Tulip Clusiana    photo: j jaman     (click to enlarge)

Spring drags it’s feet, arrives in fits and starts. After a winter that timed its killing freezes to do the most damage with the least effort, the kale plants are short knobby stumps, pushing out miniature leaves just barely as fast as we can pick them. Everything grows in slow motion.

Where is all the miner’s lettuce, the tastiest green this time of the year?  Usually by now I’m picking salads piled high with succulent stems and tender cup-shaped leaves, and hauling away heaping wheelbarrows-full to the compost pile. This year it should be called minor’s lettuce, the juvenile and delinquent salad green.

And where are the orange and yellow flowers, called Calendula by the Romans because they bloom every month of the year, a calender of flowers to garnish salads and anoint the skin?

Spring drags its feet, and my seedlings creep when they should jump. I could complain, but there

are other compensations, like the clusiana tulips that are new to my garden this year. For the longest time, ever since the crocus flowers faded away, a small colony of these pointy buds on long, slender, spear-shaped stems, have gathered to wage war on a winter that drags on against all odds.

They grow next to a small clump of arugula plants from seeds that blew away with the chaff when I was cleaning the seed from last year’s seed crop. The arugula makes a lovely green backdrop to view the clusiana tulips against. I’m letting this arugula clump go to seed, even though it’s in an inconvenient spot, too close to the path to my front door.

I ate so many leaves through the long winter from this tiny little clump that I want to honor it by letting it make babies, and age with dignity and grace. I want to let it stand like a prayer that I pass every time I come home. I want to eat its babies and its children’s children. I want to age with dignity into a graceful old age.