SPRING!! It’s here! At last! Hurrah….
Evenings that have actual daylight, and little green shoots and early blooms poking through the still chilly soil. (Or clay, in the case of my yard.)
So exciting and energizing. Until….the Big Freeze.
Predictably, a few unusually warm days kickstarted all manner of spring activities here in the southern Appalachian Mountains a few weeks ago: daffodils bloomed, leaves started sprouting, blossom….um…blossomed, and a few humans bravely revealed their startlingly white shins*.
And then, all of a sudden, there were confused squirrels and crying gardeners.
Temperatures fell 10-20 degrees below freezing and the white blossoms became crispy, brown sprinkles atop patio tables heaped with snow.
My yard though is totally fine. This has nothing to do with my prowess as a gardener, you understand; it is entirely to do with my benign tolerance of native plants**.
Last summer, in a new house (to me), I set to work installing sweeping flower beds, (as well as one smaller, funny-shaped one, we call the ‘amoeba-bed’) and a fire pit, and a patio, and paths, and……well I ran out of time to add many actual plants to these beds by the fall. So, the main early season growth we have this year, is possibly nature’s most well-adapted, resilient, and snow-tolerant plant: the dandelion.
It was early February when the first fluffy yellow dandelion heads woke up the yard, well before the more celebrated daffodils. And here they still are, barely fazed by a brief visit from the Arctic.
Betty Biscuit - our puppy - doing a little weeding
By May, when other, more intentional plants are blooming, I will mow and remove some dandelions, but at this time of year, they remind me that what we consider weeds, are actually just ‘wildflowers’ we’d rather not have.
AND, these early, resilient bloomers are food for bees and other industrious pollinators, so I welcome the early color and nature’s effort to install a few ‘wildflowers’ in my otherwise…um…promising garden.
Enjoy a few weeds this spring. You have my permission.
*Not me. Never me.
**weeds