Gardening bench

Since we moved back to NY three years ago, we've started gardening. Until last summer, when we moved to Sea Cliff, we did all our gardening at your house. You lucked out! That was a huge help for you and meant that Mom stopped bugging you about a lot of the gardening work.

One day, during a particularly rigorous weeding session, you gave me a gardening bench to sit on. A gardening bench, I thought scornfully? That's for old people with bad backs.

Well, it was kind of amazing, actually. It's comfy and sturdy and really did help me last longer than I would have just crouching or bending down to grab the seemingly endless weeds and vines. Anyway, I asked you about the bench, and per your usual treatment of gear, you gushed about it and all the bench's virtues. The top comes off for washing. If you turn it upside down, there is a pad you can use for kneeling down. And on and on.

I said I might get one and you winked and me, and said, Megs, don't buy a bench! Next time you and Mom came over, around my birthday, you brought me my own gardening bench as a gift.

It's spring now, and if you were here, Dad, we would be going over everything that's blooming in detail. Let me tell you what's happening in our garden:
- The peach tree is getting leaves and little pink flowers are going to open any day now. I am saying prayers that the flowers are precursors to fruit...
- The very first flower opened on the camellia bush, it's a pinkish red
- All of the hydrangeas, which we cut back the way you advised us to, are growing leaves, both from the old branches and from the bottom up
- I just cut back the butterfly bushes, which you're supposed to leave until early spring
- The little tree you and Mom gave me (at the same time as the gardening bench) was the first thing to get leaves in the whole garden
- The lilac has tons of buds and could burst out any time
- Idriss is in heaven because his gigantic mint patch is coming back in, and soon he'll be able to cut the mint for tea. Our thyme and chives are also back
- The strawberry plants are getting their first flowers and tiny fruits
- The little holly in the planter died (I didn't like it that much anyway)
- I planted two small rhododendrons in the back corner in the hopes that they'll cheer up that area
- I am planning a small shade garden in that corner near the privet, with astilbe and Japanese anemone

I have looked for organic heirloom tomatoes but I guess it's too early to plant them yet. Same goes for the pink peonies I'm hoping to find soon.

It's a beautiful April, Dad. It's so hard that you are not hear to chat about the garden and maybe start golfing. Every blue sky, every clear sunset, every mild afternoon I think of you. I wish you could have had one last spring.