There are days, and then there are beautiful days. Days that take your breath away. Gardeners understand exactly what I mean. Most days we work. In fact, we work hard. It becomes hard to see beyond the list of garden chores to do….
Turn the compost. Pull the weeds. Spread the compost. Plant the tomatoes. Pull the weeds. Trap that pesky gopher…
But yesterday was different. Even with all the garden chores, it was SUCH a beautiful day!
Spring in Texas is very unpredictable. For bulb lovers, the late freezes and early heatwaves can halt any good thing the garden is trying to create. My to-do list is long and my chores are unending. I feel I am still playing catch-up from the drought. Last year was the worst garden season I have yet to experience. Our area had numerous hard freezes, including a late freeze that halted the veggies, fruit trees and Spring bloom. As if to make matters worse, our temperatures jumped immediately into extreme heat and drought. This year, I was hopeful that the winter and spring southern bulbs would renew themselves with a bloom, but alas. I had only 10% bloom. 🙁 I can’t blame them though. It has been a rough few years.
This year, the gardens really stepped up, and gifted me with the most stunning display of Spring Wildflowers I have ever seen. The studio grounds gloriously showed off the Lord’s creative handiwork through bluebonnets, prickly poppies, stork’s bill, oriental poppies, and a lovely assortment of larkspur. I’ve never seen the colors like this before. Everywhere I look is beauty.
Breathtaking Beauty.
As I write, I’m still breathing in the beauty captured in the garden. I can see my littlest of violin students sitting on the “dream swing”, in the middle of the flower garden. I can smell the sweet aroma of the bluebonnet patches and I can hear the bees buzzing and the countless birds singing. I can still see the eyes of the young Possum, shaking nervously in the live-trap, and the tender sweet moment he was freed. Thousands of little moments captured in a single afternoon in the garden.
This, my friends, is why we do what we do. It is why we work and dig until our back hurts. It is why we continually spend money on flowers, even when we accidentally killed the last batch of plants. It is why we spend so much time, energy and effort on nursing a seedling into a mature plant. It is just what gardener’s do….all to breathe in the beauty of a beautiful day.
Happy Gardening, my friends!