Wednesday, April 21, 2021

Hope Bleats Eternal



It's sunny. It's seventy degrees. The birds are pitching woo, and apparently that is all the evidence I need to determine it will never be cold, ever again, and so I have gone to the plant nursery and jammed a bunch of little pots in the back of my car. None of this bucks tradition.

One tradition is, I will buy more flowers than I can plant in a day, or three. I will scatter some of them here and there while I think about where they should go, and change my mind and move the pots around, and finally I'll get around to planting them except for one. It might say "hardy in zone seven" on the tag but what it needs to be is "hardy left in a black plastic pot in the sun without water for three months," and odds are it isn't. Another tradition is: I'll get everything settled in and then we will get one night close to freezing and they'll all sulk for a month. Oh, they won't die. They will just mope around like kids who didn't ask to be born.

The first thing I do is fill the flower boxes. I used to shake that up but for quite a few years now I've put in the exact same plants. Geranium-Lantana-Cuphea-Callibrachoa-Heliotrope. I worry about this. There was this lady on my mail route, Mrs. V., who could politely be described as "rigid." The first time I met her, I was crisply informed I was late. A few days later I was unacceptably early. Mrs. V. employed a miserable-looking gardener and every year she directed him to plant the flower beds all at once: tulips, to begin with, lined up like soldiers, socially distanced on a grid. Then they got pulled out and tossed so they wouldn't naturalize. A fresh platoon would be mustered the next year to stand at attention. At a precise moment that was neither late nor early they were pulled out and replaced by a row of obedient salvias and a precise edging of lobelias, just the way Mrs. V. wanted them. The gardener never smiled and the garden itself, although quite well-behaved, looked unhappy too.

So I worry a bit that I have gotten into a routine with my flower boxes, although I would like to point out in my defense that everything but the Cupheas come in lots of colors, and I mix those up a bit. The thing is, it is a grand mixture, they play wonderfully well together, and in a good year, this is a thing of beauty and a joy for the whole block.

Meanwhile a number of things are conducting springtime in their own fashion without my input. For instance, I have grape hyacinths. There is such a thing as too much of a good thing. And there is definitely such a thing as too many grape hyacinths. They are a rolling blue tide thundering through the soilscape and lapping up against the walkways and how anything else wheedles its way through the mass of bulbs, NONE of which I planted, I will never know. I begin yarding them out by the bucketloads year after year, starting before they even bloom, and it does not slow them down one bit, because Jesus loaves-and-fishes them till Kingdom Come.


Meanwhile, we enjoy our seventy degrees. A lady crow in the tippy top of the fir is putting out a metronomic bleat every ten seconds from dawn to dark, indicating she wants a treat. I used to find this repetitive but now I am rather charmed by the dedication she applies to thoroughly annoying the neighborhood, and the fine results she obtains. Per tradition, now that I have my prescribed flowers planted, with their tentative, petite rootage, a crow will come down and yank one of them out of the flower box and replace it with a hole.

He is presenting his find to his lady friend, and his lady friend informs him yet again--does he even remember last spring?--that the nest is done and she is not interested in a bouquet, but maybe a snack of some kind, and he drops the limp $4 flower into the yard and plucks out another one, dully thinking "Maybe she doesn't like pink, let's try orange," and his intended reaffirms that actually she would like a delectable larval item or at least something in the arthropod family, thank you very much, bleat bleat bleat. And the courtship goes on apace.

Meanwhile a few weeks of significantly less friendly temperatures ensue, everything botanical pouts except the grape hyacinths, and I examine the empty spots in my flower boxes and go right back to the nursery.

It's a tradition.

29 comments:

  1. Lovely words and photos! (I live in a high-rise in the city but I enjoyed the read, even if that playboy crow did tick me off!)

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  2. I am in metro Detroit and right now, we have snow weighing down the forsythias in the back yard. And luckily, I was able to convince my friend that it was weeks too early to move his cannabis plants out of the greenhouse and into his yard.

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    1. A little experience, there...with plants in general, or just cannabis?

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  3. My partner likes orderly height and colour regimented lines in the garden. I do not. He plants that way. And I come along after him and plant behind, between, hither and yon. His lines are still there but I cannot see them. Which I count as a win.
    Shortly I will go into a bulb planting frenzy in the hopes of a riot of colour when our spring comes round.

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    1. I'd be so confused if my spring showed up in autumn I wouldn't know what to do.

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  4. We are supposed to get a freeze tonight and if we do, tomorrow I will be mourning my beautiful wisteria, which just recently started flowering.

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    1. Naah--that wouldn't extinguish a wisteria, would it? I guess it's never happened to me or I'd know.

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  5. We are still having snow flurries most days. Thanks for a preview of what color looks like. I had forgotten.

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    1. Last week it was in the eighties two days. Not what April is supposed to be like. One becomes afraid.

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  6. I would dearly love to have crows "bleating" in my yard. But we don't have trees around our neighborhood that are tall enough to induce them to nest there. Sure they come to gather nesting materials and food, but I would SO love to have them live nearby.

    On a similar note, I noticed a white throated sparrow pecking around in the bushes outside my computer room window for a very long time. I know from Google that they nest on the ground or in lower parts of bushes. YIKES! That sounds dangerous! I'm definitely going to have to go badass on any cats that I see around here. (Actually, we have very few of them anymore. I think word got around amongst them that this human is CRAZY! Whenever I see them ANYWHERE (even several streets away), I hiss at them and even run at them if I have to. They pretty much seem to avoid our house now. Come to think of it, the neighbors seem a bit leery as well.....

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    1. And, though I will undoubtedly have to spend minutes of my life that I will regret on my deathbed.... I have to say that I HATE the captcha thing where you have to pick out fire hydrants, crosswalks, and bicycles. The pictures are so small that I can barely see them. I usually have to go through many permutations of them before they clear me as a human (I don't know whether to take that as a compliment or an insult.) I generally do better at the wavy letters that you have to identify, if that's still a thing.

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    2. You don't have to do that here, do you?

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    3. Yeah, I did. I'll see if I have to do it now....

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    4. Yup. I had to identify fire hydrants, FFS. I wonder what I'll have to identify NOW.....

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    5. Well for heaven's sake. I thought I had no obstacles. I'll look into the settings. No promises.

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  7. We are in zone "grape hyacinths barely make it here" which must also be the "agapanthus (angry panthers) will conquer your yard leaving nothing else alive" zone.

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    1. Wow. That sounds fabulous. I'm sure I wouldn't like it if it happened to me but I love those buggers.

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  8. I didn't think there *could* be a surfeit of grape hyacinths. But then I favour blue. Murr, we plant with a melded mind, except I plant in the 1st week of June! Our weather is ordered by a schizophrenic. One day 70 F, the next 26 and 10" of snow. We plant only our hopes this time of year. I heard a big commotion at the feeder tray on our deck yesterday and when I went to look I found we had a visiting raven, and a large number of crows taking great exception! He/she took refuge in our big poplar and the crows gathered round, as close as they dared, dashing in for a beak or wing thrust, screaming curses and threats, saying nasty things about the raven's ancestry and upbringing, the usual ill-mannered and quarrelsome things one says to an unwelcome intruder. The raven sat there rather rudely with its throat feathers ruffled out and said, "B-waaaaahhhh!!!" occasionally, as if that were the only response warranted. The crows finally tired and flew away and the raven shook itself before taking off in the other direction. I noted a crow flying past this afternoon with a beak full of food. Must have young'uns in the nest across the way. Chicks in the nest, harbingers of Spring, even in our Northern climes.

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    1. Well, now I want a raven. I'm guessing you don't get a heap of tomatoes, either?

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  9. The flower boxes look so pretty! I used to wish for a garden with decent soil, but I'm used to what I've got now and just plant what I know will grow. The only flowers I have are the ones that bloom on the jade bushes each spring and sometimes in autumn too.

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    1. Did you notice the hummingbird in the top photo?

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  10. Glad others have problems with crows that are stuck on one saying every 10 seconds. Mine is a baby crow, demanding food of course. Think the mother must be the one with a completely different crow noise to all the others.

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    1. Do you have rooks too? BTW I used to think the crows that are bleating every ten seconds were babies--because when someone did come up to the tree with a treat there was this marvelous strangly sound. But right now it's the female, acting like a baby. She'll pipe down when everyone hatches and then you'll hear the babies only when someone approaches. I think.

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  11. We're enjoying an incredible spring here in DC. In our yard, I'm seeing tulips bloom that haven't done so in about 8 years. And after 3 years of planting hostas and watching them either die or get consumed by garden slugs, last year's hostas are up and leafing out and looking more full than they usually do in June! I'm attributing this to.....lack of air pollution. Is that possible? For the past year, automobile traffic has been down about 85% from normal. Of course, I understand that some of this might be due to a slow, cool spring. But tell me, how much does air pollution put a damper on things like flowering plants? This is a real eye-opener for me. Comments?

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    1. Huh! I wouldn't have thought it would make that much of a difference. I'm amazed you have hostas at all because I KNOW you have slugs!

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  12. We have a lovely robin nesting on the side of our house. Not sure she has eggs yet ... she seems to desert them for hours at a time, yet is broody at other times. Probably impatiently waiting for a treat from her fly-away spouse.

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