The first blooms appear in February, with bright yellow colonies of winter aconite followed by drifts of nodding snowdrops. There are only a few bloodroot and Mayapple plants, due perhaps to renters who removed the protective and nourishing cover of fallen leaves in recent years. Numerous sugar maple seedlings left to grow into saplings may have shifted the balance as well, depleting the soil of nutrients that were not returned and monopolizing the available moisture. The strip of soil along the back fence where the sugar maples congregate is mostly barren, in stark contrast to the abundant growth elsewhere. Two peony bushes produce only a bloom or two, remnants of an area that must have once received more light before the trees matured.
Wild roses push through the front fence in one of the sunnier spots in the yard.
Scarlet trumpet creeper vine, left to its own devices, has snaked its long, thick roots through the soil to send up shoots through clumps of daylilies and phlox, scrambling up trees and shrubs wherever it can. Grape vines, black raspberry canes, and rhubarb persist where there were once gooseberry and currant bushes as well, offering fruits to be made into jams. Around the same time my house was being built and its landscape enshrined, May Theilgaard Watts was living in Ravinia, Illinois, and writing a booklet urging people to leave intact the trees and woodland plants that attracted them to the area, rather than decimating them and replacing them with lawns and exotic plants. Watts was a writer, naturalist, and conservationist. The various directions of Watts' life all sprang from her love of the earth that led her to examine nature, find the stories there, share those stories through teaching and writing, and fight to preserve that which she valued through her work as a conservationist.