Random Access

This is the time of year when anticipation and anxiety grip the gardener with equal fervour.
In the woodland bed, the hepatica is blooming, the white trillium are just starting to show colour, the hosta are beginning to poke their pointy heads out of the ground (except for the late-starting Honeybells) and the Virginia bluebells have huge leaves and tiny buds.
The white hellebores are finished, the red are in full bloom and the new one, with the supposed acid-green flowers, has swelling buds that look set to burst forth momentarily.
The incredibly pasty-white tops of the Mayflowers are visible and the Dutchman's Breeches and Meadow Rue are on course.
But what's missing? No sign of the Jack in the Pulpit. Are those tiny little leaves the start of Spring Beauty?
Doesn't that tag mark where the new red and painted trillium were supposed to be showing by now? How far did they get moved in the winter?
At the base of one of the posts holding up the porch just outside our front door, the Globe flower has returned without incident. But where are the many Moonflower seedlings that should be showing by now? Will we not be blessed this year by their gorgeous scent and the white night-light that their gigantic fluorescent blooms provide in mid-summer?
Something should be coming up right beside the sidewalk because I know I planted there. Maybe that gardening journal would have been a good present after all. But then it would spoil the surprise should something green eventually emerge in front of the coral bell, whose pink leaves are literally glowing each morning when the low sun shoots it through with electric colour.
The martagon lilies are coming up in groups. The squirrels have only taken the tops off a couple of them this year but there's bad news: the American red lily beetle has moved in en masse. Having munched their way through most of the Asiatics and latched onto the Orientals and LAs, they are now heading for the more expensive stuff. Time to get out the Neem Oil and launch a full-scale (non-toxic) counter attack!
So it begins — the annual tug of war between man and nature, design and execution, and hope and reality that we call gardening.
Once more into the breach, trowel in hand, to ache like no back has ached before, in the pursuit of a perfection that will always elude us. Praise the Lord and pass the compost.