In Spring: Month

April gardening is an act of faith. You put peas in the cold ground because the book says you can. You plant potatoes on Good Friday because your grandmother always did. You have no guarantee of success. The ground might freeze again. A late snow might crush everything. But you do it anyway. Because April is not the month of results. It is the month of trying . Here is the secret of April: the days are getting longer at their fastest rate of the year. Each morning, the sun rises a minute and a half earlier. Each evening, it sets a minute and a half later. By the end of the month, we have gained nearly three hours of light. Three hours!

So here is to the middle child of spring. Here is to the month that cannot make up its mind. Here is to the puddles and the crocuses, the wood frogs and the phoebes, the green haze on the hillsides and the last, stubborn patches of snow in the north-facing ditches. month in spring

And then—the green. Oh, the green. It arrives overnight, it seems. One morning you look across the valley and the trees are still gray twigs. The next morning, they are wrapped in a haze the color of pistachio. This is the famous "spring green," a shade that painters have tried and failed to capture for centuries. It is not a color so much as an event. It is the sound of chlorophyll rushing through a trillion tiny veins. It is the planet holding its breath and then letting it out all at once. The bird feeders, neglected all winter, suddenly become battlefields. The goldfinches are losing their olive drab for buttercup yellow. The juncos, those snowbirds, are packing their bags for the north, and in their place come the newcomers: the phoebe, pumping its tail on a fence post; the kinglet with its jewel-like crown; and finally, the herald of everything good, the song sparrow, singing from the highest branch of the lilac bush. April gardening is an act of faith