When it comes to seasons, I’ve always been partial to fall. I love the bright colors of the leaves, the harvest of crops and the cool, quickening weather. Fall is the best time for hikes, for making plans, for changing directions and heading for your dreams. If I had only one season left to live, I’d definitely hope it was autumn. 

But when it comes to a favorite gardening season, I’ll have to vote for spring. 

Spring Is for Planting

Think of the primary garden goals of all the seasons. Spring is for planting, summer for tending, fall for harvest, winter for resting. Of those four tasks, planting is far and away my favorite, which is one reason spring is my favorite gardening season. 

I love choosing the vegetables and flowers to plant. It makes me happy to rake the dark soil, working in compost and designing the year’s garden. Knowing that the tiny seed I place in the loamy soil will turn into a vegetable or flower is a kind of magic that makes the work enchanting.

Other Spring Garden Delights

But planting is not the only delicious part of spring in the garden. There are spring bulb flowers. I must admit that spring-blooming bulbs produce some of my favorite flowers in any garden. There can never be too many fields of nodding daffodils in my opinion, and I like tulips and lilies too, as well as most spring bulb flowers..  

Then don’t forget the ballerina blooms of the fruit trees in spring. Not every fruit tree flowers in spring but many of them do, donning frilly white or pink flowers, sometimes on bare branches. The fragrance can be exceptional, and they are always lovely to look at. Is it any wonder that spring is the favorite gardening season for so many people?

Spring Weather

I am also a fan of spring weather. Like fall, it is changeable, warm sometimes but often cool, sunny sometimes but often rainy. The variety makes work in the garden interesting, while warm summer days seem to follow each other in endless lines, each a spitting image of the day before.

Now I admit that this view of spring weather is generally more accurate for France than for San Francisco, where every day looks pretty much the same all year long. But the difference between spring and summer is marked in France, and, for me, the variable days of the early season beat summer heat, hands down.