Longing for Spring

I have a bad case of spring fever, and it's not even spring yet. My daffodils are blooming in spite of the temperatures. They've counted the hours of daylight and confirmed it's time to lift their heads look for what the groundhog could not see.

 Bring me fifty shades of green, sweet longed-for Spring.

I'm not alone in my wishing. Take a moment and enjoy a few thoughts on spring and wish with me, then pop over and visit Heidi at My Juicy Little Universe for more Poetry Friday.

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It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade. ~Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

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Spring is sooner recognized by plants than by men. ~Chinese Proverb

I wonder if the Daffodil
Shrinks from the touch of frost,
And when her veins grow stiff and still
She dreams that life is lost?
Ah, if she does, how sweet a thing
Her resurrection day in spring!
        ~Emma C. Dowd, "Daffodil and Crocus," in Country Life in America: A Magazine for the                     Home-maker, the Vacation-seeker, the Gardener, the Farmer, the Nature-teacher, the                           Naturalist, April 1902

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You can’t see Canada across lake Erie, but you know it’s there. It’s the same with spring. You have to have faith, especially in Cleveland. ~Paul Fleischman

Spring in my Backyard

Spring doesn't last very long in the deep South, but while it's here it's stunningly beautiful. I'm enjoying every minute of it.







Because I know that very soon my lovely garden will have a fight for its life with a jungle of weeds, briers, and searing heat. This prickly little vine is known as greenbriar. It can also be called bull briar, horse brier, and cat brier. It's such a monstrous nuisance people can't even decide on a single name or a consistent spelling. This little shoot may look innocent at the moment, but if it's not destroyed, it will soon grow straight up above everything around it until gravity pulls its nasty little stem downward into whatever grows nearby. The thing can grow up to twenty feet long and wrap itself in, around, and through every healthy plant within spitting distance.

Definitely a worthy antagonist.

So I Can't Count

It has been brought to my attention that I can't count. Okay, I never claimed to be much with numbers. Words are much more fun. Spring is still officially three weeks away, but the phlox and daffodils blooming in my yard don't seem to care that I can't count either. They're blooming their little heads off whether it's officially spring or not!

Is it Spring Yet?

It's the middle of February, still four full weeks before the official declaration of spring, but I'm counting the days. Counting the flowers--a few pink and white phlox struggling to cover the rocky bed by the mailbox, the green tips of bulb foliage pushing through the cold ground, a yellow daffodil considering whether to seek the sunshine, one fresh fern frond unfurling (say that three times fast) over the dead stubble. It's time for spring! I don't care what the groundhog saw. It's just time.

I'm drooling over my perennial flower catalog, reading old gardening magazines, and wishing I could plant something. I'm not very good at indoor gardening, so I'm waiting impatiently for the temperatures to rise and the ground to warm up.

If you're interested in gardening books for kids, here are some good ones. They are Robbie Readers from Mitchell Lane Publishing. The set had good reviews by both School Library Journal and Booklist. Various authors. AR levels are from 5.2 to 5.7.


The set includes these titles:

A Backyard Flower Garden for Kids
A Backyard Vegetable Garden for Kids

Design Your Own Butterfly Garden

Design Your Own Pond and Water Garden

A Kid's Guide to Container Gardening

A Kid's Guide to Landscape Design

A Kid's Guide to Making a Terrarium

A Kid's Guide to Perennial Gardens

Organic Gardening for Kids

For the younger crowd, Capstone has just come out with a set by Mari Schuh called Gardens.

Titles include:
All Kinds of Gardens
Animals in the Garden
Growing a Garden
Tools for the Garden

AR levels are unavailable yet, but they are Pebble books, so reading levels will be low.

Red!

My yard is at its most beautiful right now. With all the rain and the warm days (not counting today when it's in the 30s again!) everything is blooming happily. Buckeyes don't usually grow this far south, but I have two on the bank on the creek bursting with red blooms.

The azaleas vary from the orange red Christmas Cheer to the almost purple Pride of Mobile. They are beautiful. Today's poem is a celebration of garden color. I couldn't agree more.

The Garden Changes

When I was young, I grew
dull plants returning food
for work. But I, now older,
repent my practicality.
I’ve renounced beans, and turned
to crocus, gladiola,
and coreopsis. I’ve moved
past zinnia, marigold,
to bougainvillea.
I’ve even learned to love
poor salvia, which blooms
on August days, when few flowers
will venture anything
but green. The summer’s short
and ornament is what
I want—all vividness.
Not pasty cauliflower
and not potatoes, whose
gnarled flesh is more and more
like mine. Give me bright blossoms
against the teeming green.
Give me orange flags, blue horns,
white faces, yellow wings.
Give me the purple throat,
breathless, of calla lilies—
and red, red, red, red, red.

--Andrew Hudgins

Another Conference

Last weekend I drove home from a conference in the the snow. This past weekend I went to the beach, walked barefoot in sand still cold from winter wind, slept with earplugs against the spring break crowd at Party City Beach, and sat around tables with 250 women at another conference.

So many gems gleaned from each gathering. I hope to sort through them in the next few weeks and pass some of them along.

So after two weeks of conferences, deadlines, and crowded rooms, my body is tired, my soul is stretched, but that third ephemeral part of me, my spirit, is renewed. In my backyard, I watch the hidden buds of forsythia and azalea break the sepals and bloom golden and coral and purple and pink. My amaryllis bulbs are jabbing thick stems out of the ground. In another week or two their red blooms will trumpet spring!

New growth from old roots. Warm ideas from cold ground. Spring is a good place to be.