Everybody has a different cue for letting ourselves admit that it’s finally spring. For some of us (me), spring officially begins when we sow the sweet peas (back around President’s Day). Others might notice spring for the first time when the forsythia blooms its head off, or when we have that first t-shirt-weather day or when the calendar says it’s so.

For some, it’s all about daffodils and Daffodil Days here at Blithewold. Well, a lot of them (dare I say “most”?) are open and we’re opening for the season starting Sunday, so no one can deny that it’s really truly spring now. The daffodils should continue to be in peak into next week. They love these cooler temperatures.

We’ve been hustling to get ready and have had an extra spring in our step because of opening two weeks ahead of schedule to better match our timing with Nature’s. We’ve fluffed and we’ve puffed and from here on in it’s a work in progress. Like any real garden, ours are in perennial transition and change by the day. Every year we focus attention on a particular garden: this year the North Garden will look quite different from years past. We’re adjusting to a new design that should make the space more welcoming to visitors, and we’ll be in there planting and rearranging every chance we get.

Even if you come just to see the daffodils, don’t miss the Rock Garden. This is the start of its favorite season. And you can’t miss the Rose Garden unless you have your eyes closed coming out of the Visitor’s Center. Open ‘em up. That garden will just keep looking more and more glorious as days go by.

So stick around. Visit as often as you possibly can and celebrate a whole new season by enjoying every bloom of it.

I know I’m going to start sounding like a broken record but I can’t help going on about how early everything is. I looked up the other day when I was walking my dog and noticed that the maple trees in town are blooming. A full month early according to my notes. Come on. Spring is breaking all over the place and the only thing we can do is try to keep up.

We asked garden volunteers to bundle up (it has been warm but wicked windy) to start working outside. This must be the earliest we’ve ever had to abandon the greenhouse work for later and we’re sort of smarting about that. But the Rose Garden and Moongate bed are tidied just in time for a steady trickle of early-bird visitors come to catch spring in its infancy. And although we might have gotten to the climbing roses as early as this before, they certainly weren’t breaking yet. At this rate we have to wonder if the roses’ June peak will fall in May instead.

If we had ever had a decent freeze, Fred and Dan wouldn’t have been able to break ground and be so far along with the North Garden redesign. We have temporarily relocated plants that are showing signs of taking off, so take it from us, if you will be doing any plant shifting this spring, you might as well get a jump on it and start now – particularly if you have shrubs or trees to move. Beat feet.

The weather is still going to do its usual diabolical March swing thing though. Unbelievably, given that yesterday was in the 60s, there’s a wee chance of snow in the forecast for tonight. So even though part of me is ready to throw out the calendar I have to remember that it’s March and slow down a minute. We’ll still follow our usual last-frost in mid-May planting schedule because you just never know with spring.

Are you making any adjustments to your spring schedule?

A little more than a month ago in a post about potting bench perfection I mentioned that our potting bench was in a sorry state and that the windows above it were drafty heat-leakers. No longer true! Gail and I are thrilled to be cozy behind a bank of new storm windows and can’t get over the beauty of the shiny new stainless-steel bench topper that one of our favorite carpenters installed in about 2 seconds yesterday.

Winter is definitely the best time for dreaming about projects and for being able to follow through with minimal disruption to the day to day workings, or the visitors’ enjoyment of the property. It was easy for us to clear the bench because we’re more focused on putting our orders together right now than potting up.

And because there are fewer visitors on the property this time of year, we can get to some changes outside too. The North Garden wall repair was completed in record time and has provided us (the gardens and grounds staff) with an excellent opportunity to ask the gardens and grounds committee to consider a few of our ideas. We’d like to re-size some of the beds, improve the soil, add irrigation, and lay a path that will tie the floating fountain, which at one time had been the punctuation at the end of a bowling green, back to the garden. With spring clearly closer than it usually is this time of year, it looks like this next project might get rolling soon. We hope all of Blithewold’s members, visitors, and brides think it’s an improvement.

Are you using this time to make some improvements to home and garden too?

I used to work in a windowless office so I completely understand when every other visitor tells me I have the best job in the world. I know. I totally do. But contrary to popular opinion amongst non-gardeners at least, the weather isn’t always 70 degrees and sunny; gardening is not always serenely therapeutic, and it’s certainly not glamorous. Especially not when it involves hauling out a truckload of annuals out of a garden, or shoveling dry compost in a windstorm. Gardening is dirty work.

It’s been an especially back-breaking work-week here between taking out the cutting bed to make room for tulips (next week’s work), cutting back, dividing and moving various perennials around like musical chairs, and forking compost into the two North Garden beds that won’t be trampled during the wall’s restoration project. Of all the hard work this week, the compost was definitely the dirtiest. But it was also the most potentially gratifying.

We haven’t amended the soil in the North Garden in a very long time and it has become compacted from years of feet and years of moving plants around in wet springs and falls, just like the Rose Garden had. And just like we did in the Rose Garden last year, we opted to use Bristol’s own (free) compost made with biosolids and yardwaste, which is super stinky but certified top-grade and tested pathogen-free. Thanks to a strong team of volunteers (Go Rockettes!) who plugged their noses to rake out and fork in the compost, we have every expectation that next year the North Garden will be every bit as stunningly healthy as the Rose Garden was this year. (The Rose Garden is still glorious by the way – although frost/snow might do it in tonight…)

We are coming close to the end of the dirtiest work in the gardens for the season. Once the tulips go in we will have to make a shift to the more mentally challenging work of planning next years gardens. – Just listening to Gail and Tara try to plan where to plant the tulips in the cutting garden is making me feel a whole other kind of exhausted…

Have you been doing dirty work in your garden too?

The North Garden wall restoration project had already begun but it was almost as if we couldn’t wait to get at the wall itself. Three members of Team Florabunda came in on a wet and wildly windy morning, were reluctant to break for tea, and stayed past lunch to take the climbing hydrangea (Hydrangea anomala subsp. petiolaris) off of the North Garden wall. I never thought we’d be able to do it in a day but as soon as we started to rip-tear, none of us could stop. (Never underestimate the enjoyment a gardener takes in destroying something – gardening may in fact be one of the only creative arts that allows for that impulse. Don’t we all kind of love to weed?)

Without the hydrangea, the wall looks a lot smaller, and a lot more precarious. It became very clear as we worked that the very hydrangea that must have contributed to the wall’s downfall was also helping to hold it up. The edge along the east side is severely bowed and another section by the steps had begun to separate – you can just see the light of day through it in the picture below (top right). (Click on pictures for larger view.)

But other things were revealed as well, such as the quartz rocks that young Augustine collected in her travels and asked the masons to insert (also visible in the stone steps picture above.) And it’s much easier now to see the supports for a bench under the star. Gail and I only learned of the bench’s existence when we visited the archives to look at old pictures a couple of weeks ago. When the North Garden was divided into parterres, the bench was in line with the bowling green and the low fountain at the edge of the Bosquet, and must have been removed when the garden was done over in borders.

We all hoped to find buried treasure as well and in a way we did. The wall itself is a marvel and it will be wonderful to see it restored. And in case you are shocked about the demise of the hydrangea – that filled the truck just about to its limits – Fred and Dan took cuttings earlier in the year. It lives and will be replanted.

Do you enjoy giving in to the destructive impulse too? Cathartic, isn’t it?