It won't be long now. In a month or so, winter begins its retreat -- grudgingly at first, one degree at a time. Days grow longer already; I can see people's yards now, sans headlights, on my way to work.
Come March, many of the yards I pass will be filled with flowering forsythias, those harbingers of hope for the season.
Is there a brighter sentinel of spring than the forsythia, in all its sunny splendor? Graceful yellow boughs curl upward toward the sky, beckoning us to come closer, closer, to see that winter's gone.
Forsythia seems to trumpet spring's arrival overnight. One day the shrub is a tangled web of bare brown stems; the next, it is filled with bell-shaped blossoms that blanket the entire bush.
It's as if the forsythia cannot wait to bloom: The showy flowers appear long before the leaves, which come later, after the shrub has exploded in lemony brilliance. A grander plant there isn't, in early spring, when little else save crocuses are heralding the season.
The forsythia has long been an American favorite. Hardy, pest-free and drought-tolerant, the fast-growing, fountain-shaped shrub gained immense popularity when imported from China in the mid-19th century.
The plant honors William Forsyth, a noted 18th-century gardener and inventor of sorts. (Ironically, Forsyth never crossed paths with his namesake shrub. He was best known for concocting what he believed to be a cure-all for plant maladies, a kind of horticultural chicken soup. Forsyth's "miracle brew" consisted of sand, soap, manure, lime, wood ashes and urine.)
The forsythia adapts to almost any soil, including heavy clay. It tolerates strong alkaline soils that would kill most shrubs. Despite a shallow root system, the forsythia thrives on neglect, demanding water only when the plant is very young, or during a drought.
Though extreme cold won't hurt the shrub, it may damage the buds, which are hardy to minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit. Destroy the buds and the bush won't bloom. Frankly, if the bush doesn't bloom, there is little to recommend the forsythia, which fades into green-leaved obscurity for the rest of the year.
Other factors can affect flowering as well. Though it will survive in partial shade (forsythias have been known to reach heights of 15 feet), the plant yields bolder blooms if grown in full sun. Shearing a row of the shrubs in the shape of a formal hedge is also counterproductive: All of the flowers form on top of the plants, producing a line of forsythias with bizarre yellow crew cuts.
Because forsythias grow quickly, and in every direction, many gardeners cultivate them en masse as an informal (and impenetrable) screen. Their branches seem to race to hold hands, linking stems to create a formidable barrier favored by songbirds for shelter.
The shrub's rambling habit can create havoc when the forsythia oversteps its bounds. Once, a row of young forsythias lined the east slope of my vegetable garden. They looked gorgeous in spring, filling me with a heady optimism as I toiled to prepare the plot. The shrubs also helped anchor the soil and prevent erosion.
But the forsythias grew larger and larger, creeping steadily toward the vegetable bed until the boughs reached over into the carrot patch. Well, that did it. Forsythias are pretty, but nothing comes between my veggies and me.
Efforts to trim the shrubs failed. Pruning forsythias is an arduous task: First, you must crawl beneath the low-lying branches, toward the base of each plant, and cut out the oldest, woodiest and most nonproductive stems. Then you must remove the dead boughs from the shrub, no small task considering the branches are tangled like pretzels.
I yanked and yanked but lost the tug-of-war to the plants. In desperation, I pulled out a saw and whacked every bush down to ground level.
The forsythias would have been allowed to grow back, had they not sought revenge. Soon after, while preparing the vegetable bed for planting, I drove into the garden in a pickup truck filled with manure. Bam! Flat tire. The wheel had struck a forsythia stump. I spent three hours changing that tire; the jack kept sinking into the soft loam. Worse, it began to rain.
Incensed, I dug up and discarded all the forsythia roots. I felt better then. I don't now. Spring is nigh, and I'm going to miss the opening credits.