Spring is in the Air

I was threading my way through the snow and black ice last week when a greenhouse sign caught my eye. “Tired of winter. . .just come on in,” it said. They didn’t have to ask twice.

As it turns out, nothing major was in bloom at the moment under all those glass-enclosed aisles full of plants. It didn’t matter. Like the smell of printers’ ink to a writer, the rich smell of potted things growing is something guaranteed to get a gardener’s pulse racing. Moreover, I have come to appreciate, as a gardener, that foliage has a subtle appeal all its own—indoors and out.

Cool and lush, a classic shade garden can turn out to be a subtle island of calm and restraint in otherwise tough to cultivate nooks and crannies in a yard. Those delicate and muted shades of green, creams, whites and yellows are restful, quietly inviting us to look deeper for our definitions of beauty than the gaudier displays possible in sunnier beds.

Hostas and varieties of ferns flaunt their distinctive and showy greenery, elbowing one another for space in the shady ground. The incorrigible vinca minor or lesser periwinkle sends tenacious runners into corners where more showy flowering plants would balk at trying to establish themselves. Shady rock gardens can flourish like exquisite landscapes in miniature with their tiny red and crimson forests of shoots rising above the pillow-like hillocks of moss.

In the early morning when the ground is still wet or in the hours after a spring or summer shower, a walk through a shade garden is like a stroll through a tropical Eden. Life is flourishing on all sides, not to flower or pragmatically to fruit, but simply and joyously to be.

In a human world that values “bigger and bolder”, shade gardens are life lessons in simplicity and discernment. The aesthetics of a shade garden is grounded in the bare shape and structure of things. Its palette depends on an appreciation for subtlety as much as variety.

Shade gardens celebrate the long haul, the steady and the persistent. Long after species after species of perennials in the full-sun have flowered and faded, the plants of the shade garden go quietly on with their business of growing.

I left that greenhouse with a tiny fern for my terrarium. The wind was biting, the ground uncertain under my feet. Still, I told myself, somehow it didn’t matter so much whether March was coming in or going out like or a lion. Spring is coming. I smiled.