Cool, Clear, Spectacular

These cool May mornings make the heart sing, don't they? In light of last summer's drought, it seems a miracle that anything came up in the garden this spring, but everything looks sharp again, and in a shady yard like ours, many of the plants will never look better than they do now, especially the violets, the bleeding heart, and the brunnera, with their tiny blue forget-me-not flowers.

Now's the time to divide and move things around, of course. A few days ago I uprooted a volunteer pagoda dogwood, maybe three feet tall,  that had been doing well in the sunny side yard (where we never see it) and moved it to a position in back where, if all goes well, it will contribute to the leafy, though slightly feeble, woods that screens us from the neighbors all summer.

Wandering the yard on a Sunday morning, I see the fruits of two winter projects that had been on my mind for years. Back in January I lopped off the tops of the nannyberry bushes that had been getting leggy. Now they look much better. And in February we hired someone to remove a volunteer elm that was blocking much of the sunlight coming in from the south while also littering our deck with yellowish leaves all summer due to Dutch elm disease. 

He carefully removed the tree, section by section, using a small chain saw on a pole while standing on a ladder. His wife held the ropes to insure the sections fell into the neighbor's yard rather than across the power-lines, and she also carried the limbs away. He volunteered to cut the tree into fireplace lengths, to avoid the cost of disposing of it. That sounded like a good idea to me.

It's always fun to watch an artist at work. The entire operation took three hours. We'll see how much the added sunlight does for the garden. Well, it can't hurt!

I noticed just this morning, while on a stroll though the back yard, that a serviceberry tree is flowering deep in the woods, and so is one of its offspring closer to the house. A less pleasant discovery: the deer have already begun to chew down the clematis recta. (Time to get out that bottle of spray that's been sitting in the garage for years.)

Out front, I initiated another project that's been on my mind for years: to make better use of the sunny patch on the north side of the driveway. To this end, I removed a large chunk of sod from the lawn, moved the peony that was getting smothered by the neighboring bushes three feet further out toward the driveway, and planted some day lilies from the vegetable garden in front of it. Hilary has some Mexican sunflowers that might also do well in that space.

But matters of garden improvement aside, the chief joy of these crystal mornings is simply to feel the cool air on your skin and gaze lovingly at this or that plant, perhaps admiring its translucence when struck from behind by the rays of the early morning sun. 

On a day like today a clump of Virginia waterleaf looks as fine as the rarest and most delicate exotic, and spotting a golden-winged warbler amid the leaves of the linden tree is merely frosting on the cake.