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.
