fog, drizzle: wind gusts: 46ºF

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a moveable holiday called “Groundbreaking Day?” We’d all get together to celebrate the day when all of the spring bulbs have poked their tightly folded leaves above ground. This would be that day.

A week ago only a few daffodil straps were showing. Now after a few days of warm sun with temperatures in the 70s followed by a day of soaking rain, every spring thing is finally up. Last week the spring beds in this botanical garden were uninterrupted expanses of dark mulch. This week the mulch beds are dotted with sprouts of green.

This morning the damp weather is keeping most of the early spring bulbs closed. Crocuses and snowdrops are the mainstays of the garden right now, but here and there I saw a few yellow aconites, some of dwarf irises (Iris reticulata) and one or two white bell-flowered spring snowflakes (Leucojum vernum). The tip of each snowflake petal is marked with these distinctive green and yellow dots.

I walked over to a star magnolia planted in a spot where it gets some protection on its north and west sides. More than a few of the fuzzy pussy-willow-like casings that protected the blooms all winter have started to split and crack open. Since magnolia blossoms don’t take well to cold, I’ll consider their emergence as a sign that we’ve seen the last of winter.

Piles and piles of these droppings: all in the same flower bed in one corner of this botanical garden’s Ottoman Garden. They’re pellets of scat from something. I tried without success to identify the droppings from a web site that classified scat by its form (pellet, tubular, smooth, segmented, and the like). The result: I was looking at the droppings of a deer, and elk, or a llama. Huh? So I started again. This time thinking about creatures most likely to be here in this walled urban garden – cats, squirrels, rabbits, and because I’d seen them here a few times, I included foxes too. Google images of animal crap eliminated cats and foxes – both tubular. Squirrels and rabbits both poop pellets, but squirrel pellets are much smaller than the ones I saw. That left rabbits. I checked a web page called ‘Why does my bunny poop so much?’ and found that rabbits drop about a hundred pellets a day and that they can be litter trained because they have a habit come to the same area again and again to drop their pellets. So rabbit crap it is.

Several years ago I ordered snow drops bulbs to plant in my garden at home. The ratio of bulbs bought to snow drops actually seen was about 50:1. I gave up buying them when I learned that snowdrop bulbs are unusually prone to drying out. The result: I was just burying the dead when I planted them in my garden.

This week I found an alternative to bulbs. I saw one of the keepers of this garden kneeling beside a cart filled with still blooming snowdrops that had been freshly dug, cleaned, and neatly separated into individual plants. With her trowel, she was digging a hole for each one. When she was finished there was a new bed of snowdrops. The bed looks skimpy this year, but wait a few years and I know I’ll see drifts of snowdrops here.

From a book I have by English plantsman Rod Leeds (Early Bulbs) I read that the technique I saw of dividing and moving live snowdrops is called “in the green.” In the U.K., selling snowdrops “in the green” seems to be a pretty common way to buy the little flowers.

Witch hazels aren’t known for being tidy. Left alone, the shrubs grow in unpredictable ways. The flowers aren’t orderly either. The petals are wavy, supple, and they fly off in different directions with the slightest breeze. This morning, I found this witch hazel that’s much more suitable for people who like things more predictable, neat, and even. In the Chinese Scholar's Garden, there’s this Chinese witch hazel named ‘Brevipetala’ -- short petal. Its petals are short; they’re stiff; they’re all the same length; and they neatly radiate in all directions around a central core. Brevipetala – a straight-laced member of a wild, unruly family.