Most years, my garden is thoroughly spring-cleaned by mid-April. This year, I’ll be lucky to be done by the summer solstice. I’m not sure how I got so far behind, but El Niño appears to be at least partly to blame.
Winter has hit the snooze button this spring too many times to count. In a normal spring, gardeners grate one another by reciting a litany of what is in bloom, kind of a gardener’s smack-down.
“You’ve got saucer magnolia? Oh, really. My first tomato ripened on May 1.”
This year, Front Range gardeners seem universally too harried by unfinished tasks to even notice our triumphs. As we approach Mother’s Day, the official start of Colorado’s prime-time garden season, most of us are still whacking away at overgrown roses and trying to rid flowerbeds of recalcitrant weeds.
At least in my garden, clematis are long since taken care of. Until last spring, I attempted to use proper technique, pruning each according to whether it was categorized as Group 1, 2 or 3, using great care to untangle vines and to cut just above a pair of green buds. But with an impending garden tour and limited time, I adopted an off-with-their- heads policy, lopping to the ground all but spring-blooming Clematis alpinus and C. macropetala varieties. (When I admitted what I’d done to a nurseryman who specializes in clematis, he said the rules only apply to English gardens anyway.) This year I did the same.
Roses are another matter, although a couple that were overgrown and riddled with cane borers got the Red Queen treatment. Forty others got the works. As soon as new buds appeared, I mulched, fertilized and painstakingly cut out all of the dead wood (and for all my trouble ended up as bloody as if I’d tried to break up a catfight).
Perennial flowers were easy by comparison. All that is really required is cutting off dead stalks. Shrubs and trees are pruned only on an as-needed basis, which many years amount to no more than lopping out a few oddly placed or dead branches.
Truth be told, I have just about given up trying to eradicate my worst weed, smooth brome, which has hijacked large sections of my garden. After having taken out whole flowerbeds, then sifting through the soil with a fine-toothed comb to remove every little piece of root before putting the flowers back, I admit defeat. Now I just pull visible sprouts, hoping to at least limit this grass’s spread.
I’ve come to realize that a perfect garden just isn’t a rational goal — not that I’m suggesting we don’t try to keep things at least slightly under control. I’m just remembering that every spring is frenzied in a gardener’s life.
If we can’t allow ourselves to relax for a moment because of all our unfinished tasks, if we don’t stop and take some pleasure in spring’s exuberance, aren’t we forgetting why we garden in the first place?
Hasn’t this been a great year for tulips?
Marcia Tatroe’s most recent book is “Cutting Edge Gardening in the Intermountain West,” ($29.95, Johnson Books). E-mail her at mtatroe@q.com.
