Author: Will Balk, Jr.

We’re only three weeks into spring and already the last of the camellias are fading, the classic azaleas are past their peak, and mowing the raggedy-looking lawn is beginning to look like an immediate necessity. Barely spring, yet summer weather is announcing an early arrival. There will be plenty of blooming beauty coming with the hot days, of course, and perhaps it will last longer than the short-lived season of spring eruptions of bloom.

Those waves of spring-like warmth and depth-of-winter cold that have repeatedly swept over our gardens lately haven’t caused my hydrangeas to burst into bloom yet – unlike the old Kiefer pear trees which have made a gorgeous show of flowering, only to be zapped back to bare stems once the cold returned.

There is much still to clean up in the garden and grounds around the old farmhouse. A frost a short while ago turned some of the winter-dormant plants to mushy mounds or bare sticks, for they had all been growing as if fall and winter cold would never come.

Fortunately for a lazy gardener like me – I’m a reluctant shopper, to boot – there’s still a little time left in this holiday gift-giving season to find the right gift for those difficult gardeners on your list. There’s time . . . but I always seem to be challenged with the inspiration part. I really don’t want to give the usual or expected; I want to come up with something meaningful and special, something unique, something the recipient will value.

Even those of us who faced damage to property after Hurricane Dorian can probably count ourselves pretty lucky. When we think back to what we faced in Beaufort after Irma and other storms in the recent past, this first major (and it definitely was a major storm!) hurricane of the 2019 season spared our little corner of the coast the worst winds and rain and tides. 

July is when our countless palmetto trees display their huge panicles of tiny, pale blooms, thousands of them on each blooming branch and often several of the great white-flowered masses on each palmetto tree. 

Would you just look at that mess? Some doofus has taken that whole wheelbarrow full of gorgeous newly-made potting mix and moved it out under the eaves of the potting shed.

When you’re as lazy a gardener as I am, and when you procrastinate just because you can . . . well, sooner or later you have to get right down and start working in the dirt.  Today I reached that point and admitted that the new garden bed had to be addressed immediately.

I’m looking out over these five acres of ‘lawn’ stretching all the way to the woods in one direction and to the old fallow field in the other, and that familiar sinking feeling comes over me – as it must do every year: it’s getting to be time to start mowing again.