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?

I like to think that encouragement and praise is the best method for inspiring productivity but must admit that threats and criticism can be pretty effective as well. Spite is such an excellent motivator. Don’t we love to prove someone wrong? – I had a mean as spit English teacher who made it clear that he thought no one in my class could string two words together. I sweated blood to write the finest term paper there ever was and didn’t he have to give me an A? I sure showed him!  I think plants sometimes need the same kind of kick in the pants. All of the roses in the Rose Garden that we threatened with expulsion have never looked better than they do right now. It’s just like last year when Gail and I talked about taking out the moldy phlox in the North Garden and every clump immediately cleaned itself off and rebloomed fit to burst. Of course we still took most of it out… But I can just hear these roses saying “you don’t think I’m pretty? I’ll show you pretty.” And even the blue woodruff that looked like slackers when we planted them perked right up as if they heard us say “We’ll just rip them out if they don’t perk right up”.

The roses we always praise to the skies have never looked better either. It seems like they’re basking in the glow of it like we all do when someone says something nice. They’re totally blushing with pride. I really truly honestly think that plants respond and react to us in a way that seems totally impossible for anything without ears and a brain but I also have to confess that we have physically treated the roses a little differently this year.

We fertilized them earlier than ever (we fertilized them period, full stop!) – right when the experts say we should in April as the buds were swelling – with a slow release organic 3-5-3. We’ve also had a rainy spring into summer, which I guess Gail and I shouldn’t take any credit for, with the magic number of hot sunny days to coax any flower into rapturous bloom. We are being good and sticking to our fertilizing schedule and gave them another round of the same stuff this past Monday as they came into their first bloom. We’ll fertilize again in August right before their next big push. (In case you’re curious, the fertilizer we’ve chosen to use in most of the gardens is Espoma Bulb-Tone because it has the NPK ratio we were looking for plus additional micro nutrients.) We still refuse to use sprays – fungicides or pesticides – and are considering ourselves very lucky that the garden is not infested with the tiny worms that are skeletonizing roses in other parts of the state. We’re also crossing our fingers that the Japanese beetles and black spot won’t be bad this year.

Do you let your plants know when you think they’re doing a great job – and when you’re fed up to here with their behavior? Do you think they listen?

We’ve been so intent on planting the Display Garden that we’ve – not forgotten exactly – and not neglected certainly – but perhaps put off the Rock Garden a little lately. Since it’s at its very cutest now we made sure that the Rockettes (after planting the entire checkerboard bed in the Display Garden) got a chance to fuss a little over the precious Rock. I’m not entirely sure what makes the Rock Garden so “cute” – it’s not really diminutive, and although rock gardens are often a showcase for tiny alpines that you have to bend down with a magnifying glass to see, ours is not that exclusive – there are sizeable clumps of geranium and iris and columbine and hosta of an average rather than microscopic size along with the wee Alchemilla alpina and tiny campanulas and dianthus. I think there must be something about the poetry in the relationships between the plants and rocks and light and shade that makes this garden too adorable for words.

Lilah and I saw the poets themselves in some of the plant combinations. The ghostly pale spirea and skeletal columbine is Poe of course and the fleshy hosta combinations are as evocative as Neruda. Edna St. Vincent Millay recites the geraniums and Emily Dickinson always has something to say about an “admiring bog”. The violas remind us of Blithewold’s own dearly missed poet, Mary.  And for me there was at least one painterly association but then who doesn’t see Monet in the waterlilies?

Do you ever find yourself reminded of an author or artist as you look around your garden?