Talking to My Plants

Blogging about my garden before most of the plants have arrived turns out to be not my brightest idea ever.  I've been racking my brain trying to come up with ideas for posts.  My colleague Erika suggested I blog about the plants in Central Park, which is a pretty good idea.

But then this morning, I noticed something bloggable about the least likely plant in my garden.

Yup, it's the Dwarf Alberta Spruce.  I've actually been sort of worried about it because, well, I talk to my plants.  So every morning I water my Japanese Maple and tell it what a good, beautiful tree it is.

(I really have to learn to move the furniture out of the photos...)

Then I move over to the Dwarf Alberta Spruce and feel guilty for having let it overhear my lavish praise for the other tree.  So I give it the "You can do it!" speech, but I bet even trees know that  the "You can do it!" speech means you haven't actually done anything yet.  And so I've made my tree feel like a failure before I've even had breakfast.

Maybe I'm overthinking this.

Anyway, this morning, I took a closer look at the brown buds at the ends of the brown branches of the brown Dwarf Alberta Spruce.   Turns out they're doing exactly what buds are supposed to do in the spring.  They're budding.

See those tiny bits of green appearing towards the end of the branch?  Those were not there a couple of days ago.  Some of the other branches have these little sprouts too.

So the Dwarf Alberta Spruce lives.  Maybe it's sibling rivalry with the Japanese Maple.  Maybe it's being outdoors in the cool air that vaguely reminds it of its ancestral homeland, Alberta.  Maybe it's just a tree doing what trees do in the spring.

Or maybe, just maybe, it's the "You can do it!" speech.