Nature's Garden in my Backyard

I cannot tell whether the fog that hangs in the air outside will burn off later today, or continue to mist through the trees and keep everything green and damp throughout the day.  My vegetable garden calls for my spade, and if I do not make the time to thoroughly work over that small patch of ground it with be thick with deep rooted weeds when I plant it in earnest a week or two from now.  Another bed of perrenial herbs and wildflowers is overrun by choke cherry suckers, and it may be that this year I am forced to destroy the garden to save it.  There is garlic mustard testing the boundaries of my modest backyard from beachheads it has established at the property lines.  Ignore that, and the choke cherry suckers will be but a modest inconvenience in comparison.

I love gardens in spring, however, especially the one that contains ephemeral wildflowers.  I have let the dog toothed violets and ramps seed and grow where they will, and watched with delight as new Jack-in-the-Pulpit plants appear in other parts of the flower bed from their parent.  There are Dutchmen's britches and bloodroot and both have started to find new niches amid the ferns.  There are trillium and wild geraniums and wild ginger, and even a clump of calcium-loving large yellow ladyslippers.  There is a new seedling growing this year, apart from the clump of many flowered stalks nearby, and I believe it has accomplished that most unusual feat for one of these orchids and actually germinated.

Later in the season the cardinal flowers and white turtleheads will rise above the fading green leaves of these plants as the early flowers have all gone to seed.  I'm not sure what blight did in my formerly vigorous stand of Giant Solomon's Seal but it has all but vanished where once it flourished.  I watch, and I weed, and I wonder, and still it is this garden that helps me mark the progress of Spring to early summer better even than the uncurling maple leaves, or the nesting wrens at the back of the yard.  It has taken a decade for this garden to assume its present shape, and with luck, and a bit of intervention when an invader makes a run at it, it will continue to evolve and change for many years to come.