As the saying goes, when they give you lemons, make lemonade. A synonym for spring in our house is gardening. The snow finally recedes revealing the still blank canvas below. As the sun warms the soil, the plants hibernating underground are woken up and begin to poke their stems above ground and remember the joys of summer.
The excitement of seeing green and growing things typically inspires multiple trips to nurseries and garden centers. It is a feast after a long fast. But this year has been different. Safer at home kept us isolated and practicing patience being content with focusing on what we already have. It wasn’t worth risking Covid-19 to satisfy our itch for more new plants and more instant color and texture.
Time passed. I dug dandelions and pulled creeping charlie like I never have before. I appreciated the clear blank spaces and the neat, ordered delineation between plants. In a world filled with so much uncertainty, this order comforted me.
By the time the weeds were mostly banished, the weather had warmed. We had socially distant visits with our children in the backyard. We all masked up and awkwardly occupied opposite corners of the yard.
As a survival measure, this was an adequate temporary solution for short visits. But soon it became apparent that the need for social distancing was going to be a long term rather than a short term thing. We needed to adapt not just survive.
I had let the lower branches of the white pine grow out. Each year they got bigger, heavier and hung closer to the ground, swallowing up the whole back corner and claiming it for itself. This worked well to limit the yard space for me to maintain. But looking through covid eyes, everything changed. Here was the perfect opportunity to create a cozy shady socially distant visiting corner.
All I needed to do was get out the ladder and the saw to remove the lower branches to raise the ceiling, and then add some furniture and plants. I subdivided and transplanted some shade loving perennials. To finish off the space I really wanted to add some potted impatiens.
A conversation about impatiens led to a discovery that Bruce’s Nursery is offering curbside pick-up. Deciding to limit our usual multiple trips to multiple locations down to a single pick-up for the year, we filled the car to capacity no only with impatiens but other annuals, some perennials, a shrub and even a small tree.
Things are different with covid, but for our garden it happily means we now have a comfortable inviting corner to read a book, nap in the hammock or safely meet with friends.
June 11, 2020 at 10:33 pm
This made me smile! I love filling the car full of plants, trees and shrubs! Nothing better than summer gardens to soothe the soul in troubled times.
July 6, 2020 at 9:30 pm
Lots of opportunities for the garden to soothe our souls this summer!