🌷Springtime is Here🌼 Creeping Colored Thyme and Other Plant Musings

As the days start to steadily grow warmer, taking their time turning the chilly mornings into afternoons verging on almost hot, I have noticed that the flowers around my house have begun to bloom—and quickly! Flowers I thought long dead from summers past have climbed tooth-and-nail from their graves in a return to the land of the living, and friends who I can always count on to return have unfurled their petals and filled the landscape with such brightness that it brings a smile to my soul to walk past every day.

Image by Naomi_Lord

This time of year I always want to garden. I crave the feel of the dirt against my fingers and the smell of fresh flowers as they acclimate to their new homes along the fencline. My mind is filled with images of outside activities—reading as birds come to linger nearby, or butterflies bouncing from one flower to the next. Even the ideas of fuzzy little bees come to pollinate leave me with an insatiable urge to throw on my finest cottagecore ensemble and journey headlong into the backyard to fill it with beauty. I haven’t gotten a chance to really start this year, but I’m excited to.

Every spring I find myself lost in the fantasy of all the things I want to do come summertime. Now, do I actually do them? Nine times out of ten I don’t, but sometimes the fantasy can be fun enough on its own; and it does no real harm to imagine all these perfect scenarios that, if they do happen, then yay! but if not, then its not too tragic.

Come July of this year I will be graduating from my Bachelor’s in Creative Writing and will be taking up the mantel of Masters student, also in Creative Writing. More often than not this year I have imagined working on my Masters work outside in the garden, and this year we are making plans for that to happen.

Danny and I have a plan this year to trudge up all the overgrown weed-grass that constitutes both our front and back yard, then replace it with creeping colored thyme, which looks like this if you don’t already know what it is:

This will be the perfect solution to our problem with the yard. Because of where we lived, which I think I heard before once used to be swamplands, we get more weeds than manageable grass in the yard. This applies to both front and back yard, though the back yard is way worse. The front yard is at least somewhat manageable but still causes a great deal of distress when it comes time for maintenance.

Creeping colored thyme, though, is the newest trend for getting rid of difficult grass and replacing it with something much more beautiful and, dare I say, more aesthetic.

At least it is for my poor little cottagecore heart.

This alternative to grass will make our yard look like a wild meadow and drastically cut down the need for high maintenance in the process. Personally I’m very excited to get this done. It’s going to look so pretty and I’m going to get to have something beautiful to look at while I sit on our back porch with a good book in my hand and some soft music, probably from Nemo’s Dreamscapes, playing on a little bluetooth speaker I found recently at Five Below.

My green thumb might be lacking, partially thanks to the ADHD, but I would love to be able to focus more on planting this year than ever before. Gardening is supposed to be really good for anxiety and depression, two things which I’ve been struggling with a lot lately, so if I can keep my mind focused and not lose sight of at least the aesthetic joy of gardening, I think it could be something I really enjoy!

What about you? Are you good at gardening or, like me, do you just do your best?