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?