The Garden of the Seasons: Restoring the Sidewalk Strip

When the company hired by the city last fall to rebuild our street and its sidewalks got to our house they told me I would have to remove all my plantings from the strip of soil between the sidewalk and the curb stone. New cement sidewalks, new curb stones, and new soil in between were being provided by the city.
             The most likely reason why those sidewalk strips exist on residential streets such as our own is to plant trees. 
              Trees are good for neighborhoods. They're good for the whole community. They clean the air, removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The reason we have an atmosphere breathable for human beings is the presence of green plants. Earth's forests and trees and green plants everywhere habituated a plant capable of supporting large, air-breathing land animals. 
               No trees were growing on the strip of dirt in front of our house, so we put our name on our list for the city to plant a tree, which the city did a few years later. Then a second tree was added. They've grown, providing more shade for our house, front yard, and our street.
                 The rest of the sidewalk strip held the tattered remains of lawn grass. But these areas by their size and position are not hospitable to lawn grass. They're too small to mow. No one takes care of them. And lawn grass is a non-native plant that grows poorly in Northeastern cities and towns, requiring frequent watering, fertilizing, weed-killing and re-planting when the dead spots appear. So we didn't plant grass in our strip of dirt between the trees. 
                 We planted perennial and annual flowers. Since the strip is a hot, dry spot -- surrounded by pavement and automobile exhaust, it is vulnerable to road salt and visitations of urban waste -- we planted a patch of Autumn Joy sedum, because sedums survive in hot, dry climates. We planted flowering annuals, rotating them through the season. Our daughter planted a patch of crocuses and grape hyacinth for spring color. I added some hardy mums, some of them hardy enough to return each year. 
                     Those were the plants we lost when the city's contractor ripped up the sidewalks and started over.
                      But a new start is also a new opportunity. A long trough of new dirt is a blank canvas. Unwilling to face a completely blank canvas when a new spring rolled around, I decided to look for some spring bulbs. But the contractor didn't finish work until mid-November. When I went to the garden section of a big box store, no bulbs were to be found anywhere. Everything was Christmas greens. However I asked a guy in work clothes if the store still had any bulbs -- and got lucky. He confided that he had just thrown the last of them out, leaving them in a big box next to the store's dumpsters. 
            He suggested I go see if they were still there. I took the hint.
            The bulbs were there. A big box, with netted sacks containing probably a couple hundred daffodil bulbs altogether -- all daffodils, nothing else. I rescued a half dozen sacks and tossed them in to the trunk of the car. 
              So the new composition of the sidewalk strip began on a raw Thanksgiving morning when my daughter Sonya and I planted eighty or a hundred bulbs -- those fat spuds of floral potential -- in the Thanksgiving cold, a couple hours before the family feast.
                We waited five bare months to see if they would bloom, and when they did, happily, springfully, I began to look for what I could find in Covid Time to keep them company. 
                 In April green plants spring up, free of cost, out of the ground. Which is a good thing, especially this year, when shopping for anything, or taking yourself out in public, can be a fraught, restriction-hedged errand.
                So I looked closer to home, i.e. our own backyard, for candidates for missions Sidewalk Strip. Violets, I noticed, the kind of New England wildflower that grows in your lawn unless you poison them. I transplanted them from the weed-addicted soil of the backyard perennial garden; some already had buds, I hoped they would all bud and flower. 
                  Today, as I look around, they are. I found other flowering weeds -- another world for wildflowers whose names I do not know -- and added them to the mix. I added in some newly prominent, suspiciously prevalent, fast-growing plants -- I suspect them of being invasives.... but these, joined with violets and daffs will do for spring color. 
                Then I broke down and masked myself and visited a small garden center where I found some small planters of lavishly priced pansies. I bought three of these, divided the contents and added them to the pebble-strewn soil of the strip. 
                 These will do for spring. We have color, we have life. 
                 I will have to find more plants, more color to add, and soon, because the daffs after a beautiful month's showing are beginning to fade. 

                  So that's the formula: Add rain, repeated squattings followed by subsequent lower back complaints; two weeks of subnormal chill for the end of April, plus a surprise, summer-like May weekend -- and there you have it, one floral sidewalk strip, restored to the homeowner's -- temporary -- satisfaction