As you all know, this past Tuesday was the Feast of the Presentation of the Prophet Phil. I celebrated and paid homage as usual but I think I might be losing faith in The Groundhog.

The sun was shining in Punxutawney, PA and Phil saw his shadow. According to tradition that means we’ll have 6 more weeks of winter weather. But here in Bristol, it was cloudy that day. If our woodchuck, a lay rodent, had been ceremoniously yanked from his burrow, it wouldn’t have been the sun sending him scurrying back to bed. Not only that, but other signs seem, to me, to be pointing directly at spring’s corner. Just this week the birds  started to sing again – I heard mourning doves this morning – and the late winter, spring-predicting flowers are showing their colors. The sun is high enough to warm the greenhouse and I could swear that the silhouette of the trees has just changed – I think they’ve filled out a little. I prefer to think that spring is right around the corner – my gut says it’s only 6 weeks away.

Do you believe (in) Punxutawney Phil or the other indicators of spring?

There is no way I’m going back outside today. Nope. I’m staying in no matter how many colors there are. They can name themselves today. It’s cold! Maybe our little thaw has made me soft. Or maybe I’m a zone 8. It’s only 14° out there and the wind is gusting to 35mph making it feel more like something truly negative. It’s too cold for the nose to work and any scent has been blown away anyway. I’m staying in.

But keeping a positive attitude, thank goodness we’ve got work to do in our greenhouse and potting shed. Never mind that it’s only in the 50’s in here – that’s downright toasty. And the sun is getting high enough out of the south that some of the ice might even melt as the houses warm into the 60’s. On this frigid Friday (I’m joining Mr. McGregor’s Daughter’s meme today) we’ll do some overdue potting up and a bit more catalog shopping – plants this time, now that our seed orders have been sent out. And I expect we’ll wrap our chilly fingers around consecutive cups of tea.

Are you planted inside today too or are you made of hardier stuff ? What zone are you?

–Speaking of hardy, in the greenhouse we’re babysitting a little Edgeworthia chrysantha and it’s beginning to open up. I just learned that it’s a Daphne relative (oh dear) and hardy to zone 7. (Blithewold is officially USDA zone 7 but I don’t believe it. We call it a 6.) Do any of you in a nearby zone have experience with this lovely little winter bloomer? I’d like about 10 more of our very own if there’s truly a chance they’ll survive and thrive…

It could happen to anyone. Even the “professionals” get it a little bit wrong sometimes … sometimes in a pretty big way. Last week when I discovered a rather substantial error in mistaken identity that Gail and I made, I swore that I wasn’t going to tell a soul. It was too embarrassing. It seemed like everywhere I looked another wrong plant was about to bloom in the North Garden. I kept pulling them out and stuffing them deeply into the weed bag while looking guiltily over my shoulder in case anyone saw. I was pretty mortified. But then today, when I was still finding clumps of mistake and Lilah turned it into an I-Spy game, I found it much more hilarious and thought you might get a chuckle out of it too.

I’m sure it could happen to anyone. This spring, in our annual effort to freshen and improve the North Garden, Gail and I moved several perennials from the Display Garden including a couple dozen divisions of Echinacea purpurea. We did this pretty early in the season – I can tell you that it was Monday, April 27th because I wrote in the calendar, “Gail and I moved echinaceas from DG to NG” – and on that date they were just minuscule clumps of pointed basal leaves and roots. Well. It turns out that some of them weren’t echinaceas at all. Neither of us has a memory of any rudbeckia in with the echinacea in the Display Garden but I just yanked an easy dozen Black-eyed Susans (Rudbecka fulgida) out of the North Garden. We did introduce a couple of new colors into that garden this year but school bus-yellow, as one of our good friends describes it, is definitely not one of them.

The good news is that the garden is really full and it’s impossible to see where any of these plants came out. As a matter of fact, that many echinaceas might have been too many – but we won’t know that until we maybe try again next year. Meanwhile, I feel slightly less idiotic since discovering that E. purpurea was once identified as R. purpurea and our mistake was an honest one. And yet…

It could happen to anyone – couldn’t it?