March is a weird month.
It gets warm out consistently all of a sudden, and then almost overnight things start blooming. In Colorado, that always makes me afraid for the little buds and blooms peeking through the dark soil. Go back in, little ones! Don't you know it might blizzard at any moment? Wouldn't you rather just stay tucked away for another month until you know for sure the threat is over?
Nope. Those delicate blossoms are fearless. They're made in darkness, actually. They have no clue what the weather is like, they just feel the warmth of the sun, even through the layers of dirt and rocks, and they want to get near it as soon as possible.
We moved into this amazing house last year and enjoyed, through no effort of our own, the fruits of our previous owners' work on the landscaping and gardening around the house. They planted, thank heavens, a lot of low effort greenery, so although we may have done the occasional weed pulling here and there, we did mostly nothing to make our landscaping blossom. The mums were literally like fireworks in late summer. It seemed like every week another color exploded from the green bushes out front, and I LOVED how it looked.
Then as summer heat cooled into brisk fall, those mums aged so gracefully over months and months, snowstorms, frosts, and winter cold. I told myself countless times I needed to trim them down, but I didn't. Secretly I kind of liked how they looked all stiff and dried. Like a weird, winter bouquet around the front gardens. So I left them.
I told myself I would trim them down before it got too warm.
March is mostly a weird month because things start to grow amidst all the dry, brown, leftovers from fall. It's a giant combination of death and life all meshed together. Whether the dead things get cleared away or not, life pushes through as best as it can. It's cumbersome, yes, making it's way through tangles of leaves and old flower petals, sometimes battling for light from sticks around it that no longer need the light.
I went out this weekend, and although just weeks ago I was admiring how pretty the snow looked on the withering, old mums, I saw leaves bushing up at the bottom of all the dead stems. The new mums didn't need to suffer at the expense of the old anymore. So I cut and dug and raked as much as I could, and now I have a very barren looking garden. However it's a garden that has room for growth.
Here's to another year of pretty landscape.