April The roofs are shining from the rain. The sparrows twitter as they fly. And with a wind April grace The little clouds go by. Yet the back-yards are bare and brown With only one unchanging tree-- I could not be so sure of Spring Save that it sings in me. --Sara Teasdale The queen of all garden blogger musing is Carolyn Gail at Sweet Home and Garden Chicago. Check her out for other great musings on the sweet month of April.

And one of my children is sick. Why is it when a mother tries to leave town, she or one of the children usually gets sick? The Diva has been listless for days, but still attending school. This morning, I made her stay home, and she fainted, hitting her head, and jamming her finger and knee. The Diva faints when she's really sick or badly hurt. Now, the poor thing is both. When, she passed out, I was at my mother's house. Mom is better, but still needs help. I picked up some prescriptions for her. Thinking the Diva was safe at home without me, I stayed and talked with my aunt and uncle who traveled from Missouri to perform some household repairs. My cell phone rang, and I couldn't get to it in time. When Mom's phone rang moments later, I knew there was a problem. Several cases of...

In the city, everything is coming up green, but further north and rural, we see mostly purple and gray. No school-box Crayola Spring Green or Fern for us. Native Oklahoma redbuds (Cercis canadensis) dot the countryside with color where they stand against charcoal gray, scrub oaks. The oaks don't trust our warm weather. They've been fooled before. As I write, dark gray storm clouds gather overhead, and raindrops splatter outside my open windows. We had fierce storms last night that spawned nighttime tornadoes (the most dangerous kind) at 1:00 a.m. They danced all around my house, one coming within three tenths of a mile. Another hit part of Edmond causing damage, but no one was hurt. I was asleep and heard nothing until the one land-line telephone we still own rang downstairs. HH and I woke and discovered we'd lost power. Losing electricity isn't unusual where we live. With the...

For the months of February and March, the Garden Bloggers' Book Club read Second Nature, by Michael Pollan. The book details Pollan's attempts to grow a garden on the old dairy farm he and his wife purchased in Connecticut in 1983. When, at the beginning of his enterprise, Pollan quoted Henry David Thoreau's Walden, I thought, "uh-oh." In college, I, too, was heavily influenced by Walden, and tried Thoreau's method of gardening without much success. It should be noted that Thoreau's bean field wasn't very successful either. At first, Pollan is a sympathetic protagonist against the various critters who want his tasty vegetables for themselves. I laughed aloud when he wouldn't fence his garden against a marauding woodchuck. When the woodchuck nearly drives him to firebombing its burrow, he realizes he must revise some of his gardening ideals. In the process, he discovers that, at Walden, Thoreau wasn't so much...