The air outside is all frothing and flickering with snow. A thick coat fell overnight, bending down the branches of the cedars and obscuring the contours of the garden, and it will continue to deepen throughout the day. When I bundle up later and go outside with my children, we’ll need to watch where we step to avoid snapping off a tiny current bush or tripping over a buried tomato cage. We’ll spend some time in the garden today, not in order to dig and sow but just to tromp around in the deepening white.
I have set aside my work as a gardener this winter, not just avoiding work in the garden but giving it little of my thought and attention. Of course, I have done the pruning and the watering that needs to be done, but my typical midwinter planning and seed-catalog-fueled dreaming hasn’t taken place. Far from striving to radically extend my garden season in the winter, I was all too happy to see the vegetables give up. I needed a break; I had other things on my mind. For much of the first part of the winter, the temperatures stayed warm, and that unseasonability encouraged me further to stay out of the garden—if nature wasn’t going to force me to stop the labor, my own body and mind would.
February has brought colder temperatures and snow, however, and the wintry weather has begun to wake me up.
I love winter, perhaps love it more the colder and darker it gets. Winter temperatures here in the Ozarks tend to hover around the mid-forties, which I consider jacket weather, at best. On the rare occasions that we get single digits or negative temperatures, I relish it—to step outside and feel the inside of your nose freeze immediately is a pleasure everyone should experience sometimes. So the winter weather wakes up my gardening self, not because I’m dreaming of spring, but because it calls my attention back to the pleasures of the outdoors. I’ll spend more time outside today, in the snow, than I have for some time when the weather was “nicer.”
Hikes in the cold have been a regular part of my routine lately—generally early in the morning, while the temperatures top out in the twenties. I like to start off the walk cold, and feel my blood slowly warm my fingers and nose. I like to move through the woods before the day gets started, with nothing else troubling the cold stillness but a few birds and deer.
The cold also creates possibilities for the garden. The average winter temperature here may not really be cold enough for my liking, but we’re still in a temperate climate. Many of the plants I most love to grow—fruiting trees and shrubs, native wildflowers—require a cold period to produce fruit or germinate their seeds. Right now I can see a number of these sitting under snow cover on my front deck, in my sheltered propagation area, including cuttings from chokecherry, gooseberry, Nanking cherry, and grapes, and pots containing seeds of prairie turnip, purple poppy mallow, compass plant, prairie smoke, and cardinal flower. Under a thick layer of snow is precisely where these proto-plants want to be.
I know that many people grapple with profound discouragement during these months when the sun turns its face away. We have a deep biological need for the light and warmth of the sun, of course. Dante was correct to depict the last circle of Hell as icy, since the cold, like evil, is an absence, a privation. In the winter, we have less access to the solar energy that gives us life, and this can rightly be unsettling.
Yet I cannot help but feel that this season is a gift as much as any other. Not least because so little takes place in the garden. Winter lets me rest and reflect, burrow deep, go dormant. Like an apple tree, I will emerge fruitful in the spring only because of this time spent in a chill.
One of Wendell Berry’s better-known poems advises the reader to walk in the dark without a light: “and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings.” So, too, I would commend you to get to know the cold a little, as you can. The spring garden will be here soon enough. Until then, I’m content to watch the snow pile up, to harvest that crop of ice that I did not sow.
As someone who has struggled with the long dark winter this year, I appreciate this very much.
Normally I’m happy to nest, but I started taking early morning walks during a cold snap in Montreal (-25C) and they were exactly what my soul needed. Thank you for sharing your thoughts.