32  bar steep rise 29.79 1pmh SSW dewpoint 30  Spring

                       New Moon (Growing)

Snow!  Yes, it happens in April.  Even May here sometimes.  Even so, at this point it seems like such an insult, a step backward when the engine of solar warming has already taken hold and eliminated most of our snow cover.  Yet, even as I write this I don’t mean it.  This is the ever present dynamism of our latitude, visible both in the deep cold and dark nights of midwinter, as well as the forwards and backwards of early spring.  And I would have it no other way. 

The plants that show signs of life now, that spear their first leaves up through the oak leaves and straw laid down to keep them cool until temperatures even out a bit, they are ready for this, made to achieve height and bloom before their contemporaries.  This is an example of what Bill Mollison (author of Permaculture) calls a time niche.  Most perennials have specific time niches. Part of flower gardening involves learning their niches. Only then can you have a garden with blooms throughout the growing season. 

Daffodils, tulips, bloodroot and anemones fall into a category roughly named spring ephemerals.  Their strategy is to grow, bloom, and begin to die back before the larger, woody plants like trees and shrubs leaf out.  That way the spring ephemeral gets light denied to those that grow later in the season, light filtered or blocked out entirely by the leaves of maples, oaks, dogwoods and lilacs. Ephemeral refers to their time niche and defines them as the mum and aster are as fall bloomers.

I like the spring ephemerals.  Their pluck, their hardiness and their almost too obvious metaphorical value regenerate horticultures spirit in me each year.  Right outside garden patio door I can see the red leaved tulip plants and the yellow green daffodil leaves.  Up from and behind them the iris have already grown as much as six inches.  The moss has turned bright green and buds on the dogwood and magnolia have swollen. 

At this point I’m always reminded, in an admittedly perverse way, of the Aztec poem that goes something like this:  We are here as in a dream between a death and death.  I haven’t got it quite right and I can’t find it.  The intent though is to say that life is the illusion, that our true existence is in the realm we think of as death, we emerge from it at birth and return to after death.