What felicity on earth can compare to that of setting out the seeds for a summer vegetable garden in the midst of the gentlest of April showers? It was like a benediction upon my labors and the fruits to follow…if only it could exercise some sway over squash vine borers…
Elizabeth von Arnim says that ‘Humility, and the most patient perseverance, seem almost as necessary in gardening as rain and sunshine, and every failure must be used as a stepping stone to something better.’
How exactingly true is that statement of my experience! Perhaps I’m reaching a point where I can smile more at my mistakes—and they are many! Or perhaps the sweet little successes I’ve had with forget-me-nots and foxgloves take the sting out of old failures. Whatever the case, I must admit, however, to an incapacitating fear after sprinkling compost over all my flower seeds today. Would the richness of it as a covering burn my little seedlings before they’d had half a chance to emerge? Ah, such are the trials of a gardener! I guess I have only to wait and see, which seems like an impossible task at this point. I was already out today checking on the seeds I sowed yesterday!
I’m so pleased with my flower garden…it looks so dainty and tidy and yet so established. I do hope that those white forget-me-nots which promised to bloom through October are respectable plants and keep their word. And I’m in a fever of anticipation over my new Bouncing Bets. Ever since reading of them in Pat of Silver Bush I’ve been dying to grow them. I don’t even know what they look like—I used to call that beloved magenta summer phlox ‘Bouncing Bets’ out of sheer wishful thinking, but now I have them both. And the phlox is giving me every reason to expect Great Things.
I sowed my cosmos and zinnias on the outer beds of my vegetable garden today. I tried to convince myself last year that the petunias, begonias and marigolds I planted in their place really were better and easier to manage, but, while the latter point may hold true, the fact of the matter is that I just missed them too dreadfully. So, for better or for worse, I’ll have my cosmos and zinnias once again running riot through wandering tomato vines and leaning out over the lawn in a most appropriating fashion. As it should be.
Along the back border I sowed sunflowers and marigolds, and in the middles of the outer beds borage and Chinese forget-me-nots—not true myosotis but a very cheerful little imposter that flowers easily in our hot, humid summer. How I crave and cherish those rare flashes of blue!
Yet again, I planted moon vine with my morning glories, though in five or six years I’ve had but one success. But it was sweet enough—those translucent white blooms unfurling with such unearthly fragrance on summer evenings—to make me try once more.
I’m quite cocky over my foxgloves. I hate to harp on them, but they really are majestic. I think I’ve earned my bragging rights, the way I hovered over them last winter in the basement and nursed them through a long hot summer in little pots on my tree-shaded patio. Their present beauty—pink, white and mauve stakes against the picket fence and flanked with lavender–is enough to make me want to start some more in the basement this very instant.
I’ve spent every spare moment in the garden this week. How wonderful to be alive and outside in such a lovely old world as this! I simply cannot believe it each morning as I see the sun rising over the woods to the east that we are to have yet another of these Eden days. 
I’ve always wanted to grow things, and though most of my experience has come by trial and error I greet each planting season with a renewed enthusiasm and optimism. My garden journal may be more full of things not to do than of things that worked—for instance, I have given up on hybrid tea roses, as they are often laughingly treated as annuals here in the hot, humid South! But I have made joyful discoveries, as well: Virginia bluebells love the shady bed beneath my cedar trees; sweet peas will grow and actually bloom here if they’re planted no later than early January; coral bells are about the pluckiest plants around and strawberry foxgloves really are perennials! 
It happens every year. March gives way to April, and I wake up one morning and see that a miracle has transpired, overnight, as it were. And every year I am unflinchingly convinced that no spring has ever been as gorgeous as this one. ‘How could it have been?’ I ask myself. If it were, we’d spend all of the rest of the year pining for its charms. But one glance through my journals reminds me that the God who masterfully blends our love of the familiar with our passion for change has outdone Himself every year since spring ever was. 