Morgan, my friend and co-worker, has big news. She and her husband are expecting their first child, a girl, to be born in early April. That means right now Morgan is experiencing a lot of new thoughts and powerful emotions, and more than a little physical discomfort. I’ve had a few conversations with her lately about the great change of life she’s facing, and bearing witness to what she’s going through makes me think back to the long ago days when my wife and I first embarked upon the parenting adventure. It seems to me Morgan’s mind and heart are in the right place because she seems fully committed to being the best Mom she can be, even as she contemplates all the serious challenges that lie ahead.

I have to admit, I wouldn’t want to be a new parent now. The world is so full of trouble at present and so much of what’s happening seems to be heading in the wrong direction. Then again, I can remember my own Mom and other older people expressing the same dark worries to my wife and me thirty five years ago when we were new parents. I think this pessimistic perspective, the faltering of faith in the future, belongs to the old and worn out, among whose ranks I must now count myself. It is nature’s intention that parenting should be a young person’s occupation. It takes all the energy and the overall optimism of youth to size up the current state of world affairs and forge boldly ahead anyway, betting everything you have that somehow someway the center will hold and life as we know it will go on. Hooray for the young! May they never be so broken in spirit as to give up all hope that the world can be a better place.

Springtime is a young person’s game, too. Not that the old can’t enjoy it, but rather that spring is spontaneous and headstrong, surging forward with pent up energy, recklessly confident in the rightness of its own moment. Old people aren’t built for that sort of activity, generally. By the time a person becomes old they have been knocked around a bit, have banged their head against a few walls and tripped over a few obstacles they never saw coming. That stuff wears on you. You acquire some scar tissue and an aversion to making any sort of jump when you’re not certain where you’ll land. You remember the pain of failed desire and the taste of ashes in your mouth, and most of all you feel the want of energy. When you get to the place where you think of your own personal energy as a precious and finite resource and you have to manage it accordingly, sparingly parceling it out only when you feel certain the outcome will be worth the expenditure, then you must be old. Youth is never troubled by such cautious reserve.

What does the old gardener make of springtime? The warming air feels good and the thought of new leaves and flowers and the return of many living creatures that have been gone for the last six months brings a smile. Oh, but the work! Tending a garden takes effort and energy, and the warmth of today will be tomorrow’s oppressive heat, and a good number of those living creatures will bite and sting and chew up the plants the gardener grows. The old gardener smells the breath of springtime and feels the surging impulse, yet somehow now wishes time might slow down. Can’t spring wait a little longer? Winter is not so bad — it’s quiet and calm. Let’s sleep in! Let’s stay in winter a little while longer. Spring can wait, can’t it?

No. Spring never waits.

It’s been a seasonably cold winter for these parts up until recently. Nighttime temperatures were often in the twenties and teens, and we had at least one occasion where the thermometer dipped down into the single digits. (Temperature is relative, of course, and people in Minnesota would scoff at our idea of a cold winter.) The very end of January was bitter and included an ice storm that made the roads hazardous and caused the Arboretum to close for a few days. On the first day I was able to come in, all the trees and shrubs in the landscape were still coated with ice. In the bonsai garden, sections the walkway were still somewhat treacherous but sunlight glinting off the frozen plants made a pretty picture:

Just about a month later, towards the end of February, we had our only significant snow of the season. It wasn’t much — maybe three inches or so — but coupled with the intense cold it was once again enough to bring much of Asheville to a standstill. This part of the country used to experience considerably more snowfall than we do anymore. I feel ambivalent about this because I don’t much like dealing with the problems snow can bring, yet I know the reason we don’t have the snow is because our climate is changing. Our region used to be categorized as being in zone 7a on the USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map, but now we are in zone 7b, which is several degrees warmer on average. Several degrees difference in average temperature is a significant shift.

Like the snow or not, it’s hard to argue that fresh fallen snow doesn’t magically transform the landscape:

In wintertime we do a lot of wiring on our bonsai trees. I do some of this time-consuming work, but the bulk of it is done by longtime bonsai volunteer Rebecca Ayres, here seen with her current project:

Rebecca may rue the day she ever learned how to wire, but I sure don’t! Wiring is all but essential for training bonsai and Rebecca is very good at it.

Here is one of the trees that were wired and styled this winter:

The bonsai pictured above is a dwarf eastern white pine (Pinus strobus ‘Nana’), previously featured in a Curator’s Journal entry.

As winter nears its end and spring looms in the near distance, our bonsai work tends more and more toward repotting. The images below depict a recently repotted tree, in this case a Korean hornbeam (Carpinus turkzaninovii) that was also previously featured in a Journal entry:

The hornbeam was potted into a brand new Preston Tolbert container:

A close look at the buds on this tree reveals they are swollen and on the verge of opening, which is the same stage of seasonal development as can currently be found on many of our temperate bonsai out in the hoop house:

In the first week of March I did a demonstration program at the Arboretum for the Blue Ridge Bonsai Society, which was also open to the general public. The subject of the demonstration was the renovation and replanting of one of our notable tray landscape bonsai, known by the title “Mount Mitchell”. This piece has also been previously featured.

“Mount Mitchell” has been repotted numerous times before, and each time changes a little bit in the way it’s put back together. This occasion was no different. The program went for two hours duration, the bulk of which was taken up with me trying various ways of rearranging the components of the landscape in an attempt to find the most agreeable composition. These were the components: three living spruce trees; two dead trees; two dwarf azaleas; several perennial ground covers and a few rocks. True to form, I went into the work with only a rudimentary idea of what should happen, intent on experimenting to find the right combination. This was an honest representation of how the sausage gets made, although it demanded a good deal of patience from the audience.

In the end I had to eliminate one of the living trees because there wasn’t enough room in the container for everything. Those trees were considerably smaller when the planting was last repotted. With one eye on the clock, I found an arrangement I could live with and wrapped up the program. This is how the landscape looked at that point:

Even before bringing the planting back to the shop, I knew I hadn’t gotten it right. Once back at the shop and without an audience, I took the planting apart and put it back together differently:

It would have been nice if I could have gotten to the final design before the demonstration program ended, but I ran out of time. Bonsai should never be done by the clock.

Finally, in reference to the title of this entry, one week from today will be the technical first day of spring. All this week the weather has been glorious, more in keeping with the end of spring rather than with its beginning. We were having daytime temperatures in the upper sixties to upper seventies, and nighttime temperatures staying in the fifties. Last night, however, we dropped down to a degree below freezing accompanied by a heavy frost. The forecast for the coming week calls for four nights in a row where the temperature will be in the twenties, and one day when the high will be thirty seven degrees.

Well, it’s still winter, after all. Some of the very earliest plants in the bonsai garden landscape have poked their heads up out of the ground, while most are still dormant. Those earliest plants are usually pretty tough — they’ll probably make it.

Report From the End(?) of Winter