hope Eternal

If any of you have been reading this column since I began writing it you can probably recite my standard spring promise along with me. Because every year it is the same one - recite along with me now - "This year I am going to get it right!"

The best part about spring, to me, is that it is all hope. All potential yet to be realized. You can look at the little green noses of your bulbs, thrusting confidently out of the soil and somehow just know that this year your garden will finally start to resemble those fields of daffodils that impressed you when you watched reruns of Dr. Zhivago

You can still see enough space between plants to feel confident that you will be able to grub out every weed and unwanted thing permanently. The daylilies don't have thrips yet, the slugs haven't emerged to chow down on the hostas, and the deer have charitably eaten all of your neighbor's rhododendrons and then, filled to the brim, wandered off, sparing your own. The trees are unfurling in that gorgeous color that can only be "spring green" and the newly pruned roses look so clean and well balanced and healthy that you just know this is the year you can invite Fine Gardening over for a photo shoot.

This year you are going to have blooms in such abundance that you can cut endless bouquets for the house, and have plenty to bring to friends - and the garden will STILL look as if Fine Gardening should be showing up any second.

Now, in my heart of hearts, I know that by fall I will be singing a slightly different song - but the same tune works amazingly well. My fall song is "NEXT year I'm going to get it right."

Because we all know that perfection is such a fleeting thing that, if it ever occurs, it will be the morning you slept in and missed it, or the one day you had to go out of town. The rest of the time you are merely striving for that elusive perfection. Or, more realistically, striving to keep the weeds at bay and the plants from going crispy in the annual drought.

Yes - I know that is what will happen in fall - but I still cherish my springtime illusions. To relinquish them would be as difficult as it was for me, as a child to finally give up my belief in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy. To relinquish that springtime hope would mean giving up the very essence of why we garden - to strive and to learn - to gain enough knowledge every year that things get a little closer to our ideal gardens.

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