Mary Agria
| The Petoskey News-Review
I know the vernal equinox will soon be upon us. But for a gardener, spring itself seems to come in its own way and time, oblivious to the dictates of calendars or vagaries of weather forecasts.
As a Midwest native, I always found myself waiting impatiently for that subtle tell-tale moment, frustratingly late as it often turned out to be. Long winters will do that to a guy.
Spring’s arrival is not a just a matter of a date — it is a feeling, a perception that something out in the garden has changed. There still might be a ton of snow on the ground. But somehow the air suddenly seems different. The sun seems to have lost that cold and distant look. Gone are those frigid blue skies. Clouds build up and the spring rains begin to fall.
“Fruhlings erwachen,” the Germans call it — Spring’s awakening. Sometimes we feel it when the first of the seed catalogs show up in the mailbox. Or maybe we sense it when the icicles along the gutters started to melt in earnest. By the time the first green shoots emerge from the icy puddles forming below a drain spout, there can be no doubt about it. Spring is coming.
Despite the old saying about lambs versus roaring March lions, for a gardener spring’s arrival tends to be subtle. The ground feels a bit softer underfoot. No gaudy summer reds or autumnal purples here. The blossoms of spring tend to be pastels or even white, a lingering homage to winter’s monochrome palette.
We may call our response to all this “spring fever.” But the warming we feel is more like a quiet yearning, the hope and promise of renewal just when we seem to need it most.
It may seem logical that summer’s lush days of growing and flowering would win the battle for a gardener’s heart and imagination. Not so. It is the rhythm of life itself that becomes the sacred measure of a gardener’s days: cyclical, familiar yet never quite the same from year to year.
Spring sets all that growing and renewal in motion. And at one time I might have said it was my favorite time of year, from the sight of the first robin to the heady scent of lilacs in bloom. But then for everything a season, including the life lessons of a winter that just doesn’t seem to let go.
Yoko Ono once said that spring reminds us of our innocence and summer of our exuberance; fall commands reverence and winter, perseverance. Bottom line, nature’s endings and beginnings become two sides of a single coin. And with another turning of the seasons soon upon us, gardeners everywhere can appreciate that bit of wisdom more than most.
Author of the 2006 regional best-selling novel “Time in a Garden,” Mary Agria is an 8-time first prize winner of the Michigan Garden Club’s statewide feature writing contest. Her “An Itinerant Gardener’s Book of Days,” gardening novels and books on gardening and spirituality are available online and from local bookstores.
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