Truncated Spring

Merely a few weeks back, on March 14, I wrote a blog full of hope for a gradual and beautiful Spring. "Irrepressible Spring", I titled it.  At the time, we'd had warm weather and it looked like everything was in place for a gradual, unprecedented garden year.  The plants were all greening and budding up.  Redbuds and lilacs looked like I've never seen before.  To borrow the style of our current President, "no one in Kansas has ever seen anything like it before, it was going to be spectacular!" 

It turns out that Spring can he suppressed. Now I'm reminded of Euripides; "Deus quos vult perdere, dementat prius", which Google translates as "God first drives mad, those he wants to destroy."  One very cold night about two weeks ago, as in my last blog, my hopes turned to dust, to browned buds of yet-unborn flowers and shriveled leaves. Early growth on the roses was wiped out, daylilies were killed down to the ground, and most buds on lilacs browned and fell off.  My redbuds never bloomed, nor did the forsythia to any great degree.  The bloom of Magnolia stellata I featured in the previous blog is, alas, the only one I am to see or smell this year.  To give you some idea of the losses, the picture at left is Magnolia 'Jane' just 3 days ago, a few stray buds blooming near the ground, nearly every other bud on the bush a dried and shriveled husk. 

Of all my lilacs, only 'Declaration', a Syringa hyacinth cultivar, bloomed in any abundance, an entertaining treat to the bumblebee as pictured above.  Three or 4 years old, it struggles in a dry summer, but is now repaying my efforts to periodically give it some extra water.  I'll gladly accept its tribute to my toils.

Paeonia tenuifolia, the Fern-leaf Peony, survived the cold, which didn't surprise me now because I know the delicate foliage hides a resilient nature.  A month ago, this clump was 6 inches high and the new foliage felt like velvet, its promise still curled against the cold.  Now it blooms alone in my front landscape; a bright red remedy for a broken heart.  

Of all my Magnolias, only the blooms of tardy 'Yellow Bird' survived the frozen night.  Now, it lights up the back yard, the only sign of its struggles perhaps that its yellow hues are a little lighter  than in previous years, at least it made it through the cold.  A lot of my Spring optimism rides with 'Yellow Bird' each year, so I'm thankful to see that its delayed timing strategy worked once again.

Now, I bide my time, waiting to see what recovers; to discover what will develop and flower normally and what may still yet be affected.  The peony, rose and daylily seasons come in rapid waves of succession soon, and, chastened, I hold no anticipation now that all will be normal in the year to come.  I merely will wait and hope the garden will provide.

Calamities & Casualties

Dead/dried Forsythia blossoms

"If you want different weather, just wait 15 minutes and it will change."   Every Midwestern American gardener knows some version of the prior statement, but I maintain that Kansas gardeners live and suffer this axiom daily.  For proof of my assertion, I offer this blog to prosperity, a historical, if not hysterical, example of the trials and tribulations in a Kansas garden.  Start, if you can stand the pain, with this photo of the dead and dried remnants of forsythia that remain today as testaments to the trials and despair of gardening in Kansas.

A promising display snuffed out

If you review the lovely early blooms and thoughts in my previous blog entry of  3/13/2026, and the scrumptious photos of daffodils from 3/01/2026, it will be obvious that this year I had high hopes for a rare, gradual transition to Spring weather, gentle winds, slowly-increasing daily high temperatures, and soaking periodic rains.  Today, I look wistfully back at those hopes and want to shake myself out of a nightmare, curious only to know who spiked my cereal with hallucinogens to create such fantasies, and what actual pharmaceuticals were used.  The photo at the left is the same Forsythia bush that is the second photo in my blog of 3/13/2026, without any of the just-starting-to open yellow buds of the latter.

These once were daffodils

On approximately 3/15/2026, the weather patterns took a sharp cold turn, record lows on several nights leaving me with the remnants of formerly jubilant plants that are pictured here, gasping and crying at tattered and dwindling dreams of  paradise denied.  Not only did the cold spell crush any nascent anticipation I had for the most vivid forsythia display in many years, it prevented any recovery from unflowered buds.  It also transformed growing sprouts of plants that normally are quite cold-resistant into shapeless and slimy piles of dead vegetation. These daffodils had only 2 days of bloom and no time at all to store energy for next year.  Can they survive?

These used to be irises

And worse, there has been no real moisture yet, no showers to quench the thirsty soil and replenish the ground stores stolen in our arid winters.  The earth around these plants is dry dust, no help for sparking any rebound in these poor perennials.  How can an Iris come back from this kind of damage?

Even the daylilies are in shock

I have yet to spend much time in the garden this season, weeks and nearly months delayed beyond normal chores, and I feel despair at every step into the outdoors.  I fear, presently, that the garden will lose an entire season, bypassing spring bulbs and blooms in all their pastel glories and moving on straight past lilacs to peonies or roses, if indeed, either of the latter survive to bloom.  I've never seen daylilies in this condition after a spring freeze and every clump looks like this.  Will this be the year without daylilies?  What spark remains for the gardener's soul when hope has fled?

Irrepressible Spring

The first 2026 Magnolia stellata

Color is returning to the landscape, foretelling Spring right around the corner, just past another cold spell or two, and along with the cheery garden tones rises the mood of ProfessorRoush.  I'm starting to feel the itch, aren't you?  You know which itch that I'm talking about; the itch to get outside, breathe clear air, feel the sunshine on your skin.  The itch to feel alive.

'Meadowlark' Forsythia

Oh, if only the wind would die down just a little more and the sun would shine just a smidge brighter, and the air would feel just a touch warmer on my cheeks!   I don't feel I'm asking for too much; it is not like I expect yet the soil to be warm and moist as I run my fingers into the ground, or that I am disappointed that the asparagus is not yet bringing forth a fresh crop.  These things will come along in their time.  Right now I just want Paradise: sunny days, gentle breezes, thirst-quenching gentle rains at night, and a gradual transition to Spring.  A return to Eden is the eternal dream of Man.

Dutch Iris & complimentary Siberian Squill

But, alas, these brave early explorers, the precocious first open bloom of Magnolia stellata, the vivid yellow blooms of  'Meadowlark' (Forsythia ovata X Forsythia europaea) and 'Golden Times' Forsythia (Forsythia intermedia 'Golden Times'), the shy grape hyacinths (Muscari sp), and the purple Dutch iris (I think?) complimented by the self-spreading squill, these are, all of them, soon to be punished for their boldness.  They've brought joy and light and color into my world at present, but tomorrow's forecast is for snow and 60 mph sustained winds, a blizzard busting in on my celebration.

Grape Hyacinths

I could rave on and on about the necessity of Forsythia in the Spring landscape, even while the yellow hue of most cultivars is seldom perfectly clean enough for my taste.  I could disclose the nostalgic reasons for maintaining this single clump of grape hyacinths in my garden, the descendants of memories brought with me from my boyhood Indiana home, even as they display the ravages of my fickle Kansas climate.  I could lament the brief  display of the Dutch iris blooms near my front walkway or the foolish waste of  the blushing Star Magnolia bloom, destined tomorrow to be merely a brown shriveled husk, if it can be found at all.

'Golden Times' Forsythia

Nay, I will instead speak here only of the gift and the beauty of these flowers, however fleeting.  They are portents, harbingers of  sunnier days and warmer soil to come.  Promising Spring, they prophesize the awakening of the world, a new season of growth, and the banishment of all forms of ice from our lives.  Blooming now, they call me out into the world, they stir my soul, and they awaken my spirit.  I am forever grateful for these first flowers of Spring.

Halfway Insanity

Scilla siberica

You all know ProfessorRoush hates the seasonal time change even under the best circumstances, right?  But, facing the semi-annual, government-imposed, tyrannic shift of one hour in my biorhythms this weekend, just when I thought the world couldn't get any more crazy, it did indeed take one more step towards the abyss.  I was minding my own business the other day, deep in my morning pre-work routine with the local news playing in the background, when I heard something said about a proposal before Congress to make Daylight Savings time a 30 MINUTE shift instead of a full hour. Since no one could conceiveably be that cuckoo, I assumed I was hallucinating and went on about my day.   

But, NO, if you look it up, a U.S. Representative, Florida Republican Greg Steube, has introduced the "Daylight Act of 2026",  proposing to permanently set US clocks ahead by a HALF HOUR.  Now, make no mistake, I am completely down with moving to permanent Daylight Savings Time, but a full hour forward, not just 30 minutes! Of all the idiotic, backward, confusing, imbecilic, dumb (I'm now out of adverbs) ideas, this one is a prize-winner.  

Abeliophyllum  distichum ‘Roseum’

American's have enough trouble with the metric system, but now some Floridian moron wants us to remember that the time in England (Greenwich Mean Time or "GMT") is now 5.5 hours ahead of the Central Time Zone?  Or that, if I am phoning Berlin Germany, it is 6.5 instead of 7 hours ahead?  Why not just go ahead and make the shift 35 minutes ahead while we are trying to complicate life?   Or 29 minutes ahead?

Folks, we have to kill this bill and quick.  The sentiment to get the government out of our biologic clocks and stop messing with us on a semi-annual basis is spot on point, but let's keep it simple and make it an even hour, please, so that we aren't further down the rabbit hole of separation from the rest of the world.   Write your Congressman, write your Senators and voice your opposition!  Let We The People be heard!  

Abeliophyllum  distichum 'Roseum'

Sometimes, I am tempted to support a return to tarring and feathers, and  this is close to one of those times.  If that's what it takes to keep this insanity from becoming policy, then I'll supply the firewood.

Oh, yeah, regarding the photos here:  Spring is coming on strong, and I've witnessed the first Scilla siberica (top right) this week, and the Pink Forsythia (Abeliophyllum  distichum ‘Roseum’‘Roseum’) is in full bloom.  I always wish the latter had a better, less straggly form, and more prominent blooms, but this early in the season, I try to cherish whatever I can get!