Garden Journal

May 14

It's not as pleasant a task to deadhead tulips at forty degrees as it would be otherwise, but with limited amount of time at the lawn that is a garden, it is something that has to be done.  Getting down on hands and knees onto clumped, cold, and wet bark, digging in to shovel the unfriendly weeds or sheering old wood stalks is the kind of work, my gardener agrees, is not usually the stuff that inspires children to "get into nature." Yet, as we both agreed, to see for oneself every last inch of plantings, from tulips to roses to hyacinth and fern, is like assessing the layout of any interior room inside a house, with all of its attendant nuts, bolts, screws, lighting fixtures, missing tongues and grooves, etc., etc., but that the difference is that the tulip and rose are living and ever-changing.  To secure their

future is something like taking care of hardy yet cute children, the very thought process, I suspect, that ties all those who participate in the cultivation of nature shares.  And so I was told to deadhead my bloomed tulips out front; clip them all down close to the origin of the stem, which allows for the teamwork of energy between sun, soil and seed to dedicate its time to germination under the surface, not at the head where the stem had just dropped.  So far, in this small little yard garden of ours, I have combed, yanked, raked and torn out some twelve bags of fallen or dead debris.  It keeps coming, and that is its beauty.