Signs of Spring

Signs of Spring here on the Texas Gulf Coast are less dramatic than Spring awakening where snow has forced a winter slumber, but we still get just as excited here!  After all, Spring means a return to garden tending, walks in the sunshine, sweet blooming trees, and the return of songbirds nesting for chicks.

 

 

 

I am not a textbook gardener.  Martha Stewart's lessons are lost on me.  I am more like Johnny Appleseed or Lady Bird Johnson with pockets full of seeds that I simply scatter about.  I am known to pull up a wild specimen from an abandoned rural garden for a new life in my backyard.  Iris and daffodils still remain as old houses crumble, standing like guards of the final decay.  Now, some stand guard at my own front door and I feel the spirit of the women who once tended their country gardens with pride.

 

 

Outside my kitchen door is a small patchy garden that has received many a seed over the winter.  There have been discarded pepper seeds, eggplant, meadow seeds, and it is also where I dumped out the remainder of every batch of my mulling spice grungy soak. Suddenly my kitchen patch is alive with seedlings! Coriander is definitely winning the growth race! It's EVERYWHERE!

 

 

Because the Gulf Coast rarely sees a hard freeze, some plants stay in bloom year round.  This wee plant grew from seeds from my best bud Ashlie Blake.  It is a lot like our friendship: strong, resilient, delicate, and enduring.  Growing in an unlikely crevice it is a reminder that all things are possible.

 

 

Soon all our gardens will be alive with blooms and stories of horticulture phenoms!  Blogs will be full of splendid scenes of floral bliss, nesting cuties, and green as far as the eye can see.

 

 

"Oh give us pleasure in the flowers today;

And give us not to think so far away

As the uncertain harvest; keep us here

All simply in the springing of the year."

                   ~Robert Frost

 

LOVE  &  SPRING