We had so many gardening friends stop by over the past 4 days in celebration of our 2012 opening.  I will admit I was beyond delighted.  Lots of our regulars responded to our spring call.  Thanks to Susan Pollack at the Detroit News, who wrote and published about our opening on Friday, we had lots of new people.  What fun-to have the opportunity to introduce ourselves to people who have never been here.  Many thanks, Susan.  Any discussion about the garden revolves around individual people, with individual ideas about what constitutes a great garden.  This means every person, both returning and new, means much.

Recreating the shop from the previous season to the new one is an enormous job.  We empty just about all of what is still standing in 10,000 square feet of space.  We clean as if we have but 10 minutes to live.  We repaint, rebuild, fix, change, alter, move around-you get the idea.  Rob’s shopping becomes a reality-this means containers and trucks to unload.  Every single garden ornament gets cleaned, moved, integrated-reimagined.  There is not one thing that has not had hands put to it.

This is work I look forward to.  I am first and foremost a landscape designer.  By the time that late November comes, I am usually finished working outside.  This year, I ran 2 crews until December 17th-the weather was unseasonably mild.  Once we clean and oil the tools, do maintenance on the equipment and trucks, that part of my work comes to a close.  The shop space is a landscape of a different sort. Certain things about this landscape project are vastly easier.  The entire place is enclosed by 4 walls and a roof.  This means I do not have to worry about rainfall, snow, winds, or any other difficult weather.  We have heat.  This interior landscape is meant to create an experience that suggests the garden. The suggestion that this pot or that trellis might not only be possible, but good.  As much as our customers know what they like, they can be persuaded by something they see.  Not something that I think, but something they see that comes from what I think.  We fuss each space down to the last square inch, knowing it will be intact but for a moment.  The overall shop landscape has to accomodate the change that comes when things go home to another garden.  

The experience of our opening was as different for us, as it was for our clients.  Though we customarily open March first, we usually have to push the snow aside, opening the gate.  Our usual opening-very quiet, and without much fanfare.  This winter was the winter that wasn’t.  We decided to do opening day differently.  We threw a party.

  This past weekend, I was so pleased to come face to face with people who love to garden just as much as I do.  The decision to do a more formal opening was dictated by the weather.  This winter’s weather was on a lot more gardening minds than mine.  Plenty of conversation had much to do with this atypical winter.  What was my take on the winter that was never a winter?  What did I think about a winter with no snow?  Are there plants that have broken dormancy, that will see damage if we have a substantial cold spell in March?  Have you ever experienced a winter like this? (no, by the way)  How do you see the spring shaping up?  Will we even have a spring?  Could we have snow in June?

I have lots of friends in the nursery and landscape industry.  They have the same questions.  How shall they schedule their crops?  Will this 40 degree weather persist into late May, or will we have reliable 80 degree days in mid-May?  No one knows the answers.  I would be lying if I said I would not appreciate some answers.  But nature calls the shots, and I have no address or phone number that would permit me to contact that natural phenomenon in charge. 

This means I have no answers. This was my first winter ever like this.  But it did seem to me that some part of our spring may be early.  And that anyone who loves to get outside and garden has had spring in their nose and on their mind for weeks.  Nature, as Rob has so aptly observed, announces spring at least 5 times before she really means it.  What does that mean for us?  We committed.  We had a party to celebrate spring.  March 1.  Judging from the numbers of people who came to say hello and shop, we were not alone in looking for a firm start date.

Rob’s partner Meg observed it appeared we were gunning it.  Gunning it out of the gate, in spite of every uncertainty.  This made me feel incredibly good; many thanks Meg.  I might have reservations and worries, but I am confident that what we have to offer falls under the one of a kind experience. Many thanks to each and every one of you who came and shopped.  No landscape design and installation means more than the relationship between client and designer who forged it.  No spring at the shop means more than the relationships, both old and new, that we have with the people who frequent our place.  We threw a spring party to which lots of you came.  To my mind,  this means spring has arrived.        

Late last week it was my unfortunate experience to have my email account hacked.  My shock and displeasure with the situation mattered not one bit.  That everyone whose email address was stored in my contacts was contacted with an annoyingly irritating email asking for help was embarassing in the extreme.  That all of my email contacts, and all of my email folders dating back close to ten years were wiped out-shocking. 

 Of course this had to happen on a Friday.  Events take time to unfold.  By the time that I knew I needed help, the weekend was looming.  I had the weekend with no available help to feel resentful and worried.  I really dislike anything that makes me feel like this.  I have a passion for making things grow.  I have a big love for living things-this means people, plants, animals, lichens-I am not so fond of slime molds, but I respect that they live. I have no patience for worrying trouble like a tongue on a sore tooth.  I like to wade right in, and put things to right.   But there was nothing I could do until my IT person returned from his vacation.  A computer, and all that goes with it- that machine comprised of characters, numbers and marks on a page that somehow get translated by a person into a photograph, a story, a video, or a letter can enable all kinds of things I would never have thought possible.  Please keep in mind that I was anxious the entire 2 hours it took to install my first fax machine.  I am a little more savvy now. It is one of the most amazing tools I have ever had at my disposal.  People 1/3 my age expect everything that comes from their computer-I am still simply amazed by it. A computer can be the next best thing to a trip to the Chelsea Garden Show.  Want to see pictures, or videos?  There are more to choose from than I could ever look at. I see things, I learn, I communicate after a fashion.  A computer is much like a third hand.

There are those things not to like.  If you have tried to solve a problem with your phone via the account you set up at the My Verizon website, be prepared to dig in and stay put.  Service websites may list 1000 possible issues you want to discuss, but are any of them your issue?  They don’t seem to be mine.  Have you ever hung up, not knowing what option to choose?  Me too!  It can take 20 minutes to find a phone number, and even longer to actually get to talk to a person.  I am amazed that a tech support person from Verizon was on the line with me for over 1/2 hour, until everything got sorted out.  Gracious and patient, she was. A person to talk to-the best.  At my shop I am adamant about this one thing.  Answer the phone.  Just answer.   

It took my IT person almost 7 hours to sort out, solve, and return my computer to a working state.  He had little interest in discussing why someone would hack my email.  I understand-after all, what would be the point of that exercise?  The idea is to get going again.  When something dies in my garden, there is the frustration, and inevitably the idea to understand what happened.  It is not always possible to know what happened.  Plants thrive, and they die.  Don’t mourn too long.  Mourn properly, and then stop crying in public.  Cry in private for as long as you want.  Getting going again after something fails is an awkward way of expressing the idea of experience.  I can wring my hands over what didn’t work, or I can plant again.  It is my choice to keep on gardening.  No one, and nothing can keep me from it-no one but me, that is.  

Loosing all of those files took my breath away.  5 days later, that loss seems like an opportunity to start fresh.  I didn’t loose one thing that enables me to live.  I lost 10 years of computer recorded history. But I didn’t loose any memories, or experience.  I have been thinking a lot about this.  Being older, I am not so crazy about change, or unexpected developments.  But unexpected developments can clear musty air.  Get the old blood moving.  From this day forward-doesn’t this sound good?       

I would never had imagined that I would be longing for snow, much less writing about it-but here I am.  Frankly, I feel cheated that the season which I dread the most vaporized.  Picture me sputtering!  The bitter cold and snow is inconvenient and irritating, but it can be beautiful.  I have not one picture of a snowy landscape this winter-much less a picture I liked well enough to save.  As it turns out, Better Homes and Gardens is coming back to photograph winter containers of mine-not today, but the very next time it snows.  They want snow.   We have a dusting of snow now, but that should be gone in just a few days.  No snow is forecast in my immediate future.  Might they not be able to come at all?  The past 6 weeks of near 40 degree temperatures has been unnerving.  It is not at all what I am accustomed to.  What I am accustomed to in my conscious gardening life-this would be 26 years worth of weather at best.  Understand that I have not lived nearly long enough to experience all of the possible variations in weather for my zone.  Perhaps we had a winter like this when I was 19-had I any investment or interest in the weather then?  No.  Or maybe the winter was warm when I was 7.  Just because I have no memory of it, it does not mean it didn’t happen.  Weather cycles outlast most lifetimes.  Weather cycles can unexpectedly vary strikingly more than the norm.    This is ordinary, not particularly newsworthy. 

Not so many years ago- maybe 8- we had a dramatic and long lived late cold snap which killed the emerging leaves on lots of trees.  Old established trees were affected.  A client for whom I had planted 21 alders the previous year was very unhappy that his trees were not leafing out.  Attributing the death of the newly emerging shoots on his trees on the weather read for all the world like I was handing off trouble to a source that did not take complaints.  My client was right-nature does not have a complaint box.  There is no number to call, no customer service department in the sky.  Some trees recovered-it took 2 years.  Others, we replaced.  Eventually, we sorted everything out.  At the neighborhood gas station, I still see the effect of that late spring hard freeze some 8 years later.  No one took an active role in dealing with the damage.  Dead branches are still overhead, and lots of branches shooting at the bottom of the main trunk is how those trees represent today.  Needless to say, those trees look besieged-not beautiful.  They have terrible scars no amount of time will erase.  My quick aside?  If you don’t mind a few scars, your gardening life will be richly experienced.  Should you terribly mind the trouble, your experience will be bumpy, disconcerting-anxious.  How silly would this be? Gardening should be fun, challenging, relaxing, and enriching.  Nature is not always so friendly or accomodating, but nature is invariably interesting, compelling, and satisfying..  Sign up.  Get on the bus.  In my opinion, your life will take a turn for the better-even if your magnolia blooms freeze before they open.

I was on the phone with my very good friend Michael today, listening as he chose his words carefully.  Will it feel like spring, if we have had no winter?, he asks.    He was tentative-quite unlike him.  I did want to laugh-no one hates the close of the gardening season more than he does.  No one could possibly lament the endless cold, grey and snow more eloquently, and more emphatically than he does.  But like me, he was fretting that an utterly bland winter would somehow compromise his joy when spring finally announced itself.  Or that what he expects to see in the spring might not happen.  Could we have 40 degree weather every day until the 4th of July??  OK, I am exxagerating, so let’s address the issue directly.  Should nature dish out a warm winter, does this mean there will be no spring game?  If there isn’t, will we unhappy enough to quit gardening? I think not.

  Whatever nature dishes out in the form of a winter, every true gardener has the ability to shift and adapt.  Michael, I have no idea what this winter will mean for the plants in our zone this spring.  This I am sure of.  What we both worry about does not necessarily affect the trees.  How most gardeners worry about may not affect much of anything. Nature deals the cards, and determines the outcomes.  This said,  I can safely say that really great gardening is about serious relationships between people, who are not afraid to come face to face with nature. The face to face with nature- Ordinary, for gardeners like you.  Just like this winter that is not really a winter.  It is more ordinary than we think.  I also think we both will welcome and enjoy whatever spring comes our way- whether we have 20 degrees and snow, or 40 degrees and no snow the month before.