It has been raining for what feels like two straight weeks, which is exactly the kind of inconvenience that makes a garden happen. All the ice has gone. The ground is soft enough to squelch under your boots. My husband is bilge pumping the cellar because it tends to flood around this time of year with all the water seeping up from the ground. Meanwhile, things are pushing up through the mud with the kind of quiet urgency that says “we’ve been waiting half the year for this and we are not going to ask permission”. Week four, and this one is all outdoors.

One — The Rhubarb Awakens

The Victoria rhubarb is pushing color. It’s always one of the first things to wake up, and these little pink-and-white shoots are my earliest sign each year that the garden is back in business. Right now they’re still small and tight, but my favorite stage is coming — that moment just before the leaves unfurl, when the buds look like something a dinosaur might have laid. Give it a week.

Because rhubarb wasn’t really something that grew well in SoCal, I only ever knew from TV and movies that it was used to make pies. So imagine my surprise when one of my kid’s friends asked, in the middle of a birthday party with plenty of cake and candy and soda around, if he could have a stalk. I gamely pulled one out, cut off the toxic leaf portion, and handed it to him, figuring he’d whack another kid with it or something. Instead, he just started munching away on it like a jaunty Regency farm hand. This child was voluntarily eating plant matter instead of processed sugar. Mind blown. Since then, I’ve also learned to eat it raw, with a small bowl of sugar on the side to occasionally dip into. Victoria is actually the perfect cultivar for this, with its balanced flavor profile.

This particular patch is a genuine heirloom from the 1950s, and it still produces thick, reliable stalks every year. It is the perfect poster child for benign neglect. I divide it when I remember (which is to say, I’ve done it once, maybe twice, in the 14 years we’ve lived here), and those offshoots have gone to live with my in-laws and various friends.

Two — The Yew That Ate the Path

This is a Taxus × media ‘Hicksii’ — a Hicks yew, or kartiomarjakuusi in Finnish. It was planted by the previous owners and has gone completely feral. It’s supposed to be a tidy columnar thing. This is what happens when you don’t prune a columnar thing. It has sprawled sideways and is now attempting to annex the path to the front door.

My husband was initially nervous about touching it because wild yew (Taxus baccata, or euroopanmarjakuusi) is actually a protected species in Finland — you can’t just go hacking at one in the forest. But this is an ornamental hybrid in our front garden, so it’s fair game. Being that it’s a yew, I also know I can be fairly aggressive with the trim. Yews regenerate well from old wood, unlike true cypresses, which will never forgive you. This one’s getting a haircut as soon as I trust myself with the loppers.

Three — I’ve Just Met a Girl Named Maria

Not really, but I’ve been on a showtunes kick recently. The blue-eyed Mary (Omphalodes verna) patch in front of the house is sending up its first tiny leaves, and I know from experience what’s coming. Right now, it looks like a handful of brave green scraps among last year’s dead leaves. The transformation will be dramatic. Which is fortunate, because I tend to dump the soggy remnants of my simmer pots into the soil right behind them all winter, both to serve as compost and because I’m lazy, figuring these guys will cover for me when the time comes.

Give this about a month and it’ll be a lush, dense carpet of heart-shaped leaves and little blue flowers — one of those ground covers that makes you look like you planned it all along when really you just let it do its thing.

Four — ‘Reliance’ Does What’s On the Label

My ‘Reliance’ peach, planted two years ago, is getting genuinely tall now. It’s been breezing through our winters exactly as advertised — it’s a cultivar bred specifically for cold climates, and our weather hasn’t fazed it in the slightest. I can see buds forming along the branches and I’m cautiously hopeful that this might be the year we get flowers. Nursery trees are supposed to bloom in their second year, but y’know. Finland.

I must remember to feed it this spring to give it a boost. (Writing this down here so I can’t pretend later that I forgot. Public accountability: the most effective gardening tool.)

Five — The First Flowers

Snowdrops. There’s a big patch of these under the plum trees and they are, without fail, the first flowers every single year. There’s something unreasonably hopeful about them — all that darkness and cold and then these ridiculous little white bells just appear in the dead grass like they have no idea what month it is.
The spring bulb parade is officially underway. Squill should follow in about a week, then the crocuses, then the narcissus. It’s the same order every year, utterly predictable and utterly welcome.

Six — Blackcurrant Buds

The blackcurrants are budding up and looking ready to go. I did absolutely zero pruning last year, so we’ll see what that does to the harvest. Probably less fruit, more tangled branches, and some pointed looks from proper gardeners. These bushes are all in the process of being assessed at the moment, with the really ancient, scraggly specimens gradually being swapped out for younger plants that I started from their own pruned twigs a couple of years back. I don’t want to buy new varieties, though. These have been growing here for years and they’re actually sweeter than anything you can buy in stores now. When something works, you propagate it rather than replace it.

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Week four. The rain did its work and the garden is repaying us in green. Snowdrops are up, rhubarb is stirring, and if the peach cooperates, we might be making history this summer.

Thanks for visiting — see what the other SoSers are up to over at Jim’s page!