March 21 can’t come fast enough for me. We’ve veered between arctic ice and the drip, drip, drip of a spring thaw since the end of January, but when the sun crosses the equator later this month it will settle the issue once and for all. Are these extremes due to a leaking polar vortex weakened by global warming or are they natural variations in climate? Is an unstable polar vortex a natural variation? Perhaps I’m overthinking this.
Regardless of the cause, when you stick your head out the door in central Virginia, you never know what you’re going to find. I have friends who moved to Florida to escape this kind of thing in exchange for hurricanes and poodle-eating ’gators, but the sameness of the seasons in a tropical clime would bore me. Here in the hollow, I’m in the midst of a slowly revolving gallery where my view changes from the American primitive of Grandma Moses (she would sprinkle glitter on her white snow, to the chagrin of her New York agent, “because that’s the way it looks”) to French impressionism worthy of Monet as the woods come alive with an infinitude of tender greens and browns.
My friend in Austin, Texas, is a member of the weather watcher program (www.weather.gov/skywarn), which requires in-person or online training and differs according to your location. When she lived in Charlottesville, she recorded information on heavy rainfall and snow; in Texas the focus is on hail and tornado-producing storms. I have had my simple fun the last few months recording our daily high and low temperatures. The front porch is always warmer than local reports and we never saw single digits (our lowest was 11.3 degrees F.). Although we are in a low spot where cold air settles, perhaps the running of the creek and shelter of the hills keep us warmer.
My husband bought us golden Narcissus bulbs for indoor forcing back in Thanksgiving from a sales bin and didn’t get the name, but they’re blooming profusely throughout the house now with a heady sweet smell. I like to plant them in bright-colored tomato cans.
Photo by Cathy Clary.
Another way to bring flowers indoors this time of year is to force branches, especially nice for children. Forsythia got nipped by that arctic spell and I’m not sure what the bloom will be like this year. Buds from beech, oak, maples or alders are beautiful as they unfurl in the warmth of the house and we always have sprays of the witchhazel ‘Diane’ (Hamamelis sp.) with her dusty ruby ribbons.
Our trees continue to age out. The sweetbay magnolia (M. virginiana) in the nook off the front porch has, after 30 plus years, outgrown its space. I love the whole family of magnolias, some native like the sweetbay and southern (M. grandiflora), some from China like the lovely ‘Yulan’ (M. denudata) at the base of the Rotunda at the University. Deer don’t seem to browse them, many are evergreen and all produce exquisite porcelain blooms.
I suppose I was foolish to plant the “Henry Hicks” sweetbay, a true evergreen, so close to the house, but I wanted to put its trunk and leaves right against the windows to serve as a living drapery, a screen of green to display the delicate gray and green bark. When I soak in our claw-foot tub, I can look up to see it framed by our bathroom window and pretend I’m in a Japanese hot tub looking out on a Zen garden. From the tower window it casts a green light on the stair landing and its light, lemony fragrance wafts about the front porch on summer evenings.
Henry Hicks next to the window
But the insurance man says it’s got to go because the branches are touching the roof. We could prune it, but it would sprout suckers from each cut and become more of a headache, so we have decided to cut it down altogether. I never hesitate to be ruthless with the landscape when necessity requires. After a lifetime of watching plants die off in one way or another, one becomes accustomed to their passing. I plan to prune the suckers that will come from the trunk into a 4- to 5-foot bonsai.
The snow has receded from the meadow path. In the shade of the hill to the south, it’s the last to melt. The creek is rushing along toward the cherry bench and beyond to the bay, beckoning me to find daffodil tips along the way. New birds sing, squirrels leap and chase each other madly. Spring calls and it’s time to walk into the picture.
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