Rites of Spring

Over the last two weeks we've been experiencing that annual rite of Spring, when the Azaleas, and the Dogwoods blossom, while the tall pines and sundry trees that adjoin our property scatter their pollen and seeds everywhere. It is not a little. Over those weeks I have bagged up six 40 gallon containers worth for the compost heap. Soft wooly bears in bright green, worm like pine droppings and ever present pine straw, along with some branches and pine cones have dispersed over every inch of the landscape turning it into a carpet of yearning new life. And yet, whether I rake or blow it or do nothing at all, just a tiny percentage of all that propagation ever succeeds.

Now I am sure that the bugs, squirrels and birds--including the formidable flock of crows that prefer our yard in the early hours of dawn all take their share of nature's provender, and we have been shy the soft rains that typically mark this time of year leaving the soil moist and ready. For all that, I am struck by the abundance that yields so little, as if nature has learned by bitter experience that birth is not an easy thing.

In contrast seedlings and grass sprout in the cracks of the brick patio, and in the newly mulched beds, places where life is sheltered from the herbivores and weather that might end it before it even begins. Don't get me wrong, I love this time of year, the fragrances and colors and the transformation of stark bare branches and leafless limbs, just as I do the Fall, even if I wish the cycle would require a little less work on my part.

When I was a toddler and for a few years after I lived with my Grandparents. An annual ritual was a visit to a neighborhood in Westchester that was known colloquially as Azalea Hill. I don't know the story behind it but smack in the midst of an otherwise commonplace residential neighborhood was a hilly lot covered from top to bottom with Azaleas planted in successive rows of pink, purple, white and red. For a few weeks every year this man made marvel was in full bloom and it never failed to dazzle me. I also enjoyed the ice cream cone we got from a nearby dairy--both rewards for a long drive in a hot, stuffy car.

I've often wondered who owned that hill, and why it was spared the development that had leveled all the adjacent properties and planted houses instead of flowers. In our neighborhood there is no such abundance, just a few bushes here and there, a handful of early flowering trees that dress up the otherwise monotonous greens of lawns manicured or unkempt, signaling the disposition of their owners. Someone had a vision and the means to realize it for the benefit of all. Which got me to thinking, do we decorate our homes with plantings for our own enjoyment or for the admiration of passersby? Maybe it is a little of both. Pride of place, and a sign to others; an Easter outfit we don in our annual attempt to impress, perhaps spark a bit of harmless envy.

I've spent enough time walking through virgin forest, or at least forest that has not seen the marks of human intervention in decades to observe a few things. It does not take a long time for nature to reclaim our feeble attempts to cultivate, claim and decorate. If one is observant it is possible to spot what man has left behind, a stone wall, lilac bushes spaced the width of a door marking the entrance to what was once someone's home. But these are buried under growth, seemingly random, occasionally majestic, and in varied stages of birth and death. It is thoroughly classless, scrub pine and birch softwoods side by side ancient oaks and towering white pine in the woods near my former home in New Hampshire. Nature is an egalitarian casting seed and spore where the winds and animals choose, each vying for the sun's rays and rain to feed them.

It is we humans who so briefly impose our sense of order, who practice our agrarian arts to decorate, to feed or level, even to scorched earth, for residence, industry or war. We are not as capable as Nature itself, our efforts do not stand long before they are reclaimed and that is a lesson we should heed. In the words of Somerset Maugham, "Nothing in the world is permanent, and we're foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we're still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it."