Alex's Asteroid Astrology

Seems I’m not the only one moving a little slowly this spring; I’m almost finished with recovery from knee replacement surgery in January, though still a bit wobbly on uneven turf.  But Mother Nature has been dragging her feet as well, with the garden a good 4-6 weeks behind its normal schedule, after an unusually cold winter.  Fortunately, we also had snow cover through most of the coldest periods, if not deep, but at least that sheltered the more sensitive roots and bulbs from the bitter temps, and I’m hoping not to have much damage or loss.

My witch hazel, always an early harbinger of spring, typically opens its spidery blossoms for me in the last week of January or first of February, but held off this year until early March.  It was well worth the wait, though – I’ve never seen it so full and lovely!  I’ve come to the conclusion that witch hazel prefers to bloom on older wood, and since two years ago was an “expansion” year, with lots of new growth put on overall, last spring’s bloom count was a bit disappointing, compared to the tree’s overall size.  But 2024 was a “consolidation” year with little spread, and almost every bit of the plant is covered in yellow blooms now.

A week ago, the witch hazel had the field to herself, with no competitors, but a lot can happen in the garden in seven days in March if the temps pop up, which they did for us, to some 10-20 degrees above normal for a brief stretch.  I now have a sparse smattering of snow crocus and snowdrops spattering the path edge with bright yellow and pristine white.  Some of the individual plantings look to be diminished, but it’s early days yet, they may yet expand. 

If not, it could be caused by the ongoing drought, which will affect even dormant bulbs if the area isn’t receiving enough water in the off season.  Most of my bulbs are planted in areas that don’t have much else, so don’t receive much hydration support in the summer and fall beyond what nature provides.  My well water supply isn’t such that I can regularly douse areas with no visible signs of life, whatever may be lurking below the surface.

Additional culprits leading to loss of vigor could be the invasion of the vinca groundcover, sapping water and nutrients from the area, though these have coexisted peaceably for several years up to now.  It may also be impinged by the leaf matter I didn’t get raked out this year, with my normal mid-winter cleanup delayed by the knee situation.  This means the sprouts need to navigate more material before they can reach the sunlight, and with low-blooming bulbs such as these, that can be an issue.  Poaching of bulbs by squirrels (the bastards!) is yet another possibility.

But as I say, it’s still very early in this cycle, relatively speaking, even if the cycle itself has been delayed, so some of these may yet fill out in time.

Hellebore is another super-early bloomer that is taking its sweet time waking up this spring.  Also termed Lenten Rose, for its habit of mid-winter bloom coinciding with the pre-Easter period, my hellebores missed the mark by a wide margin this year, even with a very late Ash Wednesday.  Three of the four remaining do show vigorous sprouting at this point, so I’m content to wait on their schedule for the show.  The last planting is displaying no signs of life yet, but has been struggling since I got it, so if the coup de grace came this winter, I’ll not be surprised, just disappointed.

One area I am eagerly anticipating is a new bulb field I developed last summer and fall, in the west bed, dominated later in the year by peonies and daylilies.  For some reason, the thought of early spring color here never occurred to me when I did the initial mass bulb plantings in 2019-22, and the area has been languishing without bloom until May.

Last summer we began to rectify that, planting out the potted bubs purchased for the house for Vernal Equinox and Easter, and followed that up with an infusion of fresh bare bulbs in autumn.  The holdovers are a mix of mini and standard daffodils, crocus and hyacinth.  But the newbies are all crocus, with some fun varieties I haven’t tried before.  There’s not much doing there yet, but I see some green tips poking tentatively through the mulch.

Another week of warmth is forecast ahead, so perhaps things will start to look more like a typical spring before long, but normally by this point these early bloomers are fading and we’re well into peak daffodil season.  So far, not even my mini tete-a-tetes are in bloom, though their greens are well up and some buds starting to form.  The earliest patch of full-size daffs, which often blooms as early as Valentine’s Day for me, is just now setting buds as well.

There’s one area of spring bloom where I maintain total control, whatever the weather, and that’s in the forsythia I cut to force indoors.  Most years I start this process in mid-January, cutting new stems every week or ten days to facilitate continual bloom.  I do this until the plant outside catches up to its cuttings inside, and blooms itself out, usually in mid-April.  But this year, in the aftermath of the knee surgery, I didn’t feel up to making the trek into the yard earlier, so I’m just now enjoying the first of the 2025 cuttings.

If the landscape outside is looking bleaker than usual, that’s nothing compared to the internal landscape, where spring is also somewhat anemic.  With my knee surgery scheduled for January 8^th, there wasn’t time to take down the yuletide display beforehand, and limitations on my movement precluded a prompt removal afterward.  So it wasn’t until early March that the great winter takedown began in earnest, leaving me precious little time to get the house up to speed for Ostara, the Vernal Equinox.

My solution to this vexing problem was to dial it back this year, as regards spring décor.  I decided to make do with just a smattering of the tchotchke available for the season, so I chose a relative sampling from the collection, in the end settling on just seven boxes and three bins’ worth of springtime cheer.

Granted, this is still somewhat extensive decorating, by most people’s standards, but for a confirmed tchotchkaholic like myself, Mother Hubbard’s cupboards look bare indeed!  I randomly selected just one box from each major springtime category, and left things to chance as to which pieces emerged into the light of day.  I kept the same basic layout plan, just with shelving that’s more sparsely populated than usual.

So, for example, there are still five leprechaun shelves, but this year housing a bare tithe of what’s available.  Overall, I estimate this display is only 20% of the springtime collection, if that, but I got extremely lucky with the choices I made, and feel that each category has decent representation.

I brought up one box each of leprechauns, brown rabbits, chicks, “chocolate” bunnies, retro/antique rabbits, and faux chocolate molds.  It was a crap shoot, but I found that many of my favorite pieces were housed in the boxes I chose randomly, so the packing gods must have been with me when I stowed it all away last year.  The seventh box held a few of my favorite spring wall hangings, small painting reproductions from Darren Gygi, who specializes in seasonal imagery, printed on canvas to look like originals.

To these categories I added a bin of egg garlands for trimming the bookcases, doors and archway; and a half-bin of St. Pat’s-themed wall hangings, which included shamrock garlands, much to my delight.  So though I brought up no faux florals, my usual go-to for such venues, I had just about enough material for complete coverage.  A single bin of the four which are filled with spring china was sufficient to outfit the hutch and dining table, with a bit of overflow left for some empty hall bookcase shelves.  The guest room is dark this season, getting a well-earned rest after very manic Halloween and Yule displays, and the bathroom houses only my collection of spring-themed lotion pumps.

One of the unintended consequences of this year’s “tchotchke lite” approach is that the display risers, normally hidden by the plethora of goodies in front of them, are now clearly visible to the rear of the shelves.  By and large, these are unattractive things such as cardboard packing, plastic rounds or styrofoam blocks, and make unacceptable viewing. 

So I hit upon the happy solution of buying tissue paper in seasonal colors, and that’s worked very well to cover my multitude of riser sins.  It did leave me, however, with a rather flat-looking base, but we tchotchcaholics are a resourceful bunch, and I was able to commandeer some leftover crinkled paper shred basket filler from Easters past, to scatter amongst the display, giving the base a sense of depth and adding both visual and textural interest.

The end result, I’m happy to say, is a very pleasant, if muted, celebration of all things springtime.  I hope you’ll agree.