I am writing on Tuesday afternoon and it’s another annoying windy day. It is sucking the moisture out of the soil once again. I’m already tired of watering and it’s only May. Plus, I have yet to organize my hose situation. Many of the properties on which I work have not yet been visited by the plumber to further complicate my life.

It’s high spring and absolutely beautiful and here I am starting off this week’s column complaining.

I’ve admired the white flowering dogwood for years. This is the Cornus florida. It is a naive of eastern North America and once was everywhere. It grows best in shade so one can see it in the understory of larger trees. It has been afflicted in the last several decades by some sort of disease but continues to soldier on. It has been replaced by the more popular summer blooming Kousa variety in most home landscapes. There is a small one blooming in a pot at the entrance to the Grey Barn farm stand.

My crabapple is finally blooming. Nothing quite compares to the one on Franklin street, opposite Saint Augustine’s. I think the house originally belonged to Brooks Carter. He probably planted it.

The rock wall border belonging to Fala Freeman on Skiff avenue is wonderful with its cerasticum. Another low growing spring plant, it lends itself to borders as does ground phlox or the perennial yellow allysum.

I had a red bud for years but realized recently it is gone. I don’t know how I missed its passing. The large one at the Edgartown fire station is about to bloom. Cercis canadensis is also a native of the eastern U.S. Sometimes it is called Forest Pansy.

The grounds of the Martha’s Vineyard Savings Bank in Chilmark are particularly nice. The daffodils are multiplying each year and are still blooming. Most of mine have seen better days. No matter, they have been replaced with wood hyacinths. Unlike the more popular hyacinths, they continue to spread over the years. The large bulbs that people purchase that have been forced, get smaller every year outdoors until they disappear.

The cool nights have prevented my lettuce and spinach from bolting. We are harvesting huge amounts of each. Life is truly grand. Plus my family and I have been fully vaccinated, so some of last year’s anxiety has lifted.

Back to spring bulbs that are unreliable. With the exception of the Darwin’s, tulips are the worst. I’ve planted hundreds over the years and few ever made it past four or five years. Both the Angelique’s and Mount Tacoma’s were huge disappointments. The Darwin’s are called the perennial tulip in some of the bulb catalogs and they really mean it. They are reliable May bloomers if Bambi and his extended family don’t wipe them out in one night.

This seems to be the week for lilacs. Violet and I took a drive around West Chop and admired several impressive stands of them.

I arrived on the Vineyard in early May of 1970. Things were so quiet then that one day my soon-to-be husband and I tried to hitchhike to then Gay Head from Beetlebung corner. Not a single car passed by and we walked the whole way. Fast forward to today. Traffic has become frustrating and sometimes downright laughable.

Violet’s friend, Owen, is attending Amherst College. They talk weekly. She was complaining about traffic. He keeps up with hometown news thanks to the local papers. After agreeing that he had heard about the Island traffic, she mentioned the “hump” making it worse. He had even heard about that. We all laughed and then thought about traffic and the influx of summer visitors and decided the Vineyard is the place to be. Even a world-wide pandemic did not change my happy, busy life that much thanks to this community of kindred spirits.