What's Growing: March 2025
pretty pinks; a paucity of poppies
I’m not sure if it’s midlife, or the fact that I’ve moved back to natural landscapes of my childhood, but I notice trees and plants far more than I used to. Each month here on Home Again I share a photo roundup of what’s growing around my home, neighborhood, and city. Glad you’re here!
March in Santa Barbara has been chilly and wet, with intermittent warmer, drier hints at what’s to come. I found a coat I thought I’d lost in the deep recesses of our entry closet just in time for a particularly blustery week this week, and I feel sorry for visitors from cold-weather places who booked spring break trips to coastal California and had their weather expectations dashed.
Here’s what’s growing around my home and neighborhood this month. I’d love to hear what’s growing where you live - hit reply or leave a comment below!
1. Backyard Roses
We have three spots on our property with rose bushes: two were planted before we bought our home, and the third we added a couple of years ago. Most people cut back their rose bushes in December, so the first blooms of spring represent the beginning of a long potential growing season.
2. (Flowering) Coast Live Oak
It’s silly to admit, but I never paid much attention to the ways that our trusty old oak trees, which are comfortingly everywhere in the hills around Santa Barbara, change across the season. It’s only after a few years of living with a colossal Coast Live Oak in my front yard that I’ve come to appreciate new spring growth on its branchtips.
According to Ye Olde Internet, March is the month where we’re meant to see most of the tree’s flowering: the male flowers are those dangling catkins, and the female flowers are harder to spot but present nonetheless.
3. Poppies! (But Not At My House)
When we returned from a week out of town, I spotted them on the roadside as we pulled out of the airport parking lot. Poppies!
Happily, they’re everywhere around town. Sadly, they are not in my yard. I made an attempt at scattering seeds for the first time a few weeks ago, but I’ve not seen anything pop up yet.
4. Summer Stone Fruit
I was an embarrassing number of years old when I really connected the fact that a tree’s flowers become its fruit. I mean, I appreciated flowers on trees, and I appreciated fruit on trees, but the one-to-one correlation just took a few decades to properly register.
We have peach, nectarine, apricot, and plum trees in our backyard. Judging by this spring’s flowering, the peach tree has given up entirely, the nectarine and apricot harvest will be middling, and the plums will be bountiful again.
5a. Growing, But Not Here
We spent a week in a totally different biome this month: the big island of Hawai’i. The greens were so much lighter and brighter, and I do love a hibiscus:
5b. Here, But Not Actually Growing
I’ll leave you with flora of a different sort: cupcakes made an decorated by my 16-year-old for a theatre cast party. Good show!
What’s blossoming in your neck of the woods? I’d love to know!
More in the What’s Growing series:
Lovely photos, Sarah! Your garden must be so lovely with all those roses! April is such an exciting month outside. It's my daughter's birthday, so I always associate her birthday with an exploding garden. Our cherry, plum, and pear trees and thornless blackberry are blooming now. The jasmine is going and the climbing rose is about to burst. We have a ton of foxgloves that are shooting up (they reseed and we get more and more each year), and I have sweet peas just starting to grow--hopefully blooms in a few months. We also have these enormous wild geraniums that burst into purple blooms around now. Strangely, we also didn't get any poppies this year, though we usually get plenty...