Observe, reflect, and take notes as your garden and your gardening evolve.

READING THE FEBRUARYS
The Joy of Garden Journaling

by Peter W. Gribble

If you’re like me, in a bubble of one, a solitary, isolated, socially-distanced lockdown, the closest living thing to you may be a houseplant or a cat, both decent companions.

Another good companion is a journal. Reading it from the beginning reintroduces you to an old friend, refreshes memories and can reinvigorate the search for value and meaning in difficult times.

I’ve kept journals before; student journals, dream journals, personal journals but never a gardening journal. I started it ten years ago Friday, February 18, 2011, to note the progress of the garden and me as a gardener and to itemize signs of spring. I should have started years earlier when my late partner Robert and I moved to the new rental in 2006. During those years, I turned a neglected, dandelion-infested backyard lawn into a garden with vegetable beds, roses and a pond (to the delight of the owners.) As well, I worked part-time at a major garden centre (I’m still at both places.) What finally pushed me to start a garden journal was to keep an accurate record and resource for writing columns.

Because 2021 marks the tenth anniversary of my journal, I decided to read all the Februarys in one go, which I’ve never done before.

After 5 a.m. every morning when Environment Canada updates the daily seven-day forecast for Vancouver, I cut and paste the “Today” and “Tonight” weather for the day and write down the day’s sunrise and sunset. February 1 sunrise is 7:45 a.m. and the sunset is 17:07 p.m. give or take a minute across the years, while February 28 is 6:58 and 17:52 respectively. Leap year day February 29 is 6:56 a.m. to 17:54 p.m. – a four-minute increment between days. Seeing it this way for the first time was oddly reassuring. Our daylight increases by an hour and thirty-two minutes (thirty-six minutes in leap years) during February’s short month. A sign of spring if ever there was one.

If storms or sharp changes in temperature are in the long-range, they are included in the morning entry. The weather is updated throughout the day but I pay no further attention to it to avoid meteorological paranoia. This journal routine ensures an entry every day and in the ten year period, I have missed perhaps three or four days except when I went back east to attend my parents’ memorials.

Reading the Februarys made clear the month was not just spent studying gardening manuals, browsing gardening magazines or poring over seed catalogues. I was out in the garden weeding, planting, tidying up or simply enjoying it. Entries show an Akebia quintana vine was planted up with a trellis in a large planter container (2015); the lavender was pruned (2017) following Brian Minter’s advice that doing so in February caused no loss to later flowering.

I usually leave garden clean-up until at least late March when days and nights have warmed so as to not disturb the hibernating beneficial insects such as ground-dwelling bumblebees. 2016’s February was the warmest and triggered my earliest garden clean-up when I started seeing bees. The solid stems and branches of shrubs such as boxwood, roses and Hydrangea paniculata were pruned but some perennial plant stalks although dead are hollow, providing sleeping accommodations for the beneficials and so I leave them until temperatures warm. As for weeding, anytime I can dig up buttercup is open season. February’s rain-softened soil makes it a much easier task.

Snowdrops are often February’s harbingers of spring, even when we don’t have snow.

At the garden centre where I work in the Nursery-Perennial department, the beginnings of “spring prep” are underway. In February, hundreds of bare root fruit trees and ornamental cherries come in. The roots are soaked in water for about twenty minutes then pruned along with the longer branches then potted up, labelled, priced, stacked on a pallet, watered again and forklifted out. There hasn’t been a February when this doesn’t happen, but if temperatures are close to or below freezing and the long-range doesn’t look good, the trees are heeled in under mounds of soil to protect them until warmer days allow us to plant them up. You dress in layers and rain gear for eight-hour shifts of this.

Meanwhile, in my garden journal, snowdrops and crocuses are up and some are blooming depending on the year’s temperatures. Daffodil tips are showing. Reliables such as Viburnum x bodnantense, Hamamelis x intermedia, “Arnold’s Promise” (Chinese witch hazel) and Sarcococca (Himalayan sweetbox) are scenting the air with their blossoms. Leaning over the fence, the neighbour’s filbert tree has catkins three and four inches long.

Yet on Sunday, February 23, 2014 there was a snowfall warning and twice I had to go out in the dark to knock the snow off cedars, skimmia, daphne and others to keep them from breaking. Another entry (Thurs. Feb 24, 2017) contrasts with, “The stars last night were gorgeous when I went out to cover the suet. Orion sparkled in the high west at 8:30 p.m.”

Wildlife appearances are duly entered. I’ve spotted the scrawny female coyote in the backyard only twice, but her presence predicts a sharp drop in the feral cat population. If the weather really chills, squirrels and racoons disappear back into hibernation and all that’s left are the birds.

LIke the snowdrop and the crocus, the appearance of bushtits is a sign of an impending change of season.

Birds are fascinating in any season. Over the years, some birds such as woodpeckers, varied thrushes and house sparrows vanished completely while junco numbers have increased. Joining the throng of blue jays, flickers, juncos, hummingbirds, and assorted song sparrows are fox sparrows and delightful clouds of bushtits, who showed one snowy winter and never left. My first encounter with bushtits was on Lees Trail in Stanley Park one spring years ago where I saw happy swarms of them fly to groups of people holding up their palms with small seeds. I was told timing was everything: only here, between 2 to 2:30 p.m. on the trail’s south side. I returned and sure enough, they came like clockwork but perhaps it was the humans who were the mainspring. It was enchanting but the practice has been since discouraged. In my garden, the new arrivals this winter are a pair of red-breasted nuthatches (Sitta canadensis) who are assertive when they decide it’s their turn at the suet. First robin sightings frequently occur around now, but sometimes they never leave.

Despite the variations, ten years of Februarys back to back look oddly stable. Reading the journal reminds me again how I’ve grown less interventionist in my garden over the years, letting Nature have its way more often than not (with the exceptions of buttercup, morning glory and blackberry.) Years ago, the veggie beds were replaced with a pollinator garden which has increased the bee varieties and my pleasure in just being still and watching the activity. Observant gardening has heightened my caution about causing harm to the environment. I’m haunted by writer and activist, Arundhati Roy’s powerful charge: “COVID is our necessary reset to re-assess this desolation we called civilization; this greed we call happiness ... “

Amid the lockdown, isolation, sickness and death, thank goodness spring, in whatever form it takes this year, is inching us closer to reset and renewal ...

... which is a positive, hopeful entry for your journal ... or a wonderful way to start one.

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