Unlike in most garden walks, any resident can exhibit -- and over 340 do. There are no admission fees. There are Japanese gardens, English gardens, Russian gardens (i.e., barely controlled wildernesses) and what I would call Buffalo gardens - eclectic, funky mixes in which found object and exotic-looking surrounding rooftops figure prominently. There's ubiquitous bee balm, which grows like a weed up there. There's a miniaturist intensity to many of the small back-yard enclosures. ~ Atlantic.com

The Buffalo GardenWalk is months away but now is the time to decide whether your patch of earth will be GardenWalk ready by July 30th & 31st this year. The application deadline is May 15th. The Garden Walk takes place primarily in these areas of Buffalo:

  • Elmwood Village
  • Symphony Circle & Kleinhans
  • the Cottage District
  • Historic West Village
  • Allentown
  • Fargo Estate Neighborhood
  • Columbus Park/Prospect Hill

My neighborhood, South Buffalo, is not included in that walk because of our location – over the skyway or through the rusted industrial landscape of the First Ward; it’s not a “tiptoe through the tulips” to our part of town. We have the Annual South Buffalo Garden Walk (to register your garden for this year’s garden walk call 826-3158). It's a sweet occasion where neighbors poke around each other’s yards, including my front yard garden. I save my backyard for the family.

My "Miniaturist Intensity"

Every spring, I long to bust sod in my backyard. If I lived anywhere else, I probably could start at the end of February. But here in Buffalo the spring weather is at its most temperamental. Every type of weather can happen in a single month — snow, sleet, rain, high winds, sunshine. It can be 70 degrees one day and snow the next. Not that the weather isn’t temperamental all year round in Buffalo.

A year and a half ago, seven feet of snow dropped on us in a single day. Seven feet of snow also fell in 2001, the year I moved here. I complained to my mother, who lived in Seattle at the time. She said, “The weather is the wonder there and if you don’t start appreciating it, you best move.” She has since moved here. She complains about the weather way more than I ever did, so it’s with particular relish that I remind her: “As you yourself said, ‘the weather is the wonder here’.” She wishes she had never said it.

But she was right.

And from that perspective, spring is truly the most wondrous season of all. This March, I was able to get outside and dig.

From what my brother tells me, busting sod has gone out of fashion in the gardening world. Lasagna gardening has become the jumpsuit of the 2016 runway. I’m worried my sod will be featured in the gardening equivalent of Glamour Magazine; I’ll be spotted busting sod and someone will photoshop a black rectangle across my eyes and a place a big red “DON”T” over the picture. Fashionable gardening aside, I like to tug on my rubber boots and get my hands dirty.

Ours is a typical South Buffalo backyard: rectangular, sunken in the middle, a chain link fence, with a blacktop driveway leading to a small garage. Every year, we improve upon it – a new fence on one side, a small gravel patio, a new roof on the garage, or a fresh coat of paint. This year it might be a new concrete driveway. Perhaps one spring we will be able to afford to build a deck off the kitchen.

Sometimes my husband Dave and my dad sit in the backyard and reminisce about their South Buffalo boyhoods. There is a 35 year age difference between them and yet their memories are identical: they ran the chain link fence line and hopped from garage to garage. That is one way to squirrel through the neighborhood. I fear they're giving my sons any ideas.

I have ideas of my own for them. Cal is four and that is the best age for collecting worms. I dig into the cold, moist dirt with a shovel, unearth the matt of grass along with a hunk of dirt, shake the dirt from the roots and toss the grass away, and then break up the clumps of loam. I run my fingers through the loose soil and plop the worm into the palm of Cal’s waiting hand. Later, we sit in the kitchen and watch the robins peck through the dirt pile for those same worms. It’s a favorite spring moment. This is what I did with Sam when he was four.

Later in the season we will plant something there – pumpkins or flowers or beans or whatever Cal says he’d like to see grow.

No matter how many times the weather throws a temper tantrum and interrupts the warmth, harbingers of spring – crocuses and pussy willows abloom – keep me in anticipation. They let me know that spring is marching in.

There is something about doing the same thing every year – digging into the earth – that seems to stop time from relentlessly charging in a linear way. These small rituals seem to reshape time from a line into a circle. This spring and last spring and spring forward to next year, certain things happen again and again. Robins will build their nests; geese will return; children will climb fences, stomp in puddles, climb fences. And I will bust sod.