April Chores, April Thoughts, April Sights

intense blue scilla

We’ve had a bit of the blustery and it reminded my husband and I of our daughters April wedding some years ago. A surprise blizzard on the day was a challenge as out of town guests battled their way through difficult conditions to get here. but the memories were sweet for all that. At first the plans were for February, and perhaps the month felt cheated and sent some snow for the April celebration?

April Chores

Aside from the freakish weather we are prone to have, April garden chores can be fairly straightforward. It is not a time to dig around in the ground, since the soils are often wet. I do put in the lettuce seeds, they stand the frost and they can sown quite shallowly.
Plant Lettuce and cool weather crops.

Most of the time spent is cleaning up the debris from last years garden and the winter storms. That is fun because it is one way to see what is happening in the garden up close. Brush aside some old leaves and stems and there are the small blooms of scillas, and crocus; while you are at it, check out the tulips and how they are coming along, the viburnum buds and whatever else might be showing some progress.
Clean up the old brush from the garden.

Time to round up the tools, and be sure everything is in working order. It won’t be long before we mow the grass.
Get your tools clean and in good working order. Check your tiller and mower, tune them up.

I have a page of tips, hints, and timely tasks for April, here.

April Thoughts

I was outside in the mild weather the other day, looking up into the sky just about an hour or so before dusk. I was engaged in transferring the lovely April sky into word pictures to try and think about why I was so taken with the colors of the sky, the April late day sky.

The blue overhead was of the most embracing blue, not distant or pale at all.. a come hither blue somewhere between a light cobalt and a heavenly blue. The clouds were gray, but of that tender lavender gray hue that warms everything like a gentle blanket and those were touched with the most desaturated pink, so soft it almost seemed fluffed within the sky fading off into the blue.

The whole of the colors are what I think would be called “tender” colors.

I think the atmosphere of our latitude must lend itself to that feeling about color at this time of year. Today the garden sings in the proverbial April showers, which deepens the sky to a strange light-infused dark gray, but that light sifting through somehow illuminates the grass to a full pulsating green and the colorful flowering bulbs to a luminescent competing contrast; today in mostly blues… since it is the scillas, the chionodoxias, the pushkinias that rule the drifts and hummocks of the lawn. The daffodils stand out in their bunches with an electric yellow, yet like one that is glowing in the mist of the intermittent showers. Even the bright chrome yellows of the daffodils becomes softened, as if April ordered them to “shush!” while she watered the earth.

Every breeze feels like a zephyr in these suspended moments, although they have gusted, and will when the storms intensify their earnest pounding.

I think I would personify April as intensely tender, or tenderly intense in turn.

April Pictures

the pinkcup daffodil

dancing daffodils

Pinkcup daffodils are my favorites I think.They are more a salmon, or warmed pink, than descriptions of them might lead you to believe. They have such soft colors without the brash yellows of some of their friends, even though I like the all cheerful daffodils.

maple flowers

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© 2010 written for Ilona’s Garden Journal. Copyrights apply.