Thank Goodness for Gardening

March 2020 may go down as the month that gardening saved my sanity.

A month that began with such promise went sideways with a speed and whip-lash-inducing severity that, in my memory, is unprecedented.  No, I didn’t test positive for Covid-19; but more than a dozen speaking engagements as close as my town library and as far away as South Carolina, Florida, Illinois and Missouri fell like dominoes and evaporated out of ‘an abundance of caution’.  It wasn't fair; I had a new book to talk about and people to entertain.  I confess to having fallen into a funk that no amount of binge-watching Cheers reruns could cure.

Ten days into the month, Betty appeared in the bedroom that serves as my office (where I was, of course, immersing myself in contagion statistics).  She had a rake in her hand.  “Stand up, Mister Gloom and Doom,” she said.  “I would like you to help me clean up the garden.”

Betty had the kind of look of her face that said the use of the words, ‘would like’, was not intended to be taken at face value.  This was a command, and was to be obeyed now.

I found crocus along the sidewalk

I rose from my chair and, for the next three days, we pulled a winter’s worth of leaves out from under shrubs.  I mended a stone wall.  We cut back the four-inch stubble on perennials, and carefully trimmed out broken branches.  And, along the way, I found dicentra already leafing out; awaiting only the removal of six inches of oak leaves to start on their early spring flowering.  Daffodil greens were three inches high and, where there was bright sunlight, heads were forming.

The aconite planted last fall bloomed

I removed a mulch of pine needles and discovered a small forest of greens that meant the winter aconite bulbs we planted in October were going to bloom.  Off our patio, a clutch of hellebores had probably been in bloom since February, but were under so many leaves, I had forgotten they were there.  When I carefully pulled off leaves and pine needles by hand, I found myself with a pink and white reward.  Those small signs lifted my spirits more than I can express in words. 

It was not all ‘rake and discover’.  Cleaning the garden also meant hours on my knees pulling out thousands of inch-tall pine seedlings and a nasty green weed with world domination hard-wired into its DNA. 

The garden was staked and fences
bloomed immeiately

Then, the sun warmed the soil and, a week later, miracle of miracles, we had crocus by the hundreds.  My spirits had done a 180.  I was looking forward to working in the garden. 

On a Friday toward the end of the month – when the temperature rose into the mid-40s and no rain was in the forecast - we gathered a group of intrepid volunteers and put down 220 stakes to mark our town’s Community Garden.  The next day, we put up our fence – or at least tried to.  A cold, nasty wind whipped up and drove us indoors.  But we will be back out.  We have to: the garlic is already three or four inches high and will be fodder for deer if we don’t protect it.

The hellebores were there all along

Perhaps the rejuvenation of my spirits has some kind of cosmic, Karma-like reverberation.  One morning in late March, an email appeared in my in-box.  The garden club convention in Missouri I was to speak to in early May was one of the first to cancel the event at the beginning of March.  But they were now planning their 2021 event.  Everyone had been looking forward to my talk.  Might I be available the first week of May a year from now? 

Of course I could; and I wrote them back immediately.  No sooner that that email was posted, my phone rang.  The group in Illinois was cancelling my talk, also scheduled for May, but was anxious to know if I could be re-booked for the same date in 2021.

I write this looking out my office window.  A few weeks ago, I saw only missed opportunities I thought would never come again, and contagion as far as the eye could see.  Now, I focus on the mass of yellow, white and blue crocuses and aconite.  And I know we will all get through this.