When you clean up the garden in the springtime…

Chionodoxa sp.

As the crocuses fade in the back lawn, the Chionodoxa (“key-own-a-dox-ah”) are beginning to bloom and they’ll be in bloom for Easter Sunday.

Exactly as I planned!

In preparation for Easter, and because it is spring and time to clean up the garden, I’m carefully tip-toeing around the Chionodoxa as I dart from flower border to flower bed and commence a wild flurry of cutting back, raking up, weeding out, and otherwise spiffing things up a bit.

The other day, it was getting late as I recall, I was outside for one of my mad-cap “what can I clean up in an hour” sessions in the garden, when something sparkly in a pile of leaves caught my eye.

My first thought was “piles of leaves aren’t supposed to sparkle”, followed quickly by “what is it”.  I reached down with a gloved hand because one never knows so wear gloves, and picked it up.

Or actually, I picked them up… three gold coins.

What an odd find and in an odd place, too. I looked around to see if there were other coins in the pile of leaves, but found none. Just these three coins.  Where had they come from? Who left them in the garden? How long had they been there?  Maybe someone hid them in my garden on purpose, never thinking I would find them? Maybe whoever hid them in the garden is going to come back for them?

I turned them over in my hands and looked at both sides. They looked old. Very old.  Maybe whoever left them in the garden was long gone?  Maybe they had buried them there years, decades, ago and it was the freezing and thawing that heaved them up out of the ground for me to find?

Other scenarios came to mind, some plausible, some not so plausible.

I took the coins inside and cleaned them up a bit. They sure looked like real gold to me.  Back outside, I poked around where I found the coins and could find nothing else.

The next day, I spent some time looking on the Internet for other coins that looked like the ones I found, and what I found was amazing. Beyond anything I could have imagined.  If these coins are what I think they are, they could make me one happy, happy gardener.

I know, I know, I know, there will be many skeptics who read this today. After all, spring is a magical time in my garden and there have been other spring-time events and discoveries in my garden.

Really, though, I think this is the year.

I’ll keep you posted.