"...and leave, if nought so bright may live,/All earth can take, or Heaven can give". No doubt there are greater glories than a garden in spring, but I find that this one already outruns my capacity for wonder and joy, though I enforce my attention to marvel at it.

For the last week or so I've been down in our woodland corridor clearing brush. This is a roughly 100' wide strip of woods that descends below the shade garden, with a drainage running through it. DH cleared a permanent path a year or two ago, and we got busy pulling the ivy that was tearing trees down, and then proceeded to cut and chop up the dead branches and live wild plum, ligustrum, willow, and brambles that make it such an impassable mess. The idea is to turn the corridor into a pleasure wood. It's a sweet spot once tidied, with some nice trees, and picturesque rocks. I started by clearing around a Cornelian cherry which I remembered. This is Cornus mas, one of our two native dogwoods. The commoner redtwig dogwood, C. sanguinea, is invasive and of no particular virtue; but Cornelian cherry is a beautiful large shrub or small tree, a cloud of pale yellow bloom in March, with handsome branching, and very interesting scaly-feathery bark on older specimens. The problem is that when the plants are young I can't tell the two species apart. So in my clearing I'm trying to identify the Cornelian cherries and not cut them down in mistake for redtwig dogwoods. The clearing is going slowly, but it moves forward.
Melissa

We've had some springs where things all started to bloom together but nothing as dramatic as roses and hyacinths. I'm waiting to see what happens this spring. It's still so cold out and the ground is still icy so we're already a good two weeks behind when things should have started to bloom.