Spring Green = Go

"April prepares her green traffic light and the world thinks Go."
--Christopher Morley

I am finding the above quote to be very true this year. And since I mostly neglected my garden in April when all of the traffic lights turned green, May finds me cleaning up a few garden fender-benders.

In the first picture, you see an overeager dianthus rear-ending the twisty blue foliage of allium senescens var. glaucum. It's not that I didn't know the dianthus would spread... it's that I had planned to move these beautiful little alliums before now. I want to show off their fabulous foliage, but haven't yet figured out a good stage for them and so they remain.

The 'Sum and Substance' type hosta that I dug up at work is obviously ready to get the summer started. I didn't take a big division, but some of those leaves are already bigger than my hand.

Notice the little purplish seedlings causing a bit of a traffic jam at the base of the hosta? Those are atriplex hortensis var. rubra. And to think that I was worried it wouldn't reseed this year... good thing I didn't find another packet to buy! I think that these babies will look lovely in the bed with drumstick alliums, baptisia australis, 'Lacinato' kale and asclepias tuberosa, so I'll be moving a few of them soon.

The last mess is really the worst kind--one of my own making. I bought a little quart of lysimachia ciliata, aka fringed loosestrife, at a local Master Gardener plant sale last year. The gardener who brought it assured me that it isn't a problem in her garden at all. Frankly, I detected some attitude in her voice while she answered my questions... at one point, she kind of looked down her nose at me and said in a patronizing tone, "You surely know that this is NOT the purple loosestrife that is a problem in local wetlands, right?"

Yes, I did. I also know that I am not immune to the pull of my own foolish pride every once in a while... and so my purchase was only partly due to my weakness for purple foliage. After all, I couldn't let this woman think that I was scared of a little loosestrife, right? Right?

The loosestrife behaved very well last year and bloomed prettily in late summer. As you can see in the picture, though, the little purple rosettes are all coming up at the edge of the pot that I used to contain it. This may be my imagination, but I'm afraid that they're taking spring's green light as an okay to jump ship and escape the pot. I don't love the plant enough to live with this worry, and I can think of a number of wonderful substitutes, so it's being evicted.

Within the week, I should have these and a few other messes cleared up in the garden. Only when all is moving along smoothly again will I give myself a green light to resume planting and other, more amusing spring projects. If that's not incentive to get to work on my spring cleaning, I don't know what is!