WE ARE ON THE CUSP OF SPRING IN NEW ENGLAND

Here in the Boston Area, we have enjoyed a marvelous winter.  We had very little snow, none of it heavy to shovel.  The sun was strong, snow didn't last long.  The Holly bushes are just now beginning to lose their winter, red berries.  Some people have crocuses in blossom. Indoor tulips are glorious and soon tulips will blossom out of doors, as well.

I quake at the thought that, while everything is budding up for a beautiful spring, some sneaky God will slip us a curve and gift us with some late season ice and storm,

However, I have treated myself with some indoor color again this winter.  I love my violets (which might force me to move to find space to live in as they have gradually taken up the space that used to be mine.) I will leave you, good reader, to visualize that there are six more window sills devoted to African violets.
Other sills have wintered colorful geraniums which have bloomed indoors all winter.year after year and in the yard summers.

No house should be without a left-over Poinsettia that will gradually lose its redness and get spindly, at which point one will be forced to memorialize it and wait until next December to replace it with a live one.

 My plants do not scratch at the door to be walked.  They do not wake me up, bark, or fill the house with shedding hair.  If they are incontinent from my over watering of them, (Bounty lives up to the 'quick picker upper title).  If leaves or blossoms dry up and drop, they are easily swept or vacuumed up.  When major disasters like knocked over pots occur, fresh dirt easily replaces that which was lost.  No bad odors at any time.  The worst disaster I ever had to live through was when a chipmunk decided (since I was only feeding it Decon, thinking it was a different type of rodent) my studio was a great place to live in because there were forty feet of window sills with plants on them.  (Chipmunks eat roots and in order to reach them, they dig out the messy dirt that covers the roots.)  At least I didn't have to take the plants to the Vet.  I just had to repot and sweep up quarts of potting soil.

Be of good cheer; spring is almost here!

WINTERING IN NEW ENGLAND AND QWIKI

Many years ago I visited an acquaintance in Vermont, North,almost  to the Canadian border.  I was surprised to see that her kitchen sink and appliances were a bright red.  I said I had never seen red stoves and refrigerators before and she laughed and told me that I had not been in upper Vermont in the winter, either.  We shared  love for color in the winter to counter the white of the snow.  I get my color from flowering houseplants and prisms hanging in most of the windows that catch sunshine and cast rainbows around the room.

I've admired many friends who have green houses, solariums, conservatories or other great spaces for growing plants.  My house is more limited so I cut down every tree on my lot and made the widest windows sills I could have made.  Every sill in my twelve room house has plants and I thrill when they blossom and add color when the only view from the window is dirty snow piled high and gray tree trunks surrounding me in my neighbors' yards.

Though I have been growing plants for 60 years, it always surprises me when I find a new variety or genus.  Someone gave me a furry-leaved plant that grew and grew and finally blossomed with gorgeous purple blossoms.  My friend could not tell me what it was.  It looked like a primrose and that is what I believed it to be though I couldn't find an exact match in the 500 or 600 pictured I looked through.  After several years, with this plant rewarding my with blossoms much of the year, I went on the new resource qwiki.com.   First I looked up African Violets then noticed Streptocarpus on the same page.  At last, a great resource and a problem solved, all in one click.

For those not familiar with the new site you are in for a treat.  I am advised that it is a totally automatic, computer-generated site and requires no humans.  Everything happens in the computer.There are already millions of entries and the site expects to add many, many more.  It not only looks up what you ask for but reads it to you in a very pleasing voice.  You, too, may find winter in New England more pleasant when you don't have to travel any further than your computer!

SPRING HAS FINALLY SPRUNG

For all of us who have been waiting for the world around us to turn green, Cheers! It is happening right before our very eyes. Having little to sustain me but a light box, and occasional red cardinal against the white snow and house plants through the long winter, it is always an exciting time as the days grow longer and the sun grows stronger.




Some parts of New England are seeing blossoms. How wonderful not to look onto blackened snow from vehicle exhausts. The sun has to break through leaves instead of bare branches. Now the crocuses are past. The lovely rare botanical blue shows up in some tiny wood hyacinths.







Tulips are beginning to come out. It was a lovely surprise to see some red ones on the side of the house. Chipmunks usually eat all bulbs that aren't yellow, so usually only my yellow tulips and jonquils survive from year to year.




Remiss for the past couple of years in my pruning tasks, a Rhodora has grown way up past the windows...not something I can tolerate. I had pruned this bush down to 24 inches
seven years ago.
Now I will wait for it to stop blossoming and give it a proper haircut again!


The blossoms are far too beautiful for me to disrupt anything until they have finished their showing for the year.













Another sign that spring is really here also will require a thorough pruning, long overdue. However, it, too, must wait until all the blossoms are gone. This andromeda japonica is a version of a japonica with a larger blossom which is often called the Lily-of-the-Valley bush.

These are but a few of the signs of spring in the yard. They are enough to lift my spirits though not quite enough to move my body too far! Before one can realize what has happened, we will be looking at the fall foliage, I fear.