It’s that time of year again. Birds start chirping, the sun feels brighter, and bulbs begin to poke through the leafy layer left by fall.

This is about timing.

Every spring, this presents a dilemma. When bulbs emerge through the leaf layer, I know that if I wait too long, they will grow through the foliage. At that point, removing the leaves becomes much more difficult. I can no longer use a rake and instead have to carefully untangle them by hand. My first instinct is to clear the leaves early.

However, it is still early in the season. Temperatures hover around zero. While the bulbs are beginning to wake, many insects remain dormant under that same leaf layer. The leaves act as an insulator, keeping the ground at a more stable temperature. Removing them too soon can expose overwintering insects to cold, or remove them entirely.

So the decision becomes case-specific. In areas where bulbs are dense, or where a heavy layer of leaves is preventing emergence, I remove the foliage. This is often visible: bulbs appear pale, yellow, compressed. They cannot emerge without help. In other areas, I leave the leaves in place, or move them aside but keep them on the property. The work becomes sectional, not uniform.

There is also a design implication here. By placing bulbs in certain areas, you are determining when and how easily those areas can be cleaned in spring. Design is not separate from maintenance. It sets the timing of future work.

Sometimes, during spring cleanup, you come across things that have eluded you.

This week, I found an established chokecherry shrub with numerous black, tar-like growths along its branches. There were many, far more than I had ever noticed before. In summer and fall, the foliage obscures the structure of the plant, so it may have been present without being visible.

I confirmed it was black knot, a fungal disease affecting Prunus species.

At this time of year, with temperatures rising and moisture present, the fungus begins to spread. Rain was coming. That made the timing clear.

I pruned immediately. I removed the affected branches well below each infection point, working carefully to avoid unnecessary disturbance. I kept the material contained and avoided contaminating tools or surfaces. Afterwards, I disinfected both loppers and hand pruners.

Other tasks were delayed. This one could not wait.

Spring is also the time when initial pruning begins on shrubs.

There are broadly two types: those that bloom on old wood, and those that bloom on new growth. Knowing which is which matters. Pruning a shrub that blooms on old wood in spring may not harm the plant, but it can remove that season’s flowers.
This week, I was tidying bigleaf hydrangeas, Hydrangea macrophylla, which bloom on old wood.

I pruned the dead blooms, then looked closely at the stems. Where there were active leaf buds forming, I left them. Where stems were clearly dead or shriveled, with no signs of life, I removed them. Once the shrub leafs out, it becomes much more difficult to access and remove interior dead wood.

I also left some foliage at the base. A late frost is still possible, and this variety can be more sensitive. That layer offers some protection.

Springtime tasks accumulate as the weather warms, and some dilemmas occur.

One that came up this week is with the early-blooming hellebore.

It is common to remove last year’s foliage around the crown of blooms. With bulbs emerging elsewhere in the garden, there is also a clear necessity to remove the surrounding leaf layer left from fall. These tasks begin to compete. There is only so much time in a garden.

With hellebores, foliar removal serves a few purposes. One is aesthetic: removing winter-damaged leaves to highlight the blooms. Another is preventative. This is the time of year when fungal issues such as leaf spot can develop, particularly in damp conditions between about 5 and 15 degrees Celsius.

In Grimsby, conditions this week have hovered closer to zero to five degrees, with occasional shifts above and below. This places us just ahead of that fungal window.

So the timing becomes clear.

By prioritizing general leaf removal, I free emerging bulbs and at the same time reduce moisture sitting around the hellebore foliage. Air moves more easily. The conditions for early leaf spot are less likely to form.

The hellebore leaves can wait. Once temperatures move into that fungal range, they can be removed then.

Timing is not abstract. It has real effects on the garden.

Knowing what causes what takes time. But once seen, small actions begin to carry more weight. You do less, and it does more.

Act where it matters. Leave what can wait.

Plants

Before plants arrive, a garden is a meeting of land and a gardener, held as a kind of dream. Where they meet, the dream is planted, and plants happen. They are the response to the conditions. They are the effect.

Plants express the garden continuously. As conditions change, they change. Water ebbs and flows, temperatures rise and fall, a gardener comes and goes. Plants respond. They are not static. They adapt. They are effects living in time.

When we talk about plants, it is easy to lump them into one group. But there is little use in talking about plants in general. They may be similar, but they are not the same. Each plant carries its own adaptations, and will respond to its situation differently.

The response of plants may not be verbal, but it is visible. Form, growth, timing, change, these responses are physical. The same plant will express itself differently in different conditions. Sometimes a difference of a few feet is the difference between growth and death. The signal is physical change.

To read plants, two things matter: attention and time. Attention asks, how is the plant, right now? Time elaborates. Repeated attention reveals change. Without time, attention gives the gardener only a snapshot, an image without context. There is no reference for what the plant usually does. But time, without a gardener’s attention, leaves the plant to its own devices. It may grow. It may also overgrow. Plants do things when they are unattended.

An attentive gardener who visits a garden’s plants over time is well set to shape their lives. But that influence is never total. A gardener can guide, but there is no complete command of plants. Plants, as expressions of changing conditions, will always change themselves. Years bring different patterns of rain and temperature, and plants will express those. Your judgment of a plant’s situation will always be necessary, and always incomplete. And that is okay.

Spending time with plants reveals how plants live in time. This life is slow and cyclical. Trees outgrow humans, and sometimes our dwellings. Plants do not hurry, but they do not delay.

Techniques

When you stand in a space you would like to call a garden, tools at hand, you are at the threshold of action. You are where a garden becomes gardening.

Gardening develops where land, body, and tools meet. Techniques do not add a layer to the garden. They are where prior forces finally act together. Techniques are responses to existing conditions.

Whether you call them techniques, responses, or gardening, these actions originate in the conditions. They arise from awareness. Awareness of land, body, and tools is where action begins. Without attention, techniques degrade. What was once a sensitive response becomes a rote action, which loses sensitivity, then accuracy. In a garden, this shows. It shows through repetition.

Gardens are filled with repetition. Similar plants ask for similar actions. Seasonal patterns ask for patterned action. For a gardener, it is in this repetition of responses that familiarity is found. By repeating actions, we get to know them, where force flows and where friction arises. Techniques are not learned once and then refined. They are distilled from repeated action.

Repetition is not foolproof. Just as repeated action distills embodied knowledge, it can also reinforce friction. The difference is attention. Distilling techniques depends on awareness of feedback. Did a desired effect appear? Did it fail? What repeats is diagnostic.

This is where technique reaches its limit. It does not complete the garden.

Techniques are embodied knowledge. They do not hold that knowledge. A technique cannot tell you when to use it. 

That is up to you, the gardener.

Tools

So here you stand, in a space you would like to call a garden. Land is beneath your feet. You are settled in your body, accepting consequence. With land and body in place, you reach for a way of making a garden: tools.

Tools won’t make a garden, but a gardener without them will have a hard time. There is no pizza without a paddle. Tools extend our abilities, our reach, the force we can exert, our stamina. But tools do not choose their own timing, direction, or intent. The gardener does.

Even a great tool in hazy hands won’t do much good. It may even do harm. Tools enhance our bodily habits, aligned or not. The fit and comfort of a tool is not an optional preference. It is a limitation that guides our choice. When a tool does not fit your body, your body will compensate for its inadequacy. Uneven tension and fatigue arise, changing how we shape the garden by making room for error. You are the one using the tool.

Use will tell whether a tool is a good fit for you. Over time, its qualities become obvious: durability, versatility, portability, and, most importantly, your bodily tolerance for it. Brands may carry reputation. Specialization may promise narrow perfection. Novelty promises unexplored horizons. But these are structurally irrelevant. The question is simpler: does the tool hold up to your use over time?

Carrying, storing, and caring for tools sets a useful limit on your collection. Tools earn their place through time. This is not about avoiding new tools. It is about separating the ones that stay from the ones that do not. Some tools are ubiquitous and earn their keep through repetition. Others are for a single task, but indispensable. What you can carry, store, and care for will bring to light what truly earns its keep.

Tools will inevitably break, dull, and put strain on our bodies. When they do, they are talking to us. What broke? What dulled? What hurts? Our tools tell us about our relationship with them. When they are misused, they fail. And when they fail, they reveal.

Gardening tools take their meaning from use. Use takes its meaning from time. Time will decide what holds.

On Becoming a Gardener

About body, time, and learning to listen

I didn’t set out to become a gardener. I was on a different path, and became one along the way. What follows is not a change of careers so much as a change in attention.

When I was younger, I wanted to write soundtracks. I set out to be a composer. I studied classical music at a university. It was there that I first encountered a problem that would later shape how I understand work of any kind. My arms were in pain. I tried to play through it, but the pain increased. I was at a loss. I could still think of music, but I couldn’t make it.

My arms hurt, but they weren’t what my therapist treated first. Most of the work was on my shoulders, neck, and especially my back. At the time, it felt like a misunderstanding. But this was the moment the pattern became visible. Pain is not stationary. Symptoms are often caused elsewhere. If the back, shoulders, and neck never release tension, the strain of hours of playing pools in the finer muscles of the forearms. Eventually, the body can’t take any more and gives way at its weakest point.

My attention shifted.

Where is the body holding strain?
What is it compensating for, and for how long?
How do its parts relate to one another over time?

What I was told was this: stop everything. Don’t play. And because playing caused pain, I had little choice but to listen.

It takes a lot of piano playing to injure yourself. My pain came from habitual misalignment between my body parts, and from avoiding a return to neutral, repeated over time. Repetition was the amplifier. It had turned habit into chronic pain.

As I searched for a different way of being, I kept asking: when will I be healed? When will I recover? When will I be back to normal?

Then something shifted. The answer was this: when the alternative becomes the norm. When, through repetition, alignment is what gets amplified.

I now work in gardens with my body, for a living, a lot. I tend to it as deliberately as I tend the land, before work and after, preventatively and reactively. It doesn’t always look the same. I add new practices and set old ones aside. And if I’m going the wrong way, I have a reliable barometer. My body tells me quickly when something isn’t working, and I adjust.

Gardens are made with tools and techniques, but the maker, the gardener, is the one doing the work. And that gardener is someone with a body.

You.

What Is a Garden

Before Making a Garden

Most people think of a garden as something finished: a look, a layout, a set of plants that finally make sense together. But a garden begins earlier than that. It starts before tools come out, before anything is planted or moved. It begins the moment a piece of land is set apart in the mind, noticed, returned to, held as its own place. Long before gardens were designed, they were enclosed. And that first act, more than any later choice, still shapes what a garden can become.

The word garden is an old one. Long before it named flowers or beauty, it named an act: enclosing a piece of land. Its roots reach back to Proto-Indo-European, a shared ancestor of many modern languages, spoken thousands of years ago. This was before Old English, before Latin and Greek even existed as spoken languages. The reconstructed root, gher, means to grasp or enclose, and it sits behind familiar words like yard, orchard, and horticulture, all tied to land held within bounds. The word garden comes from use, not theory, from the need to set land apart for daily life, to shape what happened inside its edges. That same need still lives on in the fenced yards and hedged lots we call gardens today.

Gardens do not exist on their own. They sit inside larger enclosures shaped by land itself. In Niagara, those edges are hard to miss. The face of the Niagara Escarpment lifts and breaks the land, changing wind, sun, and the way water moves. The broad presence of Lake Ontario softens temperatures and pulls moisture inland. These features have shaped roads, property lines, crops, and livelihoods for generations, and they still shape the small enclosures we call gardens. A home garden here is never just a fenced lot. It sits inside slopes, soils, air, and water patterns much older and larger than itself.

Because gardens sit inside larger enclosures, problems often begin when that context is missed. We bring in plans and plants before noticing what the land is already doing. Sun is treated as fixed. Water is expected to behave. Soil is assumed to be static. When a garden struggles, it’s easy to blame the plants, rather than the mismatch between intention and the enclosure it sits within.

A garden takes shape when attention stays with a place long enough to see it clearly. Noticing comes before change. Time reveals where water gathers, where soil shifts, where sun and wind linger or pass through. Within an enclosure, these conditions move together, and they do not show themselves all at once. Gardening begins by staying put, watching, and letting the place speak before answering it.

Seen this way, a garden is already present before anything is done to it. The fence, the hedge, the slope of the ground, the way water moves after rain, all of it marks an enclosure shaped by conditions. When those edges come into view, the garden stops being an idea to impose and becomes a place to work within, not a closed box but an open canvas. Only by knowing that canvas can anything surprising, even beautiful, take root and grow.