March on the Outer Cape is not spring. The catalogues say it is, and the calendar agrees, but the ground knows better. The soil is still cold. The wind still has weight. I do my first garden walks of the year in rubber boots and a wool coat, and I carry a notebook instead of pruners.
This March I visited three gardens in the first week — one in Truro, two in Wellfleet. The Truro garden lost four boxwood to salt spray. They were planted too close to the road, and the town trucks threw brine all winter. I had warned about this when we sited them, but the client wanted symmetry at the drive entrance. Now we will replant with inkberry, which handles salt without complaint.
The Wellfleet gardens fared better. One had hydrangeas with significant dieback — not unusual after a hard winter, and not cause for alarm. The old wood is dead above the snow line, but new growth will come from the base. These are macrophyllas, so the blooms this year will be sparse. That is the price of a January nor’easter. Next year they will be full again.
The purpose of the first walk is not to fix anything. It is to see clearly what the winter did, to note it down without rushing to correct it, and to make a plan for April. A garden that survived winter deserves a considered response, not a panicked one.