Signs of Life

I saw my first crocuses today, pushing their way up through the mulched borders at the front of our apartment building. I don’t recall ever seeing them before March. Either they are winter crocuses, or the record warm temperatures have fooled them into thinking it’s spring. This portent of global warming has me worried, and I have visions of Manhattan drowning in the rising ocean waters.

I used to have nuclear nightmares where I had one hour to get out of the city before the bomb hit. I had it all planned out how I was going to get to the train station before the crowd. Now, I’ll have to start planning for the big flood, which takes the tunnels and trains out of the picture. Time to start re-thinking my getaway route…

And yet, even as I ponder my escape from New York, I begin to notice familiar stirrings within me. No, not the stirrings in my loins, get your mind out of the gutter. The stirrings in my thumb. You know, the green one. Because crocuses mean spring, and that, my dears, means gardening…

FYI: If you aren’t into gardening, can’t stand flower shows and don’t like the aroma of manure, then read no further, my friend. This post is over for you. Go watch the Superbowl or something. Because I warn you, I’m about to wax bucolic…

As usual, I’ve ignored my garden since November. The realization hits me that I haven’t watered even once all winter. (Container gardens need water even in winter, since there is no deep water source to draw from, just what’s in the pot or what falls from the sky.) I know, I know, I should use a water gauge, you don’t have to tell me. I got one once, and it cracked before the winter had barely set in. So I rely on my inner-water gauge. Since I have a middle-aged female bladder, my inner-water gauge is always set to “on”, and it hasn’t failed me yet. Still, it worries me that never once this winter did I think about watering.

I rush up to the roof to survey the garden, hoping for the best. When I get there, I am relieved to see that the warm, wet winter has in fact been good to the plants. The lilac bush and apple trees have set their buds, and even the birch trees are showing signs of life. (How stupid was I to plant river birches in containers? And too-small containers at that, since the big ones wouldn’t fit in the elevator or even through the stairwell doors. Yet somehow they have made it through 3 years.)

Of course, it’s way too soon to predict which of the herbs will survive, or if the honeysuckle will return. City gardens are precarious and unpredictable, and a bad stretch of sub-freezing temperature could do much of it in even at this point. Two years in a row I had to restart my Pyrocanthus, till I finally gave in to the realization that the blustery winds off the river were just too much for that plant. Yet somehow, the butterfly bushes, supposedly an annual in this climate zone, always come back. It makes no sense, but that’s how it is.

I seriously doubt the wysteria will make it, having been battered about during the renovations done by our building this fall. That’s okay, it gives me a chance to re-arrange, one of the major advantages of a container garden. I head back downstairs, already planning the changes, hopeful that spring will be just a little earlier this year. I must say I am pleased. Maybe this global warming thing isn’t such a bad idea after all ..

Category: Gardening