Spring cleaning

The first year it sleeps, the second year it creeps, the third year...

So clearly I have not been dying to be on Substack for some weeks now. Composing my thoughts and setting them down amid so much chaos and turmoil, so much suffering both intended and unintended, so many assaults on fundamental values—I ‘m just not someone who does that well, and I sincerely hope in the interim you’ve found voices that spoke to you and the matters that burned in your heart in the middle of the night.

But of course, for someone like me—an introvert who has a really good extrovert act—once the silence falls, it can be tough to break. It can be easy to fall into traps of doubt and even shame—how can you write about your garden when [insert disaster]? So I’ve been thinking, a lot, about how to begin again, and funnily enough inspiration came from a TikTok influencer, comedian Suzanne Lambert who shared her struggles and the really helpful advice she’d gotten from a writing coach who’d simply said, What is it you’re dying to tell them? —adding, Tell them that.

So I’ve been pondering the question—what is it that I’m dying to tell you? And what I’m dying to tell you is … that it’s Spring.

Narcissus Grande Soleil d’Or, an excellent daffodil for naturalizing in the blazing South Carolina heat.

Not false spring, the tease that we got last month here in the foothills—that four to five day stretch of 70-degree days that everyone knew was a planetary head fake. No, real spring. The earliest-blooming tree in town, a flowering apricot (Prunus mume “Peggy Clarke”) I pass every day on my way to work? Covered in blossoms. My neighbors’ Bradford pears, too, are a mass of popcorn blossoms—the sight so pretty I don’t even have the heart to resent the damage they’re doing to our forests. The biggest sign for me is that the meadow at Bellaflora is vibrating once again with birdsong—Cardinals, Blue Jays, Carolina Wrens, Robins, Mockingbirds, Nuthatches, and Brown Thrashers—in a sweet cacophony only occasionally interrupted by truck traffic.

Please don’t hate me if you live in Zone 5, but I’ve been wearing sandals for the past two days.

At last! the little piggies can breathe!

Everywhere I look there’s a splash of color amid the winter duns and browns—sunny daffodils in oranges and yellows and creams. So many green tones—olive, emerald, and pea—shimmering in the sun as the herb and perennial beds awaken. The spring-flowering camellia and the towering loropetalums that came with the property are showing out in brilliant hues of scarlet and magenta; meanwhile, the viburnums and hydrangeas #HorticultureHubby planted and every deciduous tree on the property are at or near bud break. Forget about the calendar; spring is here and for the first time since we’ve moved to this property … we are ready.

Loropetalum, also known as Chinese Fringe Tree, at center, surrounded by two viburnum buds. At left is the extremely fragrant Parke Farm Hybrid (never commercially released but part of #HortiHubby's collection for at least 15 years) and V. Macrocephalum 'Sterile', AKA Giant Snowball or Chinese Snowball.

I keep recalling an old (as dirt) garden saying: The first year it sleeps; the second year it creeps; the third year … it leaps!

This is the third growing season at Bellaflora’s new site in the Carolina foothills—the year of leaping. The official “last frost date” for our zone is April 7, and [cue drumroll] we will be ready.

Brycen, our tree guru, completed the last of the Hurricane Helene cleanup two days ago. A widowmaker, a couple of fallen 40-footers, assorted debris—all now cut into eight foot sections and piled more or less neatly beside our drive. From my perch on the front deck, I can see #HortiHubby atop a growling John Deere as he drags twisted and smashed sections of fencing into a pile for loading into a rented dumpster. This is the first year he’s been anywhere near full strength since the hip replacement, and he’s brimming with optimism at the feeling, for the first time in many years, that spring cleaning is well advanced.

As for the vegetable garden—because, yes, veggies have formally become my assignment, as #HortiHubby thinks I have a knack for it (and FR, he’s much more inspired by shrubs and flowers and trees)—I’m sitting on go. In my post-inauguration torpor, I wasn’t capable of much outside of preparing lectures and grading papers, but I was able to dip my toes into the stream of seed catalogs that flowed steadily to our door and even test out a garden planning app or two.¹ So, not only do I have my spring-summer-fall successions figured out—I’ve even worked out a three-year crop rotation for the whole shooting match.²

In the world beyond these three and a half acres, tariffs, assaults on veterans and health care and education are going to hit with particular force. South Carolina loves to berate a welfare queen, but the reality is we receive $3.42 in federal spending for every dollar we collect in federal taxes—the highest ratio in the nation. No less devastating, I believe, will be the psychic wounds as some of faithful foot soldiers in the MAGA movement realize how completely they’ve been betrayed.

So I don’t know—I just don’t know what’s in store for the country, for my community. And if the raging dumpster fire on the “socials” is anything to go by, neither does anyone else.

But I can tell you that loving this land is creating a pathway for me back to myself in a season of helplessness and despair, that loving the land is allowing me to love me. The cup is still depleted, but it’s starting to fill. Soon there may be enough there to share with someone else.

One last shot of beauty before I go. A spring-flowering camellia that was the gift of the last owner to us.

And in the meantime, we’ll have “bread and roses,” food and beauty, to nourish us in this storm…

1. More on these later.

2. For this, I’m deeply indebted to my old friend Ira Wallace of Virginia’s TwinOaks/Southern Exposure Seed Exchange communities. She’s produced six garden guides specific to growing conditions in the Southeast for Timber Press; Grow Great Vegetables in South Carolina is an essential companion.