Gardening Dreams

Despite frost on my window shield this morning, the scent of spring is finally reaching the frozen north. Mason still has to wear boots to school, but now it's mostly to keep his toes dry while he stomps in the muddy puddles. There are still a few recalcitrant piles of dirty ice and snow in my back yard, but more and more ground is peeking through. At Crossroads this morning, I even saw a few, brave green sprouts of hosta (or perhaps tulips) poking through the ground.

I'm starting to look at seed catalogues in earnest. This year I'm planning two new gardening projects. The first one is a meditation/memorial area in the spiral herb garden. There's a section of deep shade near the neighbor's garage wall that Shawn has been considering for a mediation garden. Since very little grows in such dense shade, we're thinking about laying some paving stones and filling in much of the rest of the area with ferns, hostas, and perhaps a few native, woodland flowers like Virginia bluebells, jack-in-the-pulpit, and Dutchman's breeches. Shawn would also like a few bleeding hearts and other shade tolerant flowers to soften the area. We've got a Japanese lantern for decoration, and we're going to buy a bit of bamboo fencing to soften the neighbor's garage wall. She also wants a glider rocker out there, though we have a bench that says "Sit a Spell" courtesy of our friend Sean.

I took this photo of the area in late February, and I've been taking shots every now and again to get a sense of the light and "feel" of the space.

The other big gardening project I'm considering is planting a boulevard garden. Thanks to a lot of trees, we really don't have a lot of hot, sunny spots for flowers and Shawn would love a cutting garden. I'm thinking that the boulevard might be just the place, especially since Saint Paul actually encourages boulevard plantings and has published a guide on how-to, which I picked up some summers ago.

Can you tell I'm ready for Spring?