People who enjoy growing things will generally celebrate anything they invite to come out of the ground.   Right now I’ve got the first green spears of daffodils emerging from the base of an oak tree, and if I lift up the sheets of matted leaves over the perennial beds, I’ll see all kinds of plants waking up and stretching toward the warmth and sun; plants I managed to forget in just one winter were even there.

Those daffy daffodils

I generally separate gardeners into two camps: those who primarily grow flowers and the others who grow vegetables, and in this time of hunger for many things, the vegetables are winning.

There will be no New England Flower Show in Boston for the first time in 137 years.  The San Francisco and Northwest Flower Shows also closed this year, while the Southeast Flower Show in Atlanta survived but scaled way back.  Our Home and Garden Show is underway at the State Fairgrounds this weekend with as much Home as Garden.  It’s not exactly a mini version of the Philadelphia Flower Show, the oldest and best in the country and solely devoted to plants, plants, plants.

But the White House is getting it’s first vegetable garden since Eleanor Roosevelt planted one during World War II.  Today Michelle Obama joined some elementary students on the South Lawn to break ground for the plot which will help supply the White House kitchen with fresh produce.  I wonder why it took a recession and a forward-thinking first family to do this.   Gardening is backward in all great ways.

My Mom loved to garden.  Her upbringing in Germany during the Greater-Depression-Than-This-One-S0-Far, and the second World War instilled a practical muscle that she exercised all her life, long after my folks had the means to spend a little more.

When I was very young,  Mom gathered my two sisters and me in the station wagon every spring and drove to a farm implement store near Worcester to rent a tiller.   I don’t recall how we were supervised all day as she ran that thing through an enormous area of the yard, 50 by 50 feet.   Until I started my own little plot, the only clue my Mom’s feat was special was the reaction I got when I said she did a 50 by 50 foot garden. “Wow, that’s big”, I’d hear.

At the end of the day, my mother who was more frugal than she was exhausted loaded us little girls and the big machine into the car so she wouldn’t get stuck paying for another day of rental. For her to describe years later how difficult it was to load the tiller into the back of the station wagon by herself means it was impossible, but there was nothing she couldn’t do when her German determination took hold of her muscles and her wallet.

Thus began a season of toil that resulted in a crop of vegetables so large, Mom sent us with a little wagon around the neighborhood in late summer to sell the items at five and ten cents a piece.  What wasn’t sold or eaten that night went into Mom’s home canning operation, which was as over-sized as the garden.  All sizes and shapes of glass jars bearing concoctions of pickled this and preserved that, sat on blue painted wooden shelves that my Dad built in the basement.  It was like a bunker down there.  If the bomb fell, we could open jars for the rest of our lives.  We’d turn into picalilli in the process, and the autopsies would later reveal vinegar in the place of blood, but we’d survive.

Today we can eat fresh produce all year long, even if we have to spend vast amounts of fossil fuels to get it here from South America.  It’s what environmentalists call ” not sustainable”.   They’d prefer we eat what is close by and in season, which can be lengthened by placing a few items in a pot by a sunny window.

Pruners, sheers and a basket of work gloves at the back door

It’s wonderful to see a resurgence of back yard vegetable gardening.  I hope the Flower Shows return too because the fragrance and color and velvety touch of fresh flowers sustain us in a different way.

In the meantime, if you don’t want a garden of your own, take a drive to Schoolhouse Farms in Borodino.  They open Memorial Day.  The Malcolm family grows the most unique fresh items in the region, including heirloom tomatoes that will transform you.  Here’s a link to their blog:

http://schoolhousefarms.blogspot.com/

Whether it’s vegetables, or flowers or simple herbs in a pot, here’s hoping you find some reason to get as dirty in your backyard in the coming months, as I get in mine.

Anyone who wonders if there is hope for this world should look at a rose bush in Syracuse in March.  You never saw anything looking more terminally, fatally and permanently dead, a brown black green thing with gnarly gray thorns hooking downward that taunt  “go ahead and touch me, you deserve what you get”.

My friends Pat and Whitney Mills came to my house for lunch today.  Their drive from Skaneateles took them past the Rose Garden at Thornden Park and it was all Whitney could do not to cancel the lunch and just spend the cold afternoon there.  In fact, had Pat not grasped the wheel, I think Whitney would still be there in the dark.

To Pat and Whitney, those treacherous sticks hold the wonder of a new season of bloom and all it’s possibilities.  They know with just a few more sunny days, they’ll see what no one driving by can see; red-tipped green buds no bigger than the very tip of a pencil protruding everywhere from the stems.  The buds will become tender branches, the branches will hold clusters of color, all in just three month’s time.  Today they look as much like roses as I look like Barack Obama,  but the Mills can see where it’s all going.

Roses find it tough going in our climate.  I experimented with the hobby years ago when my yard had lots of sun.   But now I live in the shade of oak trees so I make use of the acidic leaves and grow rhododendrens, which themselves are challenging enough. The enemies of roses, like powdery mildew and Japanese beetles and aphids, are much happier in this environment than the flowers, so anyone who can produce a crop of roses in Skaneateles like Whitney, is as impressive to me as someone who can do math, which is big.

Throughout the summer Whitney places collections of his roses in bud vases on the kitchen table and countertops.  It’s still life worthy of an oil painting.  But rather than paint them, Whitney enters them in contests at the New York State Fair and is bashful about revealing he’s won more than one-hundred ribbons of various colors and roughly sixteen Queen of Court awards, the pinnacle of rose competition.

In all our conversations about roses there was only one piece of information I shared with Whitney that he didn’t already know.   Years ago we were talking about the most fragrant roses and in listing several names, I mentioned the Chrysler Imperial, a burgundy red rose with an abundant, classic rose fragrance.  People who like the scent of a Chrysler Imperial probably enjoy a glass of pinot noir, equally rich and red.

Perhaps it was one too many pinot noirs, but Whitney informed me a Chrysler Imperial is a car and not a rose.    I knew that, but I was sure it was a rose too, or was I?  Whitney’s encyclopedic knowledge of roses made me doubt my facts which could be scribbled in sum on a piece of paper.  Torn in half.    So we spent some time that evening going back to the Chrysler Imperial as a big joke on me.  And guess what?  Soon after, we learned the joke was on Whitney.   I don’t recall if he looked it up or just stumbled upon the information, but he learned the Chrysler Imperial was a rose and now he grows it and we laugh about it every time we talk about roses, which is every time we see each other.

When you look outside and see skies the color of stainless steel, and the first blade of green grass rests stubbornly beneath the thatch,  know that the clock is ticking on the roses.   Pat and Whitney can see beauty among those thorns. There must be hope for every dark corner of the world.