Listen to what Nature is saying, and be your own groundhog.

I AM MY OWN GROUNDHOG
By Peter W. Gribble

Whenever a warm February settles in, the balmy temperatures raise my ambivalence and its itchy question, ‘Should I be gardening now?’

How do you safely read the signs, understand Nature’s language? Too many Marches have dealt surprises: a final arctic outflow, a late snowfall, one last dip below freezing or the worst: freezing rain.

It’s curious that I can list all these winter tyrannies yet be so easily lured by a few days of warmish weather. Start a tentative cleanup of parts – and only parts – of the back yard … now? Wary of shadows in my garden, I am my own groundhog.

Warm temperatures convince roses and other plants to ‘break’ or put out the first tender shoots of spring. A March (or February) surprise will damage or kill the new growth. A prune mid-to-late March quickly removes the dead or damaged parts. Done earlier you leave yourself open to having to do it twice should a surprise knock the first pruning back.

The surprise this year may be: we’ve had our winter – those two terrible weeks in mid-January.
January’s raw blast of snow and cold made me feel I was coming down with a bad case of permafrost. This was despite six-inch tall daffodil shoots and the Sarcococca (Himalayan sweet box) out in full scent the first week of 2020. A dandelion bloomed January 7 in the driveway and I could hear a robin chirping – all duly noted in my gardening journal desperate for meaningful entries.

Then winter slammed us and put hibernation back on the to-do list … for everyone.

Cozily housebound and close to dependable heat sources, almanacs, seed catalogues, gardening books and magazines became my mode of existence during January’s Polar Vortex spillover. While reading, I came across an interesting clarification: climatologists are defining ‘climate’ as what to expect in the long term while ‘weather’ is what occurs in the short term.

Comparative Almanacs 101 is an annual, indoor, winter ritual. The two readily available editions are the Canadian ones of Old Farmer’s (predicting BC’s spring with above normal temperatures and precipitation, pg 97) and Harrowsmith (predicting a wet and cool early spring, pg 137.) Information and lore abound in both almanacs but Harrowsmith is a better read, with more in-depth articles and far fewer advertisers. I did not know skunks mated on February 28 (Old Farmer’s, pg 127) nor that woolly bear caterpillars have 13 distinct segments (Harrowsmith, pg 206.) I’ve tried counting and measuring the segments of my own woolly bears but they never let me.

January’s armchair’s book of choice was Oliver Sach’s Everything in its Place, First Loves and Last Tales (Knopf, 2019.) Less than a third into the book, his exuberant curiosity about everything fanned the flames of mine and incited me to venture forth and explore the garden despite its two feet of snow.

Snowfall layers an alternate language on the landscape. Unseen activity is suddenly clear. Many paired birds feed in multiple, cute, serried hoppings spread around the feeder and beyond. The tracks revealed desperate, thorough eaters leaving nothing on their plates … except for their footprints. Tracks provided running sentences in the snow, a quiet exposition of what visited, reconnoitred a moment, then continued on their way, in a language of ‘I was here’ but humbler and less self-conscious than graffiti.

Hungry wildlife wandered further from Stanley Park and snow-covered open spaces in search of food. When ducks and geese get desperate I buy a bag each of dried peas, barley and lentils, which vanish instantly the moment they’re sprinkled on the ground. Never feed the birds bread crumbs!

When I was out, angry caws drew my eye skywards. A murder of crows was after an eagle. Individual crows attacked once, then veered off to attack again while backup crows, sounding the alarm, had the eagle loosely surrounded on three sides in a crow salient to drive it onwards. It seems some crows have attended military college.

Except for falling levels in the feeder, hummingbirds leave no traces. It was reassuring that several papers and radio stations were reminding people to keep their hummingbird feeders from freezing. During the cold snap, I switched out my two feeders during the day but brought both in at night then hung them up again by 5 a.m. when my hummingbirds waited a foot away from the hanger. Sometimes during the day, through the window, I’d see a chickadee bullying the hummingbird over the feeding hierarchy.

Surprisingly, it was the hummingbird who deferred to the chickadee until he had his fill.

Even on stratospheric balconies, Nature’s little miracles can occur. While visiting friends in a seventeenth-floor apartment where they hung a hummingbird feeder from the underside of the balcony above – it was an extraordinary sight: a hummingbird, a regular visitor, soared up for a quick sip.

Until Oliver Sachs, feeding the birds was the only way to get me into the garden.

Snowdrops, an annual West End sign of impending Spring.

After January 18 temperatures stayed above freezing. By the 21st the snow was gone as were all tracks. Nature’s language changed again as robins took up their spring chirpings again, song sparrows tunes grew melodic and the Sarcococca resumed scenting the air. A cluster of snowdrops showed in the woodsy part of the garden and the hellebores were blooming. Camellia buds were swelling and crocuses and daffodils were lengthening.

With this evidence, two almanacs and inner nagging supporting the urge to garden, I’m out there in the rain with my electric pruners.

This is the time to prune certain evergreen trees, hedges and shrubs. I started reshaping my two ninety-year-old boxwoods after January’s pummeling. From now until the end of the month is the period for the hard prune. Touch-ups or a light summer trim are generally recommended near the end of July. The hard prune is not for everything. Some exceptions are members of the spruce and pine families. A good example is the dwarf mountain Mugo pine (Pinus mugo) ideal for growing in a balcony pot. When you spot the little buds of spring growth on the tips of Mugo’s branches and want to maintain the shape of your little tree, wait a month or two until the new growth has developed into true stems three to four inches in length then cut these stems off close to the point of emergence.

This is called ‘candling.’ Don’t cut the pine needles themselves in an army buzzcut as the tip ends will yellow and dry – the botanical version of split ends. Straight back and sides may have given way to high fades where human hair is concerned but plant coiffure hasn’t changed.

Every three years or so, immediately after the bloom is finished, I prune my Himalayan sweet box or Sarcococca hookeriana (the taller, sprawling version of the smaller S. humilis, which needs no pruning.) The same goes for the larger varieties of the gorgeously scented Skimmea. Snow can knock both these plants back if the stems have grown weak from the absence of pruning – or if you haven’t gone out and knocked the snow off them after every snowfall, which is good practice in any case.

Somewhere years ago, I read that slow-growing Chinese witch hazel (Hamamelis) didn’t like being pruned and so I never did. Mine grew nine feet tall over ten years and except for one inexplicable winter always flowered and scented January’s air. Since then, at garden centres, I’ve seen some Hamamelis pruned short to three feet without any apparent effect on flowering. If you want to prune it, this is probably the time once the blooms are done. Viburnum x bodnantense is another late winter-blooming, beautifully scented, deciduous shrub that needs a prune once flowering is done, otherwise, it grows to ten feet.

One of Oliver Sach’s early heroes was the pioneering chemist Humphrey Davey (1778-1829) who discovered and isolated many of the basic elements in what is now the periodic table. Davey wrote, as he knowingly neared the end, “Nature never deceives us; the rocks, the mountains, the streams, always speak the same language.” …

As do gardens.