The Wrong Lilies

The Wrong Lilies

Friday, January 29, 2016

WELL SNAP

This is the time of year, when winter is two months gone, with one more month to come on the calendar, when everything becomes strange.  One day we will have mild temps.  In two days we can expect it to be in the mid-seventies, two days after that there is expected a hard freeze.

Walking around the garden, so many things are coming and going.  The Minor Monarque jonquils are blooming away near the quince, other jonquil and daffodils are making their way out, some daylilies are coming up, other daylilies never died back, and some can only be located by a collection of their dead leaves.



Since we have had only light freezes, the cestrum bush, really a small tree taller than the storage building, is going great and all its leaves are green, where last winter it died back to the ground and we didn’t even know if it was lost.

The great possibility is that sometime between now and true spring, the one that nature decides rather than the calendar, everything will leaf out and bloom out and then one of those polar vortexes, which sounds like something from a movie, will come along and interrupt everything.  The important thing to remember is that if that happens, it will still be only an interruption, a loss of some things, a benefit of some sort to others.

And, as usual, when a walk around the garden causes thoughts such as these, immediately the thought occurs that all of these events are another perfect metaphor for real life:  we set our plans, life happens mostly outside our control, and then we find that some situations are more difficult than we expected, but just like the plants, we deal with what we have, and try to go on with life.