Written last week. Now: 4/28/25.
Twirls of leaves still wound tight, the hosta reach for the sun. Legions of them. Lilies of the Valley, which will annoy the gardener later in the season for their invasive vigor, in late April offer a glad carpet of green. Four daffodils — not four banks or four clumps, but exactly 4 daffodils — grow in this yard, and not even altogether. Two bloom out front next to the chimney and two bloom outback next to the tall yew.
Rhodies and euphorbia died. Rabbits ate one entire pot of purple pansies.
But oh, just look at the fluttering leaves of the Virginia Bluebells. You don’t notice them emerging — they are just suddenly up. Both delicate and hardy, their oblate leaves turn luminescent at certain hours of the morning. And they spread — not just into adjacent pockets of soil, but clear across the yard beyond the patio. Some flowers are plumbago blue, others white. I have no idea why.
The mold on the plastic gate comes off with warm water, a rag, and the occasional pass of a toothbrush where the pikes meet the cross brace. Satisfying.
A satisfying chore is by definition one that offers immediate noticeable results.
The ferns announce themselves shyly. Fronds rolled near the surface of the soil, still tightly wound like Spanish dancers who wait for the proper refrain to snap open and flutter their fans. Oh, but they will. They will, and soon.
During the week of their uncurling, their rise happens so quickly you swear you should be able to hear them growing. You will pause to shoot a video, half expecting the 15-second capture to creak and whisper.
The Montauk Daisies you stole from a teardown around the corner have settled in. Good news! You only took a dozen stalks and now wish you’d taken more. Over on Langley Road, the specimen was a veritable shrub, so hardy, so thriving! May this little clump go crazy and grow shrub-like too!
Hyacinth flop under the weight of their almost obscene beauty. You therefore feel no compunction about snapping the fallen stalks and bringing them indoors where their signature scent perfumes the kitchen from the windowsill. Such a heady smell!
Other things will not get done now. Closet clearing, quilt binding, postcard writing. Why? Because the soil needs replenished near the astilbe. Because that invasive mallow needs digging up near the side gate. Because the Rose of Sharons need pruned and the liatris thinned. You still haven’t finished snapping all the ghostly gray stalks off the sedum yet.
It’s the call of nature, improbable and yet present even here in suburbia. We measure the strength of its siren lure by how TO DO lists are never required for its multiplicity of tasks. We ignore the indoor TO DO lists with a decisive abandon.
Now excuse me. I need to go move a few artemisia.
