Spring's Early Gifts

Southern Living, Feb 2004 by Thigpen, Charlie

Weary of winter? Celebrate the coming season with blooms cut from your yard.

Between winter and spring, there's a period when the garden just can't make up its mind. As winter yawns and begins to bow out, spring tries to slip through the back door. Plants are confused, not knowing if they should stay dormant or flower. The sun finally wins the seasonal battle, warming the earth and coaxing anxious buds to unfurl. These early flowers are special, and riding the coattails of a long, gray winter, they signal the beginning of another gardening year. Celebrate the new arrivals by clipping a few blooms to create arrangements.

These containers of flowers can be brought into your house, where they will brighten your day and fill the rooms with fragrance. Or you can strategically place them throughout the garden to create views and to draw guests into the yard. Cut flowers will last for days in the mild temperatures outdoors.

Clipping branches from small trees and shrubs helps to shape them. Limbs that are loaded with heavy blooms will benefit from the removal of some of the weight to keep the branches from breaking. Always clip them back to a crotch or a growth bud. Use sharp clippers to make clean cuts. Don't be afraid to take whole shoots back to the ground on shrubs such as quince, spirea, and forsythia. This promotes new growth from the base of these mounding plants, and the canes will make nice arching lines in arrangements.

These colorful bouquets showcase old-fashioned Southern plants from a February garden. Study the arrangements and the plants used to make them. Add a few blooming trees, shrubs, or bulbs to your landscape to jump-start the season, and with each passing year, you'll have more and more flowers to pick for arrangements.