Human Flower Project

Friday, March 12, 2010

There’s More to Life than Squirrels

Crocus and sweet box are blooming in Louisville. Allen Bush isn’t declaring victory but he’s out-of-doors, working with winter on its concession speech.

Sasa veitchii, in the author’s alley garden, March 2010
Photo: Allen Bush

By Allen Bush

Cold and gray is the lonesome price of a Kentucky winter.  I pay little mind to the garden for three long months except to tap the kitchen window to shoo the squirrels away from the bird feeder.  A sweet-scented, yellow-flowering Witch Hazel, Hamamelis mollis ‘Wisley Supreme’ ignores the winter forecast and blooms triumphantly for weeks in February and early March.  I can also see bits of green that freckle the brown hued landscape of Hydrangeas seed heads and Panicum leaves. 

My wife Rose contends I have it in for evergreens, but I don’t completely disown them. I can point to two pencil-thin boxwoods, Buxus ‘Graham Blandy,’ standing at attention in the back garden, and a young Yucca rostrata nearby, with leaves—like rigid-swords—that form a lovely hemisphere.  Sasa veitchii, a medium-sized bamboo down by the back alley, has 10” lance-shaped leaves whose edges turn the palest brown after a hard autumn freeze. But none of these are the green, sculpted conifers that Rose wants so badly. The Taxus topiary hedge-in-progress, pruned to look like a big sofa, at the end of the scree garden, is my concession to green blobs.

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