About spring flowering trees, energy and canons
It has been a spectacular week in Grimsby gardens.
After a few weeks of bulbs emerging and shrubs blossoming, the trees are now in bloom. Cherries, pears, serviceberries, magnolias, the air pink and white and fragrant.
Underneath that canopy, I’ve been tending to some more garden tidying. The rose bushes, the carpet roses I’ve been pruning the last couple of weeks, are finally being finished, along with some straggling hydrangeas and the last of the leaf cleanup.
There is a little urgency in the tasks ahead, because gardens don’t wait. Once the temperatures climb and the sunlight lengthens, plants will be racing to the sky.
While I’m working through these final tasks, I hear a gentle buzzing above. Pollinators, braving the cooler weather, are moving through the blossoms. There is life in the canopy in more ways than one.
Last week, I was pruning another set of rose bushes; old ones, planted more than fifty years ago, on one of Grimsby’s older cherry orchards. As I sorted through dead, diseased and damaged thorny branches, I was surrounded by endless rows of blossoming cherries. Enchanting. It got me thinking about the work at hand. If the work I do now, I do well, then in a few months, these rose bushes will bloom just like the cherry trees blooming above me now.
The cherry trees themselves are in a critical moment. If the temperatures drop too low, pollinators won’t be as active. If there is a frost, the blossoms may not hold. But if the temperature is just right, if all the pruning, the pest management, the quiet care of the past year has been done, then this moment will achieve its purpose.
Every bloom comes from past care. And each act of care sets up the next.
Throughout the gardening week, I realized I am surrounded by this. I am always gardening for something that will happen. Much of gardening blossoms later. My actions are on a time delay. But while I am creating future blossoms, I am also surrounded by what I have set up in the past.
In another garden this week, under a soon-to-bloom flowering dogwood, I removed an overgrown juniper to expose a mature mugo pine. This is part of preparing the garden for a larger change: a sod removal and an alpine planting to come. It is another instance of preparing for future blossoms. In this case, not just a single plant, but a new direction. Without this preparatory work, none of that would be possible.
And so I find myself in this moment, surrounded by the blossoming canopy of May trees while preparing what comes next.
This is not only true for gardening. There are many activities where actions taken now only bear fruit later. Often, one works for weeks, months, or years before seeing the result. Long projects can be overwhelming. Over time, uncertainty creeps in. Where am I going? What am I doing? Why go on?
As I work toward future results, I am also standing inside past ones.
There is something steadying about that. Something that softens the weight of what is still to come.
Gardening is a long-term endeavour, often without a clear end in sight. It is easy to get lost in the work, in the decisions, in the direction. But standing under a canopy in bloom, I am reminded that the work does come through. That care accumulates. That something will answer.
It can be a leap of faith. But gardening time is cyclical. There’s always a blooming canopy.