Lauren Denton
As I write this, it’s early spring and the weather couldn’t be more exquisite. We’ve had a string of glorious days with warm sunshine, a cool breeze and temps in the mid-70s. Yet, as we’ve enjoyed this perfect spring weather, I’ve been steadily ridding my front and back yards of brittle, freeze-dried shrubs and vines. It’s a strange juxtaposition — winter-dead landscaping and sunshiny skies. Bright green grass popping up in the yard, with a big pile of brown sticks and twigs at the curb waiting for trash day.
Everyone remembers those crazy plummeting temperatures we had in late December. The week before Christmas, it was fairly typical winter weather: highs in the low 50s, lows in the 40s. Then it dropped and we went into the deep-freeze. Months later, having done a little research (thanks Grumpy Gardener), I now know the plants suffered so much not just because of the freezing temps, but because the freeze hit so quickly after relatively mild weather. The plants didn’t have time to pull the water from their leaves, so ice formed and killed a lot of it. But back then, I didn’t know how our plants would respond to the freeze — I just knew the leaves of all our confederate jasmine went dark and the shrubs in front of our house looked like they were curling in on themselves.
Now, I’m not a big-time gardener. I’m not even a little-time gardener. I did not inherit my mom’s green thumb as I wish I had, but I do enjoy walking around outside, especially in the spring, and seeing what’s blooming, blossoming and greening up. In addition, we planted every single plant, tree and shrub that’s growing around our house — everything but the grass — five years ago, so it was especially concerning to see it all turning black and brittle.
Once winter was over, I began walking from plant to plant, shrub to shrub, and scraped my fingernail on every stem to see what was dead and what still had a whisper of life in it. I found few signs of life in the pittosporum in our front yard, and all our cast iron plants were crispy. The limelight hydrangeas were mostly fine, but our pretty mopheads on the side of the house were cracked and brown. Those actually survived the first freeze and had begun producing new buds and baby leaves, but the second freeze we had late in the winter shriveled those. The saddest part for me was finally accepting that every bit of confederate jasmine we had in various spots around the house was fully dead.
Over the course of one week in the spring, when there was no chance of another surprise freeze, I began pruning. I cut the tall brown stalks of my mophead hydrangeas down nearly to the base, cut and pulled out all our confederate jasmine, and pruned the pittosporum back, leaving only the stems and branches that had new leaves. The distylium right outside our front door was still a mystery, as were the brown gardenia bushes in the backyard, so I left those alone. The flowerbeds were skimpy and struggling, and I figured we were looking at a season of waiting to see if anything would pull through, so on a whim, I did something I’d wanted to do for a while: I bought a birdfeeder. Two actually, and hung them right outside our kitchen window, directly above the sad little hydrangeas. It was amazing what entertainment and joy those two birdfeeders brought us as we waited and hoped our plants would come back to life. It seemed to only take a few minutes for birds of all kinds and sizes to find the feeders and begin feasting, just a couple of feet from our kitchen counter. We even saw a few bird skirmishes and possibly an avian bully or two, shoving smaller birds out of the way. But for the most part, they ate peacefully and happily, as long as we didn’t make any sudden movements in the window, and chipmunks on the ground below filled their cheeks with bits of seeds that fell from the feeders.
And while we were watching the birds, our flowerbeds came back to life in small increments. Those mopheads began growing bright green leaves from the base, the brown creeping fig turned green, and I found new shoots coming up from the bottom of many of our crispy cast iron plants. I found those on a whim, looking for a tennis ball for my dog. I’d been days away from calling the landscaper and asking about replacing those plants, but after seeing the shoots, I decided to give them time to grow strong again. Watching our yard struggle, then (mostly) come back to life, was just one more reminder that sometimes all it takes is courage to wait through the hard parts until new life begins to peek in around the edges.
When I’m not writing about my family and our various shenanigans, I write novels and go to the grocery store. You can find my books in stores, online, and locally at Little Professor Bookshop. You can reach me by email at Lauren@LaurenKDenton.com, visit my website LaurenKDenton.com, or find me on Instagram @LaurenKDentonBooks or Facebook ~LaurenKDentonAuthor.
