Here Comes Spring

Our unknown tree

The trees flowers are luscious folds of pink and white

Lacy green appearing...

Cherry blossoms

How do we know when spring finally bursts through the eternal winter?  Vernal Equinox? When the center of the sun is aligned directly with the equator?  The guy who tells you that is the same one who claims happiness is the absence of severe abdominal pain.

Technically.  Don’t you hate that word?  On 20 March it is ‘technically Spring.’  Yeah, and technically this year I was up to my technicals in snow. Snow ain’t Spring on my calendar.  Ya gotta have showers and flowers and sunshine and be able to sit outside with your shirt off, and it shouldn't be a frozen nipple experience.

We’re racing toward the end of April here in the heart of Global-Warming-Europe.  Therefore, we’ve technically been in Spring for over a month.  Yeah and technically your granny is a virgin, since the limit on prosecution for unlawful intercourse is 20 years.  Don’t quote me on that, especially to your granny.

But, solar assistance has finally arrived.  It is about 60ºF/15ºC.  Leaves appear as green and delicate as gauze, fluttering with the gentle breeze through the forest.  Cherry trees are showers of white. Butter colored daffodils bob their little heads in surprising places.  Time to collect those dandelion greens for salad.  Tulips popped through the earth and are racing for the sun.

In my backyard’s wild garden, an unnamed tree  (any help would be greatly appreciated) has burst open its huge white, pink tinged flowers.  Birds and bees float by in abundance.  For every flower it seems there are three overachieving bees.

Have you ever wondered about that expression, usually followed by a sly wink?  The birds and the bees.  Birds I can understand.  They sing, warble, call to any sweet someone in earshot.  They build nests together.  Figure out what goes where and keep the world supplied with baby birds.

But bees?  First off, the ones we see are normally females.  Secondly, they work their little bee-hinds off until they buzz their last and float away to that big hive in the honey colored sky.

I guess that’s what the expression means:  Take time to procreate, but otherwise continue to work your ass off.  To me that’s not springtime either.  Springtime is the time to lighten up.  Have another beer with the guys.  Lie about your misspent youth.  Ogle that vision of loveliness that just wiggled past.  Live a little.  What your wife doesn’t know won’t hurt you.

And above all, enjoy the sunshine and flowers.

Erica or heather

Treasures In a Wild Garden

An overview, with a wheat field behind

Even the weeds can be beautiful!

More beauty weeds

Ever hear of a wild garden?  I hadn’t either until we moved to Germany.  Every garden I’d ever seen, behind someone’s home, or in professionally done landscape, all had a carefully cultured look.  Flowers placed just so.  Plenty of rich tilled soil between the plants.  Weeds banished; the palate of the garden a broad stretch of lawn, so manicured it appears to have been measured, then trimmed with scissors by an anal-retentive barber.

But, what if you can’t find an out of work anal-retentive barber?  These days you may have better luck.  Most barbers I’ve had the misfortune to meet lately were electricians the day before, and ‘factory trained’ mechanics the week before that.  Wanna see the scars on my misshapen pate?

Why do you keep diverting my attention?  Let’s get back to gardening.  While I appreciate the care and effort of the traditional hedgerow flower garden, I don’t like to cut the lawn and now that the sons are grown, I no longer have to set up plastic water slides, soccer goals, or badminton nets.   But…..and this is a biggie….I know first hand you can still pass a football around a wild garden.

How do you get from a conventional to a wild garden?  Like anything worthwhile, it takes time, experimentation and work.  I can mention all the common advice.  Read. Ask advice from experts at your garden center.  Go to gardening blogs.  Without too much trouble you’ll find the basics for a layout and for plants, but it’s not like laying down turf.  Some plants thrive in one spot or another.  Often it’s tough to imagine how big or how small the varieties are that you’re planting.  Also, don’t think for a moment that a wild garden means no maintenance.  Some flowers thrive, others die and leave bare spots that are soon filled with obnoxious weeds.   You’ll also find that not all weeds are obnoxious.  Some are delightful wild flowers, such as poppies and Queen Anne’s Lace. 

From the photos, you’ll see a mix of blowing grasses and large pockets of color.  It’s fine to spread the color around, but for my money, you need to have large bursts of a single color as anchors.

You may also want to be careful about which kinds of high grasses you plant and where you plant them.  Some non-native species sink deep, deep roots and once they take hold, you’ll never get rid of them.  Other species, such as bamboo, send out runners that will quickly overtake entire portions of your garden.

But, in the end, a wild garden is much more than a garden.  It’s also a haven for birds, and small animals.  Even the occasional rabbit, or pheasant may make it their home.

There are other reasons a wild garden is more to my liking these days.  First of all, it’s a living piece of art, a canvas that changes with the seasons, never returning to exactly as it was.  Every year, as the dark, bare skeletons of winter’s trees take on their spring greenery, and flowers go from brown stalks of yesteryear to promises of beauty, and bees begin their never ending flights to my garden and home, the wild garden marks the new birth of my world.

I sit outside and see the daily changes.  Purple flowers here, waving grasses there, buds of yellow, once again burst though the long winter’s blanket of grays and blacks.

A wild garden is not for everyone. Some folks cannot get past the work they’ve put into a perfect lawn.  Others dwell on the open spaces with the echoes of their children’s voices and the promise of their grand children’s voices to come.  Believe me, I understand.

But, when we moved to Germany, so many memories did not get packed with our furniture and such.  The lawns of yesterday are smiling ghosts of the past that only live in a father’s heart.  Perhaps those ghosts would not permit a new lawn, with small voices that will never come.

Now I need to feel as one with nature, to share the sun, to watch the children of the flowers grow and blossom.  Perhaps it soothes the soul, and keeps alive other seasons in my life.  The lawns are gone, but the voices still ring.  And after all, beauty remains.

Lacy, flowing tops of some tall grasses

Different shades of green and waving grasses.

A German Garden: the inside scoop

Even a quick glimpse is a pleasure.

A little serendipity always helps.

A carelessly beautiful arrangement.

Germans, like the English, are wonderful gardeners.  Don’t believe it?  Drive through any German village, town, or city and see that every nook and cranny is bursting with flowers.  Must have been women who did those.  Window boxes.  Front yards.  Back yards. Along driveways.  Flowerpots by the door. Bicycle baskets still on the handlebars. Yes, I have seen these.  Inspiring. 

I am not a gardener, but I have friends who are and some are even German men.  For a bier and a wurst, they’ll willingly share the secrets they’ve gleaned from their years of playing in the dirt; which is a polite way of saying, put a beer in their hand and they’ll spill their gardening guts.  But, after a few hours of pils, who’s equipped to remember Latin names, or the best time to plant rhubarb, and why slugs don’t make good escargot? 

Well, I remember a few secrets, such as:  plant flowers in the sunshine, except for impatiens, which apparently adore some shade, as I do.  Details fade.  Beauty lingers.

Which brings me to the expression ‘nook and cranny.’  Anybody know what that means?  Nooks are small, out of the way spots only women know about, and crannies are small crevices even more difficult to find.  All of them are evil.  Would I use the phrase in a sentence?  Of course.  My wife finds nooks and crannies to be great organizational tools, which is why I’m developing a nook and cranny eradicator.

In fact, men are born hating nooks and also express great distain for crannies, preferring to place eyes-only items, such as the receipts for the new shotgun and full surround sound media center, in more secret places.  Twice locked strong boxes, labeled ‘Only to be opened in the case of my death,’ for example.

But, back to my friend’s garden, which is a delight and shows great foresight in avoiding the use of nooks. Also, back to two of his best secrets.  Secret one:  When you have a bare spot in your lawn, lightly till in some dark earth.  Next, put grass seeds in a watering can and fill it with water.  Then water the patch and the grass seeds will spread evenly.  Secret two:  To figure out where best to plant flowers in your garden, take twenty years of trial and error, and never give up hope. 

You can tell if you have a really good garden.  It’s like a living painting you can sit and stare at for hours.  A place to enjoy your morning cup, or to relax with a sherry at dusk.  The question is, what makes a garden good?  What takes a little greenery and a few bursts of color out of the realm of mere plantings and into the world of living art?  One thing I’ve noticed is that pockets of single color anchor a well planted garden. Diaspora of types and colors is great, but only if balanced by strong monochromatic patches that draw the eye.  There must also be a balance of differing heights and backgrounds of various shades of green.

If none of this comes naturally to your eye and imagination, visit some professional gardens, check out internet photos, or diligently spy on your neighbors, while ignoring their habit of nude sunbathing.  Careless balance, of form, size, and color is the key.  Yep, takes a lot of time and work to achieve carelessness.

Time for another beer, while you lovingly gaze at some photos of a wonderful backyard garden.  Meanwhile, I’m taking a fly swatter to those beastly crannies.

See how the heights, colors and shades of green come together!

A wonderful unbalanced arrangement compliments a well trimmed hedge

Visitors Welcome!

Our Small Corner of Germany: Autumn to Winter

Our backyard is a wonderful, wild garden, free to twist and change in wind and weather. Trees and hedges.  Winsome, sweet grasses.  Flowers of striking color in the spring, or somber black stalks in December.

Some of the things I like best about the garden, aside from not having a lawn to mow and leaving the gardening to my dirt-loving wife, are the constant changes of color and design from season to season.  It’s been a while since we’ve lived with a year cleaved into four distinct quarters.  The subtleties from one season to the next, dance slowly and blur the edges, yet unite and glide them in a masterly symphony of nature.

            Germany is a country of sheer, never ending beauty, from the rolling green hills and meadows of springtime, to the year around rugged grandeur of the Alps; from the dark, and mysterious forests, swollen with lush summer greenery, to the white blanketed fields and black skeletal trees of winter.

            Our backyard garden is a microcosm of Germany’s seasonal wonders.  I sit and read and sip my morning coffee, sometimes outside and sometimes in, glancing up to marvel at nature’s ever changing tableaux.