There’s an office park not far from where we live that has the most amazing tulips that you’re going to see. They crowd the corners of the intersection and bunch around the edges of the neatly cropped boxwood bushes that run near the sidewalk. These tulips are HUGE, they’re perfect red and yellow, and it seems like they just appear overnight. Tulips are the heralds of each springtime, they’re the first burst of color that tells us the dark and gloomy winter is giving way to fresh air and sunshine. When you walk up to the front door of the WRC Estate in beautiful Shawnee, Kansas—bunches of daffodils greet you along the path to the front step. I like daffodils as much as tulips, I like how the burst of the flower turns sideways, as if the flower is looking out to the rest of the world. Each daffodil presides over a small chunk of springtime, knowing they have a little part in the process.
Of course, the tulips and daffodils don’t just spontaneously appear. I planted the daffodil bulbs over a year and a half ago, having carefully selected each one, working the soil and laying out where each flower would come up when it breaks out of the ground. Daffodil bulbs, like tulips, are planted in the fall, usually as gardeners are pulling the summer flowers for the compost. Planting bulbs is therapy for gardeners, having worked in the long hot summer days to keep the bright summer colors watered and strong in drought, fought against weeds and critters—as that time draws to an end, the last vestiges of the summer sun are put into the delayed satisfaction of narcissus bulbs. We plant them knowing that we won’t see them for months, that some of them aren’t going to make it, that for all the fussiness of gardening, these bulbs are going to do it all themselves without our winter meddling. Those tulips by the office park are transplants, having been raised in a greenhouse and planted into the earth just as each bloom was going to open up. The pretty flowers of springtime are the fruits of many laborious hours, time and money, sweat and sometimes blood.
The peas are starting to come up in the vegetable garden. They’re around 4 inches tall and just developing their little fingers the plants use to climb up their trellis towards the sun. I put the seeds in the ground a few weeks ago, when the ground was still a cold and damp from the winter that hadn’t quite left us yet. Peas have to go in early, they’re usually among the first crops of May that are ready to pick. Since then, I’ve been breaking ground on the new part of the garden, pulling sod from the yard and turning the ground and fortifying the soil so it’ll be ready for planting when each type of plant is due.
The last few nights, I’ve been running the roto-tiller in the almost-too-wet dirt, breaking up the Kansas clay and grading out the high and low spots typical to a new garden. If the ground is too wet, trying to work the ground causes more trouble than good. The mud cakes onto the tines of the tiller, the dirt clumps together into clods that can take months of sun and rain to break back apart, you end up destroying the soft texture of the garden in your haste to get into the garden too early. The problem is that you can’t wait too long. Some plants have to be in by now, some will have to be in the ground within a couple weeks. Of course, springtime rain is unpredictable too! The famous April Showers are a mixed blessing, to be sure. It’s those April Showers that make everyone’s yard look so good before the summer fatigue. It’s the April Showers that push the rosebushes to turn from short brown sticks to crimsony red with velvety leaves, to the bright green stems holding up the Queen of Flowers. But it’s the same April Showers that delay the vegetables, push back the young flower transplants, that make timing the yard fertilizer and treatments unpredictable. April Showers make each lawn mowing a careful weekend chess match, trying to see if by Sunday afternoon the grass will be dry enough that the cut grass won’t clump. Our soil in this part of the world is almost totally devoid of nitrogen, so if you want the grass to be strong and thick, you’ve got to apply the nitrogen before a rain but 2 days after mowing and at least 2 days before mowing again. It’s hard enough to keep up with the fescue anyway, this is the weather it loves more than any other season. Some days it grows so fast and so tall that cutting the grass feels like cutting hay.
Please don’t take this as complaining, it’s all worth it!
In the hot days of a Kansas August, when the backyard tomatoes are as big as a softball (and better tasting on hamburgers), it’s worth it. In the high-sun days of late June, when the cucumbers are juicy and crisp, it’s worth it. When the grind of another workday ends and you’re welcomed home to the trumpets of petunias at the front door, when you’re setting down to dinner with your lovely wife and vase of fresh cut yellow roses can sit on the table with a glass of cool chardonnay, when you kick back with your friends in the backyard grass with a cold beer and nighttime air holds the call of baseball on the radio, gentle reader: it’s worth it.
That’s what springtime is about. It’s not just a time of tulips. Tulips don’t last, daffodils are not long for the world. They’re only the beginning of each new springtime.
I don’t know if this is what His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI meant when he said the Church in America will know a new springtime. But in a way, it’s apt to remember this: Springtime is when the work gets fun, when the afternoon air portends a promise of summer. But it’s also a time of labor, there’s work to be done in the springtime. Springtime means gentle rain and dangerous thunderstorms, it means warm afternoons and devastating freezes. We could get snow in springtime. We could get floods in springtime. It is creation in spite of a chance at destruction. But for the snows or floods, each day is good—and carries the promise that tomorrow can be even better. It’s a time for getting a little dirt on your hands. But we sow today so we can reap tomorrow.
Then indeed, the harvest will be plenty.
