Tra la! It’s Spring! It is the time when dreamers long for the long, languid days of summer, with trailing white dresses, tall frosted glasses of lemonade, and a beauteous weed-free garden that is burgeoning with heirloom tomatoes, ruby-like strawberries, enough zucchinis to alienate the entire neighborhood.
I have thumbed through a slick pile of seed catalogues and circled enough items, that if successfully planted, would have me and a few hired hands busy for the entire growing season. I have to remember to reel myself in, and start slowly, because I cannot plant to the horizon line. I need to restrict myself to my humble container garden, which still manages to get choked by weeds by July. Corn has never been elephant eye height in my garden.
Kathy Redman, of Redman Farms, says the first crop they will be bringing to the Chestertown Farmers’ Market (which re-opens officially for the season on Saturday) will be asparagus. That will be in mid-April, depending on the weather, she cautions. May will bring a harvest of cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, lettuce, kale and collards.
My mother kept flowers and just a few vegetables, on three levels of an eccentric Victorian garden that had stone walls, brick walks, six sets of steps, bird baths, bird feeders and a sun dial that proclaimed “I Count None But the Sunny Hours”. My brother and I loved hurling ourselves off one of the stone walls, into the sunken garden, and we learned early on that we had to push out far enough to avoid landing on some of her treasures.
In the spring we watched my mother’s vision come up through the brown leaves she used as a blanket of mulch through the long Connecticut winters. Gaudy crocuses appeared overnight, alongside the more demure snowdrops, scattered in odd places across the lawn. (Squirrels are no respecters of garden beds or Master Plans.) Later in spring, close to May Day, there would be a congregation of Lilies of the Valley on the west side of the house that seemed to enjoy the warm sunshine and the drip of the garden hose. A clutch of lilac bushes (two purple and one white) grew opposite them at the southeast corner of the sunken garden, by a set of mossy stairs. The lilacs sheltered the Jack in the Pulpits, the wild violets and later in the summer, the Bleeding Hearts. Strewn through all the beds were daffodils, because there can never be enough daffodils. There were delicate miniature jonquils, pale yellow and pink narcissii; others were great honking trumpets of brassy yellow that bobbed flamboyantly in the cool spring winds.
Waving clouds of cheerful yellow forsythia bushes grew along the fence lines. Every New Year’s Day my mother would cut some forsythia branches that she would put in water in an old cut-crystal vase, waiting for the forced blossoms to bring a little cheer to her winter days. Later in the summer the forsythia were hidden by big beds of day lilies.
In a large bed along one side of the driveway she grew great spears of white, purple, pink and yellow iris and as the days warmed, a few tomato plants. Sometimes she planted cherry tomatoes, which were the best things to eat warm and unwashed in the middle of a hot summer’s day, with seeds and juice running down into our bathing suits.
Way in the back of the lower garden, down by the barn, where Mr. Lee (the original resident of the house) had kept brittle little cool frames for cucumbers, we had a couple of rhubarb plants. They thrived, growing as they did just next to the compost pile. We sampled some rhubarb every summer, dipping stalks in sugar, and threading the stringiness through our teeth.
My mother kept a great variety of rare and antique plants that she nursed from clippings or from seed, and she had a great and arcane knowledge of the nuanced subtleties of her little charges. We had the childlike appreciation of their colors and smells. Lilac perfume would waft in through the screened windows, and the earthy loamy smell of fresh damp grass when we landed on our faces in the lower garden, trying to fly off the stone wall. I remember well the smell of the warm, red tomatoes, stolen on those long summer afternoons we spent playing in my mother’s garden.
This year I think I will limit my container garden to a few tomato plants and some basil. I will resist the siren song of the seed catalogues and the notion that this time I might actually water and weed and nudge our half acre into a vast field of asparagus, lettuces, melons and more. I know my limits, and I know what smells will bring back those sunny hours. And maybe I will plant some more flowers.
Be sure to stop downtown and graze through the Farmers’ Market this weekend! Tell Kathy I said, “Hi!”
“Gardens are a form of autobiography.”
~Sydney Eddison
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