Here’s the view out my living room window for June 1. This is what I see when I sit to drink my morning coffee. You can see the winter damage on the rhododendron closest to the house–more pruning is needed.

The bloom color at this time of year is pink, purple, blue, white. Yellows and golds will come soon and then in mid-summer the hot colors–the flame of crocosmia and hot pink phlox.

The tree peony only had 2 blooms this year–winter was hard on it as well. The blooms were deep magenta, big and blowsy, reminiscent of the tissue paper flowers I made when I was a kid. The plant always blooms in late May and inevitably the weather turns hot just about the point that the blooms appear.

These blooms are short lived in the best of conditions but the heat propels them along even faster–the buds open, flowers spread their petals out, and whomp they’re gone, in the space of a hot day. I wanted to get a picture of them this year but didn’t move quickly enough.

Sometimes I clip off one of the flowers and bring it in to float for a few days in a shallow dish of water but this year the 2 flowers bloomed and fell in less than a day. Once the bloom has passed, this is an unassuming plant with fairly ordinary green foliage–but for a day or two in spring, it prances and preens–look at me, look at me.

The regular peonies, which are dotted around the various garden beds, are slower to bloom and they retain their blooms in full glory for longer–the challenge is knowing when to cut a big bouquet before a pounding rain, again inevitable at this time of year. So far only one flower has appeared and I cut it yesterday to put in a glass vase on the mantel. Hopefully the buds that cover the plants will survive the rains to come over the next couple of days.

There wasn’t much of a garden here when I moved in–some foundation plantings and a small bed in the back. But this modest array of shrubs and plants got me started on my gardens and many of the plants have lived on: a peony; 4 rhododendrons; an andromeda; several lilacs, including one with deep purple blooms; an azalea with hot pink flowers; a patch of white Siberian iris; some Jacob’s Ladder, coreopsis, and Ozark sundrops. I’ve lifted and divided and replanted in new locations and it’s all going strong.

Although life in a garden is often a story of transience, of beauty that blooms and fades quickly, falls prey to pests or storms, it can also be a story of continuity, of resilience. I don’t know who planted everything originally. Maybe the couple who were renting the house. I like to think it was the original owner–a single woman like myself who had the house built in the late 50s and lived here for many years. There was once a deck on the back of the house—I like to think of her sitting on that deck sipping coffee before work, looking at the rhododendrons in full bloom.

It’s done.The raised bed is built, filled, and planted. Yahoo! I feel like a new parent, proudly showing pictures of my “baby” to all who will politely and patiently look. It began with the hint of an idea—as I’ve mentioned in earlier posts I wanted to experiment with raised beds or planters to make weeding and planting and harvesting easier for stiff hips and knees. I did a lot of online research and chatted many times with my very patient friend Pam who is great at DIY projects. I rejected the idea of waist high planters—they’re expensive, need a firm level surface to stand on, might limit what I could plant.

So, on to raised beds. I looked at kits online—pricey. I then thought of just buying corner connectors online and purchasing lumber at a lumberyard but the connectors I wanted weren’t available. I looked at kits available in local stores. Here’s one (I didn’t like the metal but did like the size):

I finally settled on building the box from scratch with Pam’s help. Off I went to my local lumberyard, where a helpful employee talked me down from my vision of cedar (too expensive) and directed me toward spruce boards and hemlock 4 x 4s for corner supports.

Pam arrived on a hot Sunday afternoon with her cordless drill and other tools and we built the box (well, I measured, marked, and held things while she drilled and screwed in screws). Here it is, with one inaugural shovelful of dirt inside:

This past weekend, I purchased bags of dirt (didn’t want to use my weed filled compost) and filled the box. This required hauling and dumping 15 thirty to forty pound bags of soil, which I managed without throwing my back out—no small feat! I then had the pleasure of shopping for and planting a garden filled with cutting flowers and herbs. Here’s the newly planted bed:

The yard is now mostly snow free and greening up. I make my way around each day after work, 1 or 2 circuits, checking on winter damage, seeing what’s coming up. Yesterday I noticed that one of the hellebores, nestled at the edge of the woody area, was blooming, its deep magenta blooms nodding on short stems. There are two more hellebores not yet in full bloom. At the other corner of the yard are daffodils just about ready to flower and crocuses have sprouted up all over the front border.

It’s a tantalizing and contradictory season, the landscape still brown and sandy and dry. Dead leaves from last fall litter the dormant grass. The brown and rolled up leaves of the rhododendron are a constant reminder of winter harshness. But everywhere there are tastes and nibbles of spring.

I try to feel this as an invitation, to experience a rising of joy, and often I do feel that. But it can also feel like pressure looking at everything that needs to be pruned and weeded and edged and raked. In recent years I’ve become all too aware of the limits of time and an aging body.

My lot is 1/3 acre. Over the years, I’ve put in lots of perennial beds, mostly not all that well planned. There’s the circular bed in the middle of the front yard that developed after I had a spruce tree taken down and needed to fill the big bare spot that emerged and the bed at the corner of the driveway that I created from the dregs of the topsoil I’d had hauled in for the circular bed. In the back, there’s a long border that grew from a smaller bed left by the previous owners of the house. There’s a teardrop shaped bed that grew up around an old laundry post that has since fallen down, another bed that started as an herb garden until I realized it didn’t get enough sun–the Siberian iris I’d planted around the edge were taking over and the herbs dying away. Now it’s home to daylilies and iris.

I put many of these beds in during summers off when I worked at the university. I reveled in my strong back, my ability to dig and haul wheelbarrows full of dirt around, to wrench shrubs out of the earth and move them to a different spot, to attack overgrown clumps of hosta roots or Siberian iris roots and break them up into a host of smaller plants, to wield the tiller and shove the unpowered mower around.

I’ve never been athletic or thought much about fitness so it surprised me how much I enjoyed the physical labor of gardening. I always paced myself. I’d work for a while, then pause to watch birds and rabbits and just feel the air. I’d go inside, get a drink, sit and look at the garden, maybe stretch a bit, before plunging back in. But even with my measured approach I’d end the day achy and covered head to toe in dirt–but oh so satisfied.

Now I work full time through the summer months and my back and hips no longer tolerate long hours bent down to plant and weed–30, 45 minutes and I’m done. I’ve slowly come to realize that something needs to shift. I need to downsize the garden and make it more easily tended–use shrubs and ground cover more–put in some raised beds, plant things in planters. I approach this partly as an interesting design problem to be solved and I’m excited by the possibilities.

But I’m also sad. These beds–even the sometimes scruffy and overgrown ones–hold memories. I meant to get started on this project last year but couldn’t bring myself to disassemble any of the beds. Let’s say I start with the bed at the back of the yard. Is it the phlox that will go? The crocosmia with its scarlet flame of bloom? The nepeta that my old cat Indigo used to nibble on? The rose that I nurture along each year and then watch it die back each winter? The same questioning happens with each bed I look at.

There are certainly lessons here about attachment and letting go, about bowing and bending to what is, to the present moment, about adapting–and that’s fitting. That’s what a garden’s all about–adaptation and change.