Hurry Up and Wait

When faced with the bleak dreary skies of January, it is easy to want to fast-forward into April when blooms start to appear in the garden again. Let me rephrase that. There are two faces of winter. One face is sun-shiny and snow blankets the countryside. The other gives you a side-eye, pelts you with ice pellets, and hides the sun behind thick, unmoving clouds for weeks. You'd never guess that I love winter. 

The local expression for this kind of snow is "Ithacation." It consists primarily of sideways snow and ice that nearly always finds a way inside your collar and into your ears. 

Every few years we are gifted with the Norman Rockwell "winters of year's past"... and the sky opens up, dumps feet of snow on us and then the sun comes out and everything is still for a brief moment. 

So how is one to deal with the interminable time between the rich colors of fall and the ebullient outbursts of color in spring? Around here, that can extend from November well into April. We're not even going to talk about "mud season". 

Some gardeners turn their eyes to seed catalogues and the promise that seeds offer. Others take up other winter-time hobbies like knitting or cross-country skiing. I tried skiing. On the years where we had the right equipment and my body was cooperating, the weather would fail to provide enough snow to ski on. Sigh. My wife knits. I don't think it makes winter any easier for her. Warmer, certainly, but she still looks out the window hoping for a glimmer of the sun. 

Why is this a question right now? According to the weather reporting and climate recording websites, 2024 was the warmest year on record. I would buy that. Not that it was extremely hot at any one point, but rather the heat continued long after it should have turned cooler. December was as warm as October. That's just not right. 

The reason for my concern is that I worry about spring coming too early, only to get smacked down again by a late freeze (or two). As a photographer, I take photos year-round. Most of my winter photos are pretty boring. Lots of white. I tend not to go out if the snow is blowing sideways. If the sky is grey I might not even take my camera out of the drawer. 

What does this have to do with an early spring? After months of waiting, it is easy to see that first thaw and think, that's it! Spring is here. As someone who wasn't born in the north, I really thought that winter was linear. Goes from cool to cold, then back to warm eventually. It never occurred to me that winter has a sick sense of humor. Grass in December was my first dad joke courtesy of winter. Then came the "February thaw" that made no sense. We had experienced two weeks where the thermometer hadn't reached above zero. Then mid-February it was almost 45F overnight. Everything melted into muck. I think that winter was the year that we bought new skiis. 

Anyone who gardens knows not to be "too excited" for spring. You don't want to set out your plants too early and shock them with the chill winds that still frequent day changing to night. Plants that have been started indoors go into shock when set outside on seemingly sunny days. That ground is still cold. I figure if I sit down on the ground and can feel the cold wet seeping into my pants, then it is still too cold for my young seedlings. In fact, some years, I have played it safe and have waited until that stage of spring to start my seeds. It's hard to be patient. 

crocus

All of which begs the question: what can you do while waiting for spring?

I think this is where spring bulbs come into their own. For all of their delicate flowers and rich colors, spring bulbs are punks. They are really nothing more than garlic and onions that went to art school, dyed their hair, and cut up their jeans. They stage-dive into the mosh pit of mud and come out screaming.

 There is nothing more incredible than watching a crocus pop up through a layer of snow and ice with an exuberant scream of canary yellow. One of my favorite irises (iris reticulata) will often start blooming between the last two snows of the winter. It is a tough iris! Why wait for spring? Let's bloom through the snow!

iris reticulata 'Harmony'

By the time winter slides into the last act at the end of March and spring pokes its head over the horizon, the bulbs are blooming with abandon. And that is when my camera lives on the kitchen table, always at the ready.