Winter is not nearly over in our part of the world. We’re sure to have more snow or at least very cold weather before we can get serious about gardening again.
With an unusually rainy year behind us, spilling 70+ inches of rain and already 8 inches the first 6 weeks of this new year :-( we’ve found ourselves wishing for a nice long dry spell. Probably not going to happen. So, the next best thing we can do is to start looking for signs of new life and spring to cheer ourselves up and pamper our impatience.
What I love about Arkansas is that even in February you can almost always find something green starting to grow and, if you're paying attention, you can even breath in and feel something fresh and new in the air that whispers “spring”. Daffodils, ferns and Hellebores (lenten roses) are usually the first flora
beginning to “spring forth” and bloom in sunny places in the gardens and even along roadsides.
Today, a very sunny, windy but not-too-chilly of a day, I decided to take a trek through the gardens to prove this point (mostly to myself). I found that after these last three days of relentless rainfall, there was indeed, more than just a long, flooded driveway, numerous fallen tree limbs and ghastly barnyards to our little Irish Acres.
Numerous bunches of daffodils that were barely coming up,
now look like they are only hours away from opening.
Ferns (below) are growing by leaps and bounds and will probably
over-crowd the small spaces they occupy in a matter of weeks.
The lenten roses always seem to out-do themselves this time of year.
If you lie on your back near the plant and look up (underneath the blooms)
you can see the real beauty that is hidden.
This is because they normally hang their little heads (blooms).
I did not lie on my back in the mud.
And finally, if you bring in a bit of garden life into the home,
everyone else has a chance to feel spring and see the beauty that awaits
just around the corner - when Winter is finally over!
~ Gwen of IRISH ACRES
