Mom, thanks for sending me outdoors
Many of my childhood memories are related to the outdoors. As the youngest of 3 children, living in a small suburban subdivision populated with lots of other kids and surrounded by fields and woods, “Go outside and play,” was my mom’s regular command. From my perspective it was an invitation to explore and imagine, from her perspective, likely a way to take the volume outside.
My mom was an avid gardener, and participant in the local garden club, because that’s what the suburban moms did in the early 1960′s, along with bridge club. But I don’t really remember doing lots of gardening with my mom. The garden was her domain to shape and plan. We did get roped into weeding at times, and I remember the large rockery that was on the slope between the upper yard and the lower yard. Weeding it was a big project, but the reward was the lovely scent of “pinks” (dianthus) that grew among the rocks. 
Even though I don’t have lots of memories of gardening with mom, I do think my appreciation for the beauty of flowers comes from her. I remember the flower arrangements in our mid-century home. There was a strong Asian influence, since we lived outside of Seattle. The flower arrangements would often have just a few flowers, branches and foliage, be asymmetrical and include perhaps a small piece of driftwood or stones from the beach at the base of the arrangement.
I do have an iris in my yard from her garden (the yellow one in the picture). It wasn’t from the original home I grew up in, but from a few moves later, the house we moved into when I was in high school. Last year it didn’t bloom, but I was thankful to see the blossoms this year. I know it won’t live forever, but it is nice to have a flower from my mom. But even more important than flowers, I have the legacy of an appreciation of beauty and the importance of family and friendships that were hallmarks of my mom’s life. Mom, thanks for sending me outside to play.
Never Perfect
My philosophy of gardening is that it’s a process, not a destination. So I am always working on some section of my garden, and the whole garden will never be “done” or perfect. Because if it was done, then what would I do besides weed? This year, my attention has been focused on the front yard, particularly adding perennials along my new fence. I have made good progress on my project, but I still want to add a couple of rose bushes in the area that used to be honeysuckle, add a few annuals where the pansies will die back once it gets too hot, maybe fill in with some cosmos in another spot … like a I said, mostly done but never perfect.
However, I was poking around my back yard on Sunday enjoying the poppies, and I realized that all the attention on the front yard meant that my back yard was suffering from weedy neglect. The poppies look great, because they don’t require any care or effort. They actually look better from a distance, so the profusion of weeds around them is not visible. Regardless of the weeds, the view of poppies is a bright treat in May. I’ll try to catch up on the back yard next weekend, but I might have to declare this the year of my front yard, and settle for a medium level of effort and imperfection in the back yard.
I struggle with lowering my standards, probably because I get caught in the expectation trap. People know that I’m a gardener, so I feel like they expect my yard to be lovely and weed-free all the time, and it just isn’t possible. So part of my challenge is to enjoy my experience in the garden and not worry about what anyone else might expect from my garden - because it won’t ever be perfect, but it will always have something I can enjoy and appreciate.
We had lovely rain on our dry, dry earth this weekend. I was in the mountains Saturday and was appalled at the lack of snow, even on Berthoud Pass. After an extremely dry March and April in Denver, the water department is talking voluntary restrictions. So enjoy this rain and skip watering for a few days.
Happy May Day – the flower variety
The tradition of May Day celebrations goes back to ancient times, as a celebration of spring. Flora, the Roman goddess of flowers, was celebrated during this spring festival. Other cultures had variations of May festivities.
As a child we made little flower cones to hang on the doorknobs of our neighbors – still a great tradition to build community and celebrate spring, but not one that is as common anymore. While I didn’t make any May baskets for my neighbors, I do think random giving people bouquets is a great way to share the joy of flowers and some encouragement. For many years I have made Easter baskets for friends and neighbors, but I was out-of-town for Easter week this year, so I took a break from my tradition. The island where my family has a vacation place has a “flower fairy” who leaves bouquets on front porches along with an encouraging note. A simple act of kindness can cheer up a day.
Maybe sometime this spring and summer I’ll randomly deliver some bouquets. Why not? I might not be able to solve all the problems of the world, but I can deliver some joy from my garden. A much better celebration of May Day than the broken windows from the May Day demonstrators in my hometown of Seattle.
Peer Effects
My lawn looks terrible this spring. The dandelions are taking over in the back yard and I am embarrassed to be “that neighbor” — the one who spews weed seeds into other yards with every little breeze. I panicked at the volume of dandelions this week and went out and just pulled off seed heads. I know I really need to dig out the roots to solve the problem, but I couldn’t stand looking at the puffy sea of lawn failure. If I didn’t care about my neighbors, or didn’t have neighbors, or didn’t have a garden blog, I might shrug off my dandelion problem. But I do care – I have great neighbors and their lawns look great (even though my flowers are better). The houses on both sides of me are rentals, but the owners have sprinkler systems and yard care that keeps the lawns looking good. I am grateful for that effort, and I try to do my part through a decent lawn and nice flowers. My front lawn is ok, I had to pull off a few seed heads, but not too many. But the back yard is gone over to the dandelion epidemic. It only makes me feel slightly better to observe around town that I think this has been a bad spring for dandelions.
For all the negative ink spilled over peer pressure, which is when we don’t want our teens to follow the crowd into bad behavior, having peers and caring about their opinions isn’t all necessarily bad, sometimes it improves our behavior. My son is researching “peer effects” in graduate school. Peer effects can be positive or negative. For instance, when a group of kids in a school work together as a team and through social norms improve the academic environment for everyone, that is a positive peer effect. However, if you hang out with people who have unhealthy eating habits, the negative peer effect can make you fat. There are academic research papers on these topics because researchers want to understand the community dynamics that can set up an area for success or failure.
The peer effect in my neighborhood is a good thing. Because most people have nice looking yards, the slackers want to do better and work a bit more on their yards. I promise I’ll dig out some dandelions all the way down to the roots this weekend!
Watering on Earth Day
I gave the yard a thorough watering today, and was reminded how precious water is in our dry climate. I work diligently to minimize water use and water waste, but the ground that didn’t get any snow moisture in March is dry and thirsty. Our rain last weekend helped, but a hot dry week is in the forecast, so I did some deep watering this morning.
Earth Day is a great day to plant a tree or shrubs. If you don’t have lilacs in your yard, they are great hardy shrubs that brings joy every spring with fragrant blossoms. Common lilacs are quite hardy, that’s why you see them along the alleys in older neighborhoods. Last week I noticed an old lilac bush along the highway where the old 6th Avenue cloverleaf used to join I-25. It has survived neglect and drought and is blooming. Of course, you will need to water lilacs for the first few years to get them established, and periodically as they grow, but I have an old lilac bush on the north side of my house, outside the den window, that is rarely watered and does well. Considering that you could remove a 3 foot swath of lawn all along a fence line and plant a row a lilacs, the lilacs will require much less water than the lawn (assuming you adjust your sprinklers and don’t over-water the lilacs). There are many varieties of lilacs, but I am partial to the common lilac as a hardy, reliable friend every spring. If you don’t have lilacs in your yard, take a walk down the alley of an older neighborhood and breath in the lovely scent. But hurry, they bloomed early this year and will be fading soon.
Gardening Gloves
I have a love/hate relationship with garden gloves. I know they protect my hands from prickles, splinters and the wear-and-tear of garden work, but often I go without gloves because I like the tactile nature of gardening and sometimes my fingers are the best way to grasp a weed root or pat a new plant into place. Yesterday when I was preparing a new planting area along my new fence, I put my gloves on for heavy digging, then took them off every time I was pulling old honeysuckle roots out of the soil. And since I was using an old pair of gloves with holes in every finger, I’m not sure the gloves protected my hands much anyway. Last night I kept putting on hand lotion to try to rejuvenate my hands, and my fingernails look worse than usual, even though I’m not a manicure-kind-of-gal. 
I bought a new pair of garden gloves today, ready for a new season of gardening. I won’t make any rash promises about wearing gloves more often, because I will still alternate between gloves and bare hands. Maybe if I at least start each day in the garden wearing my gloves, I’ll have some protection for my hands, at least until I pull them off to grip a stray weed.
My project for the week is new plantings along my fence. I am letting honeysuckle come back in one section, but am planting perennials in two other sections. My order of plants arrived this week, but I held off planting because of our forecast cold temperatures this weekend. Rather than planting, I did a little more garden clean-up and picked a big bouquet of lilacs. It looks like by mid-week I can plant. Of course, we can still get frost for another month, so I am just planting my perennials, not tender annuals. I’ll try to wear gloves for digging holes, but I’m pretty sure they will come off as I nestle the plants into their new homes.
Lilies
I have enjoyed adding lilies to my gardening repertoire in the past few years. I got started on lilies on impulse, seeing the display of spring bulbs in the grocery store as I was headed for the checkout stand. I bought 3 packs of 3 and started adding lilies around my patio. Then last year, I bought some more and decided to try them in pots. They did well and after the lilies died down, I added chrysanthemums to the pots for late summer/fall interest. Then I stuck the pots under the deck stairs for the winter and forgot about them until about 3 weeks ago. I pulled out the pots and realized that without any special treatment (my favorite gardening words) the bulbs had survived and were pushing up through a pile of leaves. It looks like they have also multiplied and are sending up more shoots this year than last year. Of course, too early to tell how they will bloom, but I’ve now decided that lilies in pots are a great way to brighten up my back stairs. While they do require water, they aren’t as thirsty as some flowers in pots and don’t require as much special attention as the dahlias I tried in pots a few years ago. Flowers that require multiple steps and special instructions are a lot of work for those of us who want beauty but don’t have full-time to devote to the effort. I’ll let you know how the lilies do this summer, but meanwhile, buy some bulbs and put them in the garden. I mix oriental lilies and asiatic lilies and have had good luck with both of them. If you bought an Easter lily for indoor enjoyment, you can also plant that outside in May when it is done blooming and it might rebloom.
The list of what is blooming now is too long to remember – because we have the April and May flowers all going now! Basket of gold, candytuft, tulips, some daffodils, creeping veronica, periwinkle, flowering cherry, flowering plum, pansies, mat daisy and lilacs are all in bloom in my yard right now. Last week I visited Washington DC with the intention of seeing cherry blossoms for the average peak days, but they were all gone. Instead I enjoyed dogwood, crabapples and azaleas, and of course, seeing my daughter. With the blooms early and warm weather, it’s tempting to think we can plant fragile annuals, but not yet. It’s still best to wait until after Mother’s Day to be safer. It is a good time to weed, as the weeds are also early – and I have dandelions blooming in the grass. I dug those out tonight to attempt to stop the seeds from spreading.
My experience with lilies reminds me that enjoyment in the garden is a combination of tried-and-true favorites and experimenting with new varieties and plants. So think of that as you plan your summer garden – include some old friends and stretch into some new areas.
Azaleas and Dogwood at National Arboretum, DC
Where is the moisture?
If you are reading this blog, I assume you have at least a casual interest in gardening. But even if you aren’t into gardening, all of us in Colorado need to be concerned about the lack of moisture we are currently experiencing. Colorado is a semi-arid climate, and our moisture is sporadic at best. However, the normal weather pattern includes snow in March that melts into the ground and provides a good start for our gardens. This year we did get snow in February but March is ending up as one of the driest ever. So what? We can just turn our sprinklers on sooner and run them for more months, right? Actually we can, but if you look at the mountain snowpack, where we get most of our water as it melts into reservoirs, moisture is lacking there as well. And just using more water on residential landscape isn’t the best stewardship of our limited water supply. There is a reason why water rights and water law are a big deal in Colorado, because water is our most precious resource. And I have a feeling that my recent visit to Arizona was a glimpse into the future of Colorado. I also visited some of our Colorado water, since the snowmelt from the Colorado mountains is shared across the arid southwest.
When we think about how huge the water problem is, you might wonder what difference you can make. A valid question, but if each of us do a little, collectively it adds up. And if each of us uses a little more, then we collectively have increased the problem. The water department tries to help give us incentives, because some of us need to see the pain of expensive water bills to choose to water less. But it is possible to decide to use less water on your landscape.
Blue-grass lawn is a huge culprit, not naturally suited to a semi-arid climate and each household has to decide how much lawn is enough. For our family, even when there were still kids at home, we decided a small lawn was adequate, and we would walk to the nearby park for large-lawn activities such as soccer and wiffle ball. Maybe some area you currently have in lawn could be converted to shrubs or groundcover. Start with little bits of lawn at the corners and edges of fences, or the parking strip — no one is playing on those pieces of lawn. When I was working on my overall landscape plan, my husband would joke that I mowed with a shovel, because for me, bits of lawn that weren’t serving a landscape purpose were meant to be torn out. For example, the side of my house used to have a strip of lawn. Now it sports low water perennials and shrubs. If you have a sprinkler system, it doesn’t do any good to dig out lawn and keep the sprinklers going at the same rate, so you have to put your system on zones, some which get more water, and some which get less. I won’t go into excruciating detail on watering less, because such advice is readily available from the water department and other sources. The questions isn’t how to save water, it’s if we each individually and collectively decide that we care about saving water, and then if we match our caring with action. How about a small change like shutting off one sprinkler system section in an area that isn’t visible from your front yard or back patio? If we each do one section, it actually will add up.
As I write this blog, the wind is howling outside, sucking moisture out of our landscape and I can see and smell smoke from wildfires in the foothills — in March, our “snowiest” month. Makes me a bit worried about April through October, the gardening season.
Garden Party Girl
Forsythia are a great shrub this time of year. 
The problem is, they are a rather mundane shrub for 49 weeks of the year. So in a small urban garden, where every plant has to earn its place, it is hard to devote enough space to forsythia. If I had an acre, I would probably have 4-5 forsythia along a fence line. But on my small lot, I have one to the right of my front porch, like an accent mark for a few glorious weeks in the spring. If you were to ask me about my favorite shrub, I probably would mention the Oregon Grape Holly, rather than forsythia, because it is a great shrub for many seasons of the year. But this week forsythia is my favorite, probably because the splash of color is so welcome after the brown and gray of winter. While the crocus are blooming, they are smaller and more subtle – the forsythia makes a bold statement. Walking around the neighborhood, you might not noticed most shrubs, but when forsythia are blooming, you notice each one – the bright yellow screams out for attention. Forsythia is the loud, fun, party friend in the garden, just a quick flash, then gone. But for those few glorious weeks, she brightens up the whole space.
We Made It!
This weekend definitely felt like spring and more warm weather is forecast for the week. Even though it is likely that we will have more snow and cold in the next month or two, a warm March weekend makes me exhale and celebrate that I made it through the winter. The feeling of spring is especially reinforced by the time change this weekend, so now I can enjoy gardening after work. The result of celebrating spring in the garden is that I will probably be sore tomorrow from raking, bending and digging. I uncovered emerging bulbs, trimmed back ornamental grasses and trimmed back some perennials. This year the thin layer of leaves I had left in the flower beds for winter mulch were matted to a hard crust. Some of the bulbs were struggling to break through, so I had to gently release the leaves and clear them away so the shoots can grow.
One thing I love about this time of year is that I am always surprised by some bulbs coming up in a location I had forgotten about. I didn’t remember that I had planted more dwarf iris next to my front gate, and they are brightening the sidewalk with their graceful purple blooms right now.
My weekend work in the yard inspires me even though it’s too soon to do any planting. I did enjoy sitting on my front porch and feeling the warmth of the sun after I was done with my work. Some quiet moments of peace were exactly what I needed to celebrate a new season and the hope of spring. Along with pansies, crocuses and dwarf iris, I will have forsythia blooming in the next couple of days! Spring is here.
