The Things of Spring

Really? We are back here again? Last year I decided to do another photography 365 after not having done one for a few years. I was looking forward to a year of daily camera use…looking at the world through the lens again…street photography, images from rides, different views of the province. Then that all collapsed with COVID’s arrival and our collective retreat from most of our normal annual activities. And my year of photography included more images of flowers than I care to remember.

And here I am again.

The garden is coming back to life, the flowers are starting to show their faces again, but I am NOT doing a 365….just a 52 week project instead. But the garden is still going to feature apparently. One little plant that always makes me smile in the early days of spring is the Viola, the wood violet. Its bright green clump of leaves draws me over to the edge of the garden and those happy little purple pansy-like faces peek out and promise warmer days ahead. The native Western yellow wood violets won’t be far behind on the other side of the yard.

That always looks strange when I see it in type…..yellow violets. We have attributed the colour of a specific flower variant to depict a shade of purple…when in reality the word is more appropriately attached to a specific genus of plant, so my brain sees “yellow purple” instead of yellow variant of a type of flowering plant.

But the impending explosion in the garden does make me realize that, despite all the bad, some upsides have to be recognized; I try hard to find the silver linings.

Last year, on our early walks in the neighbourhood I quipped that there were going to be a lot of beautiful yards in the ‘hood since people were going to be going stir crazy and looking for projects. Little did I know just “how” right that was going to be as garden soil, bark mulch, seeds, and lumber became red hot commodities and the basic things that I normally buy in any normal year suddenly became almost impossible to purchase because everyone jumped on the gardening bandwagon.

Last summer’s big project for us was the fence. We tore out the ghastly thing that had surrounded our yard and replaced it with something that is a great deal nicer to look at, reduces the annoying light splash across our fireplace wall from cars as they come out of the underground parking for the townhouses across the street and offers us more privacy throughout the entire yard.

We are glad we did that last year, because the materials to build said fence have quadrupled in price since then. It wasn’t a cheap thing to build last year; it would have been cost prohibitive this year. Kirk’s next project had been a new shed…but that may be put off now because of the lumber costs.

It seems strange….the BC economy is heavily driven by softwood lumber, but our own costs for the natural resource growing in our own backyard have gone through the roof. I can’t imagine trying to budget for building a new home right now.

We took a trip out to a couple of the larger garden centres to look for a few things to replace some plants I decided were too aggressive and difficult to maintain. It’s early yet for most gardeners, yet we were anything but lonely out there, and the prices on plants have also definitely increased. Most of what I need to do in the yard involves digging up and dividing and moving things around.

I have several of these wonderful little Hacquetia epipactus plants – they have no common name that I am aware of – one of which I brought from the old condo because I loved it so much. They pop into the world when little else does and generate the most amazing lime green and lemon yellow splotches against the dark soil in the late winter days. Their little clumps of leaves follow the wonderful, almost fluorescent, yellow and green, but they were all getting lost next to and below increasingly large deer ferns, forest grasses, and other larger plants. So they had to be relocated to homes where they would still be visible but not overwhelmed.

We moved a seven foot Korean Dwarf lilac tree the other weekend; we should have done it a month earlier but the weather has been cool and wet so we cross our fingers and hope it will survive the transplant from the back yard to the front of the driveway.

The Japanese forest grasses are are turning into gigantic tribbles and are trying to take over the yard, so they have to be divided and moved to less impactful spots where they don’t kill what little lawn we can grow because of their thick cover.

The Western sword ferns I domesticated from the forests outside of Squamish have done almost too well and a few need to be moved back so that I can find the path around the back of the yard, which they have almost covered completely.

And I have to do some exploratory digging where the Lucifer crocosmias were the past few years, to make sure that I did actually get them all out before I plant the smaller and hopefully better behaved Emily McKenzie crocosmia in their place. The Lucifers were fantastic….but so huge, at about five feet in height, that when they were fully grow we couldn’t see the garden from inside, or even from on the deck. They had to go.

But I couldn’t visit a garden centre without bringing home at least one thing that leaves me wondering what I was thinking because I have no idea where I am going to put it…. I have a thing for flowering quinces and I bought a white flowering one…for some irrational reason. My red ones are opening up underneath the dining room window and provide a pretty splash of colour.