Something wonderful is happening

Why is there something wonderful about getting up in the spring? Because, suddenly, for me, mornings go from Urrkk, guess I’d better stir myself, to Ohh, look at that sky. Will there be sun today? It’s lovely because anticipation has crept in. Is it going to be warm enough to sit outside? What’s going on in the garden?

Just yesterday I saw the bright blue of scillas in bloom, only a couple of inches high, and I thought, ah, you weren’t there the day before. How delicious. Scillas bring back the memory of a graveyard up in Comox where I first saw them blooming, a foam of blue that had taken over completely. The whole burial ground looked it-up and magical. Also known as Siberian squill, these bulbs are supposed to be shade-tolerant, which I haven’t found true in my garden. They’re miniature relatives of later-blooming bluebells. Scillas are a big family, rambunctious and cheerful. Invite them in for a drink anytime.

Every spring I check on my lovely small daffodils, the eight inches-to-a-foot-high crowd, and decide my world needs more of them. They’re such delightful pops of colour, blooming even before the crocus in my garden. Why do they thrive and multiply when entire bags of King Alfred daffodils, the bigger old-fashioned ones, flower once and disappear? A mystery.

 The tall Allium aflatunense, happy-making three-inch spheres of purple flowers, which bulb catalogues say need full sun, have decided that crouching underneath low-growing dogwoods is good fun. They’re running riot in there, to the point where I’m giving gleanings of them to friends. They make me smile. So often growing things are persnickety about where they’re put and they don’t like my best efforts or respond indifferently. Go, alliums! Thrive, multiply even where you’re not supposed to like the conditions. That’s the kind of response I’m after.

 One of the interesting things working in a particular garden over a period of years is that past, present and future sharpen to a point so that the gardener holds all of these tenderly, simultaneously, when looking any inhabitant. The river-of-time concept comes to a stop; the physics of everything that will ever happen happens at once is invoked. I’ve been working in, on and with this garden for fifteen years; when my husband was building the house, I was planting. My friend Robin, a landscape architect, did the design, coming to have a walk-around before we’d cleared anything. Where was the driveway going? What native trees could we leave and plant around?

So I see what was there in the past, I see the plant as it is now, and superimposed over all of these, I see what it might look like in ten years. Those Himalayan birches along the driveway, for instance; when I first planted them as scrawny little bare-root whips, I could envision seeing them as mature trees from the house, where, at that point, they were invisible. To me, their rustle and rain of gold leaves were perfectly real, for in my vision it was autumn.

This spring for the first time, one of the birches put out catkins, which delighted me. The pair of mallards who were busy in the tiny pond closest to the house have moved to the bigger pond close to the road, as the other pond is drying out. In summer it will just be boggy ground. The small pond didn’t exist until all the trees on the lot across the road were cut down. The change in drainage was dramatic. We had to hire an excavator to put in a massive run-off pipe so we wouldn’t get flooded.

I’m astonished the mallards can get by with such miniscule ponds, but they’ve been coming here for years. The same pair? I’m not enough of a birder to tell. The tree frogs, aka Pacific chorus frogs, love having two ponds. There are definitely more frogs than there were five years ago. They’re slowing on the intensive croaking at night; mating must be coming to an end. These little characters, no longer than a thumb, are absolute charmers.

The hellebores have been blooming for several months now. I am very fond of these plants. They have such a long bloom time and in the dark months, hellebores flowering remind me that the light is coming.

Something else coming that for me feels really wonderful is a first draft of Jorrie 3 on which I’m making good progress. For those of you who follow my writing, you might well say, Where’s Jorrie 2? Good question. It’s finished. I’m leaving it until I get Jorrie 3 done, so I can tweak as necessary to put in clues and setups in book 2 that will pay off in book 3. For those late to the party, the series starts with Jorrie and the Skyhorse. Writing a series involves a lot of detail. I love it. There’s nowhere I’d rather be than in my fictional universe, the Pender Island turned magical that I call Satter Island.

Well, unless it’s later on in the day, I’ve done some writing and I move out to my garden.

Thank you for all the wonderful feedback I’ve been getting about these emails that become postings on my Substack site. “I feel like I’m getting a hug from you across the country,” one person told me. “You’re an inspiration to me,” someone else said. Another person regularly posts a link to the latest magicmonday.substack.com on her Facebook page. I can’t tell you how meaningful your actions and comments are. They make my day, they make my week. They inspire me. Bless you!

PS, as an experiment last week, with no email, I popped up a piece called Daughter that you may enjoy. I’m seeing that not many of you have discovered it yet.