Uncertainty in the Garden

This was the best spring ever in my garden. For a few moments when I looked around I committed that unpardonable sin of pride. I allowed myself to think that I had finally gotten it right. The usual huge gaps in the early garden were gone. Instead I had bright stands of tulips, daffodils and early spring blooming flowers. Despite the weird weather which first promised warmth and then dropped to unseasonable freezes, things looked great. Despite dire words about drought we had enough rain that everything looked strong and healthy.

But two weeks of freezes kept me out of the garden for more than is usual in springtime. And so when I finally re-emerged, geared for serious gardening, it was another story.

Oh, there are still plenty of bulbs. I even have a few clusters of miniature daffodils mingling with blue and orange pansies - and it's nearly June! Many of the tulips are also still happy, probably because of the extended cold weather.

But what seems happiest of all is the weed population. With the mild winter we had, the more tender ones that are usually killed off by cold all seem to have survived. There are far more dandelions dotting the grass than I have ever seen. And the garlic mustard is completely out of control! There isn't any way to get it all pulled before it seeds so we will have to weed whack the flowers off and then spend anything that might otherwise have been leisure time in constant weed-pulling mode.

I've discovered that when the weeds get that plentiful, beheading is the only answer. Fast beheading - not even time for a trial before execution time. I left some innocent little wispy things in the cracks between the pavers - thready leaves and tiny white flowers, thinking my husband could get out his flame thrower and zap them all - except that the freeze intervened. When I went to hand pull them they shot so many seeds everywhere (including a few hundred that seemed to go right into my eyes) that I shudder to contemplate the next generation. I'm embarrassed to admit that I have no clue what they are. I never had them before. But they are as plentiful as lawn grass right now.

The greater celandine isn't quite as plentiful as usual - not to say there isn't enough to populate a small European nation - but a lot seems to have been choked out by the garlic mustard. Still, taking a day to try to expunge as much as I could from my woodland garden I ran into something worse - about a zillion baby maple trees. Many of these are also being overshadowed by the garlic mustard and so won't be found until their root systems have extended to the point where hand pulling isn't practical. It's easy these days to see how land, not tended, reverts to forest.

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