Reflections

WINTER: ULTIMATE TEST OF A GARDENER'S CHARACTER

It is an understatement to say that Winter has arrived in northern Michigan. The word is slammed—snow, sleet, freezing rain and everything in between. That month-plus of popular tunes on the radio that kept pleading for a white Christmas appear to have gotten a little carried away.
For a gardener, these are worrisome times. We fret over what’s happening to those plants of ours out there alone in the dark. And when it comes to keeping our own spirits up, gaudy red poinsettias in the supermarket can’t quite cut it. Poinsettias have been described as the most abused house plants, ever. Their chances of survival into the New Year are slim to none. If the closest nursery hadn’t been a casualty of high energy costs, the temptation would be to walk the aisles just taking in the reassuring scent of warm earth and chlorophyll.
Winter becomes the ultimate test of a gardener’s character. How resilient are we in the ‘down times’, knowing how much damage those winds and blizzards can do? How honest and realistic can we be—truly careful and wise about what we wish for? A garden can fall victim to a longed-for thaw as well as a hard freeze. Patience and wisdom are called for in large doses. That, and hope.
Face it, a gardener’s dilemma is pretty much ‘ripped from the headlines’. No one quite trusts that the better-than-anticipated Holiday retail season guarantees an economy in recovery. Folks in the tourism business still agonize over weather forecasts. So many unemployed still struggle in the face of stagnant job creation.
I keep coming back to Samuel Johnson's description of second marriages as the “triumph of hope over experience”—a line that also pops up at a crucial moment in Bronte’s wonderful novel, Tenant of Wildfell Hall. We gardeners cannot predict what our acres and furrows will look like in three months. We can only trust our own resilience and persistence as we confront whatever lies ahead.
So, as we head into the New Year, my ‘rallying cry’ to myself as well as gardeners everywhere is, “Take heart!” Through all the changes of our changing times, some things never change:
--How we treat the soil in our private little corner of the world will impact the earth beyond us.
--The cuttings and root-stock we share have the power to enrich the lives of others.
--What we sow, we don’t always reap. But if we don’t plant, nothing can grow.
–The most commonly recorded New Year’s resolution in ancient Babylon was to return borrowed garden tools.
–Keep a green tree in your heart and perhaps a singing bird will come (Chinese proverb)
In that spirit, I wish us all a New Year full of green things growing!