The Joyous Gardener

We have several robins building nests in our yard. There are dozens of other birds as well, all busy scouting locations. Thanks to Notes from Madoo, by the artist Robert Dash, we started feeding multitudes of birds every winter, with the result that every single one of them nests in our garden, and, more importantly, grocery shops for bugs in our yard, to feed nestlings. By the end of May, there is hardly a mosquito left.

Notes from Madoo is a compilation of his columns about his garden on Sagaponack, Long Island. It is an amazing, beautifully designed garden, and well worth the time both to read about and to visit it. From Connecticut, it is a succession of three ferries, but on a beautiful day, it makes for a lovely day trip.

This past year, we made our own garden calendar, from pictures of our garden. It made a wonderful Christmas present, and was incredible to see, when it arrived – it looked like a garden from a book. The places where we could see that it was our own garden, almost startled us.

Apple has made the process very easy. We took pictures throughout the year, each month, with our iPhones, and synced them into iPhoto, just by plugging the phone into the laptop. We then went through and picked out 12 of the best pictures, one for each month. There are some nifty choices about covers – we did a cover shot that I think I will use every year, of the arbor, which is the entrance into the garden.

For $20 for each copy, we got an incredible record of our plantings, and a lovely memory of each season. My husband has one in his office, each of our children has one, and I ordered myself an additional one, in February, because they were so lovely, and I was missing having one. So we are now a 4 calendar household. Next year, I am going to order more, to give away, to family members and friends. I was rather shy about doing it the first year, because I didn’t know quite what to expect, whether it would be gift worthy. It definitely was.

Now I have a reason for taking more pictures of the gardens each month, and am grabbing the phone quickly when the light outside is just right. A friend taught me to take lots of pictures of the same thing, and then I go through and choose the best ones to save.

Now if I can just get the hummingbird to stand still for a moment!

The most challenging part of Spring is my yearly delivery of 10 yards of compost. I used to rent a truck and go and pick it up myself. Now, I order it from a nearby nursery sometime in early March and, after it is delivered by an enormous truck, backing into my driveway and dumping all of it onto a tarp, it gets shoveled onto each garden bed and around every shrub, and recently planted tree. It is a huge amount of work. Until it gets done, the pile just sits there in the driveway, a patient reminder of Jobs Not Quite Finished. Everyone I can cajole into doing it helps, and the house is quite muddy at the end of it, from all of us going in and out with muddy boots on, but the result, in the garden, is breathtaking. The plants love it. Over several years of doing this, the soil is amazing, and the plants are incredibly healthy, withstanding onslaughts of bugs, and weeks in the summer with no rain, with impunity.

And the beds after they’re done, look like the gardens in story books. You would think I had a full time gardener. All the leftover detritus from the Fall that blew into the beds over the Winter, is covered up, to dissolve quietly, undercover, and the only thing you can see, other than the rich deep black of the compost, is the green shoots of the bulbs coming up.

Looking for a movie to watch this morning on Netflix with a happy ending (it has to have a happy ending) I am struck that this is why I love Spring so much: it’s the happy ending. All the pain, the trials, the hard work and sheer slog of the previous year are resolved, in one lovely burst of colour and freshness and beauty.

Our daffodils are blooming, at last. There are several hundred of them, and each year my long suffering husband Tim plants a hundred or so more. They’re everywhere. Inspired by a picture of Tasha Tudor’s daffodils, I, too, started ordering “The Works” from White Flower Farm, and we now have enough daffodils that I can pick them for the house, and you can hardly tell where I picked them from.

I do still have “Thalia” in the White Garden, and “Mrs. R. O. Backhouse,” a lovely pink daffodil, in the front garden, but other than that, I have renounced named varieties in favour of the wild display, all over everywhere.

I bought my brother “The Works” for his birthday, and he planted them all neatly in beds. He got an enormous display, and the pictures were lovely, if a bit like dozens of bridesmaids standing in a crowded lift, but the wild look is something special.

I have tried some of John Scheepers’ random daffodil mixtures, and they are good, but the bulbs are not as large as White Flower Farm’s. They are, however, less costly. Daffodil bulbs, like garlic bulbs, start out one clove, and gradually grow and divide. Eventually you get what would be a head. The flowers bloom larger and larger and then the bulb divides underground into several smaller ones, and the following year, each of the new bulbs sends up flowers. This is how they naturalize. White Flower Farm’s mix is mostly the larger ones, just poised to divide, so that they come up quite large the first year, whereas others I’ve bought are the smaller ones, that have just divided, and they take several years to reach the larger size.

If you cut a bulb in two lengthwise, you will see the small daffodil, all curled up neatly, all ready and waiting for Spring, to grow and push through the earth and take on colour.

The deer do not eat them, Daffodils, unlike Tulips, are poisonous and for this mercy, I am extremely grateful.

Last year’s winter left us breathless. The snow was piled in mountains 8 feet tall around our house, and it became a test of sheer willpower to believe that Spring was ever, ever, going to come. This year, we had a mild blizzard in early October, with only occasional sprinkles of snow since.

Yet it still feels as though we endured something, weathered it, as it were, and have made it out successfully on the other side.