My forsythia are confused. Just when they should be hunkered down for the proverbial long winter’s nap, part of the mass planting I affectionately call the Yellow Monster has decided to bloom.

For those of you not familiar with forsythia, they’re the shrubs covered in bright yellow flowers around about mid-April here in western Massachusetts. Mid-April. Not late November, not early December. They’re a beautiful, enthusiastic, springtime shrub.

This particular patch of forsythia began as 10 little sticks from the Arbor Day Foundation a couple of decades or so ago – a gift for becoming a member. My father planted them in a row along the top of a banking in the back yard. Several years later, they’d grown into a lovely, well-behaved wall of greenery that bloomed like clockwork every April. When I moved back here, I surrounded the patch with tulip and daffodil bulbs. And then I let them grow.

Every year the forsythia patch has grown larger – and wilder. Those bulbs I planted around the edge of the forsythia are now several feet inside the outermost branches. Oh, how it’s grown. I eventually dubbed it the Yellow Monster after a particularly glorious bloom one spring.

As I stand outdoors among the fallen leaves and skeletal remains of the beebalm on this late autumn day, I’m thinking of the coming spring. The forsythia is overgrown and has gone quite wild. But I have plans for it in the spring. Knowing it grows so vigorously and thick, it will make a lovely barrier at the edge of the yard. In my mind’s eye I can see it growing down a different banking, choking out weeds – particularly nasty ones like wild parsnip – and volunteer trees that I have to periodically cut out to save the northern end of the garden from perpetual shade. I may prune back the outer edges of the Yellow Monster and dig up transplants for my project-to-be. Or I may take cuttings and root them. It all depends on what I find when I get to work taming this forsythia patch. I’ll probably opt for the latter if the forsythia’s roots are as tough as the hosta I dug and divided this past year. But that’s a story for another day.

Today is December 5^th and there are 105 days until spring.