Guests to the Easter brunch at my house will be greeted not by bunnies or chicks or baskets of spring flowers.

My welcome: Pots full of evergreens. Dried, dust-covered evergreens. The kind left over from Christmas.

By this time of year, I normally have removed said evergreens and planted the containers on my front stoop and porch with something springy -- pansies or violas or even sweet peas.

But this is no normal year. It's been too darn cold and wet for me to want to plant anything. Heck, I haven't even wanted to spend the time it would take to unplant the containers I did for the holidays.

We did have one nice weekend. And I spent it cutting back all the stuff I should have cut back in the fall. See, I left the miscanthus, the feather reed grass, the sedums and the coneflowers to give my garden so-called "winter interest."

Problem is, the first of the many whopper snow storms we had squashed my winter interest like a bug. When all the snow melted, my winter interest was reduced to a mass of smashed, molding stems. It looked much, much worse than no interest at all.

Instead of just carping about the seasons (which I seem to be doing), I'm going to make this a learning opportunity. Here are my lessons:

1. To heck with winter interest. From now on, I'm going to clear cut my garden each and every fall.

2. There's no way I'm going to garden in the cold. The warm weather will come. I'll wait for it. Inside.

3. Evergreens can be a sign of spring. Especially when you dust them off and stick in a few plastic flowers.