A Good Day To Be A Gardener

Dark-Eyed Junco

If there’s one sure sign of winter for me, it’s the return of the dark-eyed juncos. These adorable little birds appear in late fall and stay all winter, and then one day in spring I realize that I haven’t seen one for awhile. Five minutes later it’s August, because this is North Carolina, after all, and seasons are more of a mutually agreed-upon fiction than an actual meteorological event.

Case in point, we had our first hard frost two days ago. It is currently about seventy-two degrees outside, and I went out and stuck the last of the bulbs in the ground, then slung some mulch around, because the weather is too painfully glorious to stay indoors.

The view, of course, is not so glorious at this moment—while the three-inch blanket of leaves hides a multitude of weedy sins, the frost did take out the exotic salvias that bloom so gloriously in fall. The pineapple sage, which was an explosion of golden leaves and red flower spikes three days ago is now an explosion of dead stems. The tropical milkweed is dead as a doornail (although the tiny orange aphids are not.) And there is also the small matter of the woodpecker snag that lost the top twenty feet a week ago, which knocked a profusion of branches into one of my flowerbeds, which require some quality time with the bow saw.

This is not, however, just a complaint about schizoid North Carolina weather. The first warm day following several days of cold in last fall is arguably the best bird-watching you’re going to get outside of migration season. All the birds who were hunkered down in the cold come bopping out to warm up and grab a bite to eat.

I knew it was going to be a good day in the garden when we drove up the driveway, on the way back from the farmer’s market, and had to slow to a crawl while the birds hopped and flutterd out of the way. The driveway needs to be re-graveled in a bad way, so it’s full of ruts that fill up with rainwater. At the moment, this (and our pond) are the primary water source in our neighborhood, and EVERYBODY was out getting a drink. I even saw a yellow-bellied sapsucker down on the ground, crouching awkwardly amid some robins, drinking from a puddle.

I went out with my binoculars and sat on the porch, just watching the show. My boyfriend brought me a hot cup of coffee, because he is awesome like that.  (He had to learn about the birding madness, after the time he was awakened at 5 AM, on a beach vacation, when I called him from a pier some two-hundred yards from the hotel room yelling “Northern gannets! They have northern gannets!”* (His response was “Where are you? Are you wearing pants?” in that order.))

I keep a yardlist of birds that have shown up in the garden, and today added a couple to it. A positively glorious ruby-crowned kinglet was poking around in the pine trees, and a flock of cedar waxwings had descended on—astonishingly!—the cedar tree. Various warblers, too distant and too cryptic to make out, flitted between the sprays of pine needles. (I know I can’t ID them, but I still try. “Look! An eye-ring, maybe! And it’s got yellow…ish…and there’s a…bugger, there it goes. Ooh! I see a tail feather!”) A house wren was actually lurking in the garden proper, until it was driven off by a Carolina wren. Carolina wrens own the place, as far as they are concerned.

Meanwhile, a monochromatic parade is on the feeder—Carolina chickadees, tufted titmice and white-breasted nuthatches, all of them resplendent in black and white and gray. They’re the great constants in the garden.

Once I’d run out of coffee and my wrists were getting binocular strain, I did a little light yardwork. None of it really needs doing right now, but when you get a seventy-degree day in mid-November, how can you not? And if you don’t putter around in the garden, how will you notice that the toothwort is coming up, (yay! It lived!) that the goldenstar cutting actually rooted, that the thrice-accursed autumn olive is not dead, despite your best efforts, and that the Carolina jessamine, in a fit of misplaced enthusiasm, is throwing flowers out four months early?

Even if the garden is ugly right now (and the garden is ugly) you only get so many days of warm late-fall weather to putter around and watch the birds cavort in the trees and curse the perfidy of bulb-digging squirrels. So it doesn’t matter that everything is brown mush and ragged tatters. In three or four years, it’ll be spectacular, right? You’ll finally get that winter interest thing figured out. It’s only a matter of time, really.

And meanwhile, it’s a good day to be a gardener.

*What? Gannets are exciting!

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