Given that I lost patience with winter way back in December, I’m pretty excited to notice that despite weekly storms and another overnight icing of a wintery mix, spring is starting to win the tug of war. When the sun is out – and the wind isn’t blowing a gale – it’s warm enough to bask a little. Everything is dripping, the ground is squishy, and the birds are singing love songs. Looks at least partly springy out to me. I know I’m probably jumping the gun a little because March is usually disappointingly March-like but I can’t help it. I’m just so ready to see spring in the smallest signs.

The biggest sign of spring is easy enough to see – and feel: the sun is finally high enough in the sky that the greenhouse is getting cooking. By mid-morning on a sunny day over the last couple of weeks it has become so deliciously summer-like in there we have had to strip off sweaters and scarves and squint or put on sunglasses. The plants are responding to the extra light and heat by outgrowing containers, blooming away, and becoming susceptible to infestations. – Aphids and whitefly seem to love spring as much as I do. So we and a handful of volunteers have started taking sunny opportunities to keep up with the grooming and leaf washing. (We’ll try to rotate all the garden volunteers in for a vitamin-D fix.) I have followed the sunbeams around my house to do the same thing… And today Gail and I started emptying benches to make room for more plants because we’ll start some seeds this week. If that isn’t a sure sign of spring, I don’t know what is.

Missing February bloom day is my excuse for posting some gratuitous sunny greenhouse flowers (clockwise from top left): Everyone thinks this camellia (unnamed) is a double hibiscus – it’s that tropical looking. Amaryllis ‘Zombie’ has been on a blooming rampage since December. The blue Marguerite (Felicia amelloides ‘Variegata’) is also unstoppable, and completely unbothered by insects. And even though the Spanish shawl (Centradenia floribunda) will quit blooming by summer it’s worth every inch of its bench space for the flowers now.

Is it partly springy in your garden yet? Are your houseplants going nuts? When will you start your first seeds?

I can’t imagine any other plant that embodies the abundance and exuberant excess of the holidays quite like a Schlumbergera. Blithewold’s recently gifted Thanksgiving/Christmas cactus in particular maybe — though I did hear that it was a good year for Schlumbergera all around. My two at home bloomed their little arms off too – but not like this one. It’s been going non-stop since our first Friday Sparkle right after Thanksgiving and shows no signs of quitting. And every Friday, as it stops visitors in their tracks, they’ve asked me and Gail the age-old questions of why theirs isn’t blooming/why it does some years and not others/why one plant will bloom while another doesn’t?

We all know they are day-length sensitive, needing a period of darkness to set their buds. But this does not mean they should be locked in a closet for weeks at a time. Bad idea, actually, to deprive them of daylight altogether like that. Better to give them natural nights, at least 13 hours long, unpolluted by lamplight. (I use that advice as a good excuse to go to bed at a reasonable hour.)

They also need cool nights in combination with long ones and that right there might be why some refuse to bloom. As soon as we turn the heat on in the house — unless we program the thermostat for night dips into the 50s — our modern, efficient, weather-sealed houses may be too evenly modulated to toggle the temperature trigger. Leaving plants outside at least until the forecast threatens dips into the 40s will probably give them the requisite weeks of cool, dark nights.

Although my favorite tropical plant reference book, the weighty Exotica by A. F. Graf, recommends temperatures that swing only down into the low 60s, we have used this Christmas cactus to decorate the “cold” end greenhouse where night temps dip into the 40s, and I would bet that’s partly why it has held its blooms so long. As if its been preserved in the refrigerator. By contrast, my plants at home, after the first and fast glorious bloom, dropped most of their follow-up buds. It could be they’re too warm but also maybe too wet. Although the soil shouldn’t be allowed to completely dry out, it shouldn’t stay overly moist either, especially through the winter.

The schlumbergera’s popularity among even non-gardeners belies their evident finickiness and difficulty as houseplants. If they didn’t bloom more often than not and survive for years to outgrow their holiday pedestals and mantels, they wouldn’t have become the passalong favorites that they are.

Can you count on yours to bloom for the holidays? Does it stay in bloom for ages too — or at least for the 12 days of Christmas? What’s your secret of success?

I know there are people in the world who think that houseplants/indoor gardens are messy pains in the nether regions, but I kind of love that about them. They provide just what I need to occupy, exercise, and dirty my otherwise too-clean, itchy-to-garden fingers during the winter. As a matter of fact, grooming plants is such a pleasure that I feel almost guilty doing it, and put it off because I think I should attend to other, more odious, tasks first. Like paperwork. Or dusting cobwebs down cellar. But it must be done regularly – daily to weekly – to keep the plants healthy and our spaces, whether living room or greenhouse, tidy, livable, and pleasant. To me it’s as gratifying as weeding (and there’s some of that to do too) because the before-and-after difference is so apparent.

At home I groom when I water everything, about once a week. Here we water more often because the plants are getting so much more sun, and we groom as we go, on the fly usually. But sometimes – the best times – we get a troop of volunteers in on a sunny day, or putter bench by bench ourselves for an hour or two at a time. We pick yellow and dropped leaves, check for infestations and mold, and keep our eyes peeled for plants in need of a nip and tuck (taking cuttings as we go), or any that might be desperate for repotting. It’s like getting reacquainted every time because so much can change from one day or week to the next. Where did those aphids come from? Didn’t we just wash the scale and mold off those lemons? (Last spring…) And there’s nothing better than the sweet signs of new growth. The ferns in particular captivate the heck out of me…

Hover over the pictures for captions (my assessments) or click on them for a bigger view. Though you might not need such a close look at aphids and scale…

Does grooming houseplants fulfill your gardening impulse over the winter too?

Right at the cusp of a season full of overwhelming delights, I discovered a teeny-tiny one. It’s a very small thing but for me, it was kind of huge. Ever since I found out that Aspidistra elatior, the famously boring Victorian houseplant, also known as cast-iron plant, has a flower, I’ve wanted to see it for myself. But I was never sure of the timing, and most days poor Uncle is way off my radar. It hardly ever even wants watering, for goodness sake. So just try to imagine the moment when I went to evict a pair from their pots (to use the containers in a Christmas display), and noticed the flowers! Picture me, all alone in the greenhouse, doing a little dance.

The flowers, right at soil level and mostly such a dark purple they practically match the soil, are completely incognito. Also since they open so close to the surface, the flower cups were full of bits of soil and perlite. It’s really no wonder I’ve been missing them all these years. But they’re so pretty. And while you might think that I’d leave them be and find a different pair of pots, I wanted a closer look at their full structure. (Click on pictures for a closer look yourself.)

I understand that this particular delight might not provide the same kind of thrill for anyone else but if you happen to visit the greenhouse – or for that matter wherever your travels take you throughout the holidays, I offer you the challenge of finding at least one small surprise to be delighted by. Maybe it will be these very same flowers…

Given that March felt like May and April felt a little like July, it’s been really hard not to move everything outside and start planting annuals and tomatoes as if it’s safe. But then didn’t April end on a sort of February-ish note? That was just the warning we needed (I guess) to sit tight in limbo a little longer. According to the National Climatic Data Center, there’s only a 10% chance we’ll see a frost around here after May 6. So the good news is we won’t have to wait much longer.

I think I’m ready to move out just because that’s next on the list of to-dos. For the most part though, the plants don’t seem to be in a huge hurry. They actually look remarkably healthy and unstressed. Sometimes, if we’re really busy in the gardens in the spring, we come back into the greenhouse and are shocked to see that the plants have gone downhill. But this year because we were able to start working outside so much earlier, we have had ample time to pay attention to the greenhouse despite the lack of rainy days like this one to devote to inside work. Add to that the fact that the winter was so mild that the shading never etched off of the glass so the plants have not been subjected to those sunny spring days that can really set the greenhouse cooking. The plants are still just trucking along like they have all winter.

At home it’s a different story. Gail calls this time “the bewitching hour” because one minute our houseplants look fine and the next time we look at them, which could be weeks from that last time because we’re so consumed with our gardens, they’re infested, wilted, dead, or a combination of the three. They’ll be much happier outside with us. That said, tropical houseplants will have to wait even longer for nights to warm into the 50′s.

If it hadn’t rained today (we needed it – again!) we would have planted sweet peas. It already feels late to get them in the ground because we usually plant them the last week in April. Maybe tomorrow. After that we’ll watch the night temperatures and continue the methodical move out of the greenhouse. Marginally hardy plants like phormium and rosemary are out already and have been perfectly fine. But then we didn’t get the frost that some did.

Have you started moving houseplants out yet? Have you been able to resist planting tomatoes?