I was wandering around my garden today and was so pleased to see the way everything looks. For San Francisco, where you are lucky if you don’t have just dried paper for leaves by the time fall rolls around, spring is the most beautiful season for foliage. It’s not only on the deciduous trees, but also on a lot of evergreens. In the spring the junipers put out a beautiful flush of new growth and so do evergreen oaks, maples have more color in the spring, and the new leaves opening look like a fan unfolding. I definitely look forward to it every year.

Spring is late this year though; for the past three years I had shown my small maple tree with leaves on it, but this year it didn’t have a single leaf on it at show time. Spring is about two weeks behind normal by my estimate and as I write this another round of cold rain has come in and started to fall. The trees don’t seem to mind so much; since it doesn’t freeze in SF they just grow more slowly until the weather warms up.
Of the plants that I dug from my front yard last fall I have had reasonably good success. I lost a cork oak, but had success with a valley oak; and I lost a bouganvilla but succeeded with a cedar, four Japanese maples and a kingsville boxwood. The majority of them had been planted there two years or longer…some having been dug each year for root trimming and others having not. They are all sending out new flushes of spring growth which look fresh and beautiful.

I think that one reason that spring is so nice is that none of the insects and diseases affect the leaves until later in the year. Summer growth on deciduous oaks is beset with powdery mildew; maples, although sometimes preventable, suffer from the same thing. I don’t even really have flowering trees; maybe I should get some to make me love spring even more.

I should say that the best thing of all this spring is that my large oak has finally started pushing buds. I am so attached to it that I worried all winter about it just not growing. After I wired it last summer a few of the small branches died, which made me quite nervous; then some of my other oaks pushed new growth in the fall and it didn’t, which made me more nervous. One curious thing though, on a couple of the small branches where all the leaves turned brown there are new buds coming out, which I really didn’t expect.

Tag: spring