Show from April 8, 2006, 2006

Spring fever

The tulips are up six inches, teasing me with images of stunning colour to come, while the snow is still lapping at the margins of the garden. Everything is very wet. There are pools of water in the lower reaches of the front yard. Snow mould threatens to kill the brown grass. One of my dwarf cedars is a mangled mess, thanks to city ploughs and salt.

Still, I know all this is temporary, a small bump on the path to the beauty that will soon be brought by the warming sun.

It was so wet last summer that my white lilac drowned. In its place I'm thinking of putting in a winterberry shrub (Ilex verticillata). It's a member of the holly family and has rich, deep green foliage that turns yellow in fall. But winter is its best season -- its black stems and scarlet fruit make a wonderful show against the white snow. It'll grow up to 8 feet tall – but it is salt-tolerant, a good thing here by the street, and it likes it damp. You need two shrubs, one of either sex, to get berries.

I might put in a Joe Pye Weed, something I have trouble growing because my yard is too dry. This plant can grow five to ten feet tall and likes it wet. Just think of all the butterflies and honeybees I'll have flitting among its pale purple-pink, umbrella-shaped flower panicles.

The empty containers look pitiful, some of them holding the bedraggled remains of plants I couldn't bear to pull before the snow fell. But in my mind's eye, I see pinks and blues and whites and yellows mixed with silver, green, purple and lime foliage and spikes and vines and trailers. I'm thinking of the new golden-yellow calibrachoa, Callie, that flaunts a scarlet throat. I think how terrific it will look paired with the cheery yellow, daisy-like flowers of bidens and some fluorescent-lime sweet potato vine.

In those two huge pots at the end of the driveway, I'll plant a couple of the New Zealand flax (Phormium). There is one called Bronze Baby whose sword-like leaves reach four to six feet. I'll surround it with Heuchera Amber Waves or the new orange coloured Marmalade. What a statement that will make! When fall comes, I'll just put the perennial heuchera in the garden so I can enjoy them in the garden next year or pop them back into a pot next spring.

I do have to get rid of the goutweed in the front garden by the house. Much as I love its cream and green leaves and airy blooms, I don't have time to tame it every spring. I don't want it to travel into the lawn the way the ox-eye daisies did a few years ago when they weren't dead-headed on time. So maybe I can fill the deepest part of the shade with the dark green, heart-shaped leaves of wild ginger, interplanted with lavender spikes of astilbe. Solomon's seal, with its necklace of white bells, will be a delicate contrast to the aggressive pink spring blossoms of the bergenia, whose shiny, fat evergreen leaves laze beside the fuzzy, spotted pulmonaria.

I can always coax the wood lilies to bloom here. Hosta will survive in the lighter shade. The ferns absolutely love it. Yes, the goutweed has to go. It will take years to dig it all out unless I use a chemical. And, I just know that I won't be able to resist leaving a small clump . . . funny how deliberate "planticide" is such an alien act to one who has been the cause of so much accidental plant mortality.

Ah well, only six more weeks to serious gardening time – empty pockets and a full heart.