Springtime Gardening

    

We planted the new Magnolia last night. (Magnolia grandiflora 'Bracken's Brown Beauty') It's a bitty thing right now, maybe 4 feet high, compared to the thirty to fifty feet it will be at maturity. I asked the man at the nursery how fast it would grow and he said they grow "like a kid" in the beginning. We planted it out front where it will have plenty of room to become grand. When Steve opened the ground, we saw that the soil was actually soil and not clay. Steve said this area was out of the range of where our builder scraped the earth when they built our house so, it's the original cow pasture with nicer soil. Grow little tree!
     I'm still digging up those #%/! perennial step beds apart and pulling out weeds and turning soil. All the while I worked I kept thinking, I need to hire a young somebody to do this. I fought with the mint that was running amok and yanked every newly sprouted curse of crown vetch I could find. It will be a happy day when I can finally ask Steve to bring home some soil and compost. A friend came over and adopted many of the dug up perennials. She filled the back of her SUV with daisies, purple coneflower, yarrow, and black-eyes Susans. Her little girl took interest in all the different plants and eagerly held out her hand for the earthworm I held up. She liked the Hens 'n Chicks growing in a pot near the back door so we pulled a little 'chick' from the bunch and put it in a little pot of her own to take home. My dad gave me the predecessors of those hens and chicks over twenty years ago. He would be happy that they're still being shared. To finish up the evening, I got out the lettuce seeds and planted a row. It's a little late for sowing lettuce, but I think we'll get a nice crop before the weather gets too warm. I'll be able plant another crop of lettuce and other cool season crops in late summer, for a fall harvest... if I'm on the ball. I checked on the asparagus and it's still coming right along. They are an odd-looking sort of plant, like something I would imagine from the early days of the earth. I like how they rise from the soil with their heads curled and then straighten up to the sky, like fern fronds.
     I'll finish with a picture of the little dogwood that grows in the back. The white dogwoods are at their blooming height right now and they are a bright beacon even on rainy days. Such was the day when I photographed this.