Dwindling Darkness

I’ve gone out for a walk the last three days around 5:30 p.m. and it’s plenty light to see where I’m going. That alone conveys the promise of spring. Of course we’re almost two months out from the Winter Solstice and we get something like six minutes more light every day, so it was bound to happen. Still, when there is so much dark, it often seems like it will take forever to get back to what you remember it being, assuming it ever does.

The raspberry canes and the currant bushes are starting to leaf out; the crocosmyia has tiny shoots up everywhere under the last year crop of soppy, dead leaves; the day lilies are not being backward about being forward. Tulips and daffs are everywhere showing their stride. All looking very promising, very good. Only, at least at my house, are the crocuses holding back. There are crocuses at the library, and there were crocuses up in Roberts Creek, but here at my house in Point Roberts the crocuses are in hiding. Usually, they bloom by Valentine’s Day. I believe that would be six days from now and I just don’t think they’re going to make it.

Some plants look as if winter did them in. Penstemon that has lived through the winter every year for the past 10 years looks dead. Some branches on the rhododendrons look as if they have chosen to no longer participate in the plant world. Alyssum that normally winters over, not. Well, not impossible to replace these things and we are grateful for all that did make it through. It's not that it was so cold this winter but that it was pretty cold for much longer periods of time than it usually is. These plants failed to endure rather than failed to resist.

I spent a couple of hours in the garden on a couple of days this week. Mostly cleaning up the still menacing piles of late falling leaves, uprooting the herbe Robert, and cutting back the old sword fern fronds. The ferns will be putting up their new curled-up fronds soon and once they’re up, the old fronds are much harder to cut without also cutting the new ones. It’s mild work and mostly it’s designed to get my muscles, tendons and joints back into the right groove. Alas, I have the enthusiasm of a 20-year-old, the energy of a 70-year-old, and the knees of, I suspect, a 90-year-old. Wishing me luck….