04.24.06 - 2:38 p.m.

I'm tired this morning, and I have a little bit of an ache in my left lumbar paraspinals - nothing noticeable under most circumstances, but present when I think about it. My hamstrings are stiff and tight, my nails are a mess, soil deeply embedded under in the beds. It's spring: I've been gardening. The grass needs to be mowed again, and I haven't yet done the trimming, but I have, now - at last - cleaned off the porch, lugged my bucket of salt and my snow shovel to the shed out back, removed all the dead things from their old pots, weeded, cut down the husks of plants left over from last year, and otherwise assessed the state of things-that-are-coming-up and things-that-should-be-but-aren't.

My porch is no longer bare. I have a fushia in a hanging basket, and two brick pink-and-yellow dahliettas in pots flanking the steps. In the larger pot on the steps, the dianthus has grown back, and the massive snapdragon was trying to grow back, but I ruined the new growth when I was taking out the old growth. Instead, I've potted that with candytuft, petunias - lavendar striped with a deeper purple - and catmint, with its waving gray-green foliage and tiny lavendar flowers. I like the combination - the dianthus has that silvery foliage, which compliments the catmint nicely, and the petunias will grow and grow, but I would like to have something with more height, and might add some new snaps next week.

I'm quite happy with the larger pot in the corner, although I don't remember what went into it - a tall plant with long arms and successions of pink flowers on the stems, a darker pink trailing verbena, some alyssum, and pale white-pink torena. It looks lovely. I also replanted one of my porch windowboxes with a dwarf lantana, which will bloom peach-to-pink-to-yellow, some peach colored verbena, and a combination of cosmos and this airy plant with dark green foliage and delicate white flowers, whose name I can't remember. I want a few more yellow plants for the porch, and might go with marigolds. I'm also putting out some pots with some white petunias and more of the peach verbena, not the trailing variety, the upright variety.

I think that only one of the dahlias I left in ground survived the winter, so I planted a pink-purple azalea in the middle. It's so pretty, and it's an evergreen variety of azalea, so it should do well. Most of the plants in the other bed are doing well, although I have yet to see the balloonflower returning, or the monarda or a few other things. I plan to pull out the potentilla and put something evergreen in its place, and then add a couple of pencil holleys to the back for structure without spread. I did put in a non-dwarf lantana into a bare spot in the front, and what I think is a euphrobium, although that seemed split at the bottom, so it might not last. In the back, I have thyme, sage, oregano, chives, and tansy returning. I planted some sweet basil, more petunias, a few pots of osteospermums, intermixed with lobelia, and some more torenas, mixed with lobelia. I still need to trim, weed around several beds, trim the grasses in the back, groom the vegetable garden, and cut down the damn blackberry bush that's all mixed in with and behind my ... peonies, which are doing beautifully.

I was lusting over a coral-bark maple at Hatcher's this weekend, but it was $100, and I don't know that I really have room for another tree. If the princess tree takes off - which it looks like it might do - it'll take up a fair portion of the backyard, and I don't want a tree in the front.

Oh, and a special note for the columbine I planted last summer. The flowers look like the delicate, neatly striped heads of - oh, it's lovely, and I'm so happy it is doing well. I can say less for the scabiosa, of which there are no signs, and the straggly potentilla. In homage to the appalachians, I am definitely putting in a rhododedron, even though I will forever associate the plant with Michael Smith's horrible, stuttering recitation of "Rhododendron in Bloom" in the Appalachian-themed show sixth grade speech club put on. I believe that I picked.. a passage from Harriette Arnow's The Dollmaker, where the mom finds her daughter Cassie with her legs cut off by a train for that - what was it? Was it a show, on the stage in the gym at Miller? I do remember my overly dramatic (but o-so-much-fun) "CASSIE!"

I must go slog away some more. Bill bill bill!