Spring Time!

It’s that time of year again! Spring! With the melting of the snow and the arrival of the robin, its time to hit the gardens again and I’m thrilled to pieces. A lot of people think I’m absolutely nuts with the number of gardens that I maintain, but to me that black dirt, warmed by the sun, smelling of clean, fresh minerals … love it.

When we first moved into our little house on a city lot, my husband would take perhaps 40 to 45 minutes to cut the grass. Now … fifteen years and eight gardens later, it takes him maybe 15 minutes to maintain the lawn … tops. Not that he’s complaining. The deal was the grass was his, the gardens were mine. Funny how he never argues with that.

Anyway, we decided this year to put in a deck and you guessed it … one of my gardens has got to go. Naturally its one of the bigger ones … 14 by 16 feet, choke full of plants. This is going to be such a major pain in the ass to move them all. Plus finding space in the other gardens is going to be a challenge.

Still, it will give me an opportunity to freshen up the layout of the other gardens. Normally, once a plant it put in, for me, it tends to stay there. I know all about mixing colors, shapes of leaves and heights, but it just doesn’t seem to work out that way half the time. But moving them once their in the ground is not my favorite gardening occupation.

Sorta like writing. (You knew a writing analogy had to be coming). You come up with an idea, you plant it, you nurse it along, and then you refuse to acknowledge that perhaps some scenes just doesn’t belong where you put them or maybe doesn’t belong at all. Sorta like when I planted the orange poppies planted near the pale pink digitalis. They just didn’t work together. So, you go through your book, dig out the offending scene that jars with the rest of the chapter, and either move or lose it. Sure it’s a lot of hard work, but the end result is more than worth it.

Just think about how much better that book will be.