Goodbye Winter….Almost

Every year at the end of the growing season, Weston Nurseries has a plant giveaway for employees, yet another reason why I love my job. Because it’s usually too late to safely put them into the ground in December, these babies in need of a good home get tucked into my cellar for the winter, pots and all. I say goodnight, turn out the light, and walk away until early April.

I know I’ve spoken about my old house, but I don’t think I’ve mentioned that part of the cellar floor is dirt. Rain water comes in through the rubble stone foundation, trickles across to a dry well, and then away to parts unknown. It’s worked perfectly for almost three hundred years, and it gives just enough to my sleeping shrubs.

Well – last March was a bit strange, weather-wise. If you remember, toward the middle of the month we had torrential rains followed by very warm weather. So, one Sunday afternoon in March when my grandchildren were visiting, I heard my husband calling from the cellar. Come down, he said, and bring Charlie with you.

So down we went, and there were my “hibernating” orphans happily beginning to leaf out. But the best part were the two Cornell Pink azaleas in glorious full bloom, glowing from the back of my dark cellar. Look what your grandma did, said my husband to Charlie with a smile. And four year old Charlie gave me a look of wonder usually reserved for Glinda the Good. The real one, not the one in “Wicked”. Grandma was indeed magical.

The funny thing is, the early awakening of my plants came about a week before another awakening  of sorts – the Flower Show. For the last two years I’ve been a volunteer at the Flower Show for the New England Wild Flower Society, Garden in the Woods, my favorite non-profit organization. Check them out – they deserve every extra penny you might happen to have lying around.

I few years ago, however , I worked with a number of amazing Master Gardeners  for another non-profit organization  forcing plants and putting together an exhibit for the Flower Show created by a very talented designer. He’s known for some amazing designs, but this was one of the best I’d seen:

We’d brought in boxes and boxes of chopped styrofoam “snow”, and now it was piled up in front of an enormous yellow tractor sitting in the center of the large exhibit, its plow blade to the ground. Behind this mega-vehicle was a swath of spring flowers and shrubs and rhododendron in full bloom, the snows of winter having been pushed away by our magical tractor. In a nearby hollow log slept a bear,thanks to a Master Gardener with an old rug , oblivious to the change in the weather. Children climbed the steps of the tractor to perch on the driver’s seat or checked out the fairy house in one of the trees. Parents smiled and smelled the blossoms.

The exhibit mirrored the Flower Show, itself: walk through the doors and see, just for an hour or two, the glory of Spring in the midst of a New England winter. Close your eyes and smell warmth and growth and know that in a few short weeks this magical chimera will be a reality, that you’ll step out onto your own back porch and rejoice in the end of winter, at least until next year.

I don’t have to pay for admission to the Flower Show this March. I’m a volunteer. If you need a ticket , and you really do, because the new and improved Flower Show is just wonderful and a glory to behold, we just happen to have tickets for sale at Weston Nurseries.  And we just happen to be open for the year, in Hopkinton and in our gorgeous new garden center in Chelmsford, starting March first.

See you at Weston Nurseries, and see you at the Flower Show.

Oh, and by the way….that great Flower Show aroma that hits you when you walk through those doors? Bark mulch. Really. I’m not kidding.