At Rest
The days have gotten shorter, and nights arrive with great haste. The Japanese Maple out front, which has called this garden its home for far longer than I have, has shed its last few remaining leaves. So have the lilacs, laying bare the three nests that nestled snug among its branches this past summer. Winterberries growing along the roadside have burst into berries, their startling red surely a welcome sight to birds. Out in the woods, all that remains green are the needles of the towering pines. All around me, the earth wants to rest.
There was a time when I intensely disliked winter: bare branches, dead leaves on the ground, it appeared to be a time of death. Later, I realized it was a time of rest. I did not care much for rest, thinking it to be a sign of weakness. The strong, surely, they keep going. I was wrong. While I still cannot claim to love the cold, I am now at peace with this time of repose. We each have our own pace. Some like the pines, shed through the year, fooling you into thinking that they require no time off. A few, such as the pussy willows I acquired this year, like to tempt fate, waking up early, and sending out their furry catkins while still in the middle of winter, even blooming through the snow. Yet others like the white oaks will take a longer pause, and resume only when they think the time is right, in late spring when days are longer and the sun is out, and all danger of frost is past. Then, there are others like the young beeches, which hold on tightly to their dead leaves all through winter, like me with my memories, refusing to let them drop from their branches, until they finally fall in spring, dry and brittle, to be replaced by new ones. Each to their own cycle: the woods are home to all.
In my garden too, all the plants are in varying states of rest. My lone tulip bulb sleeps underground, as it has since summer, storing and saving food, so that it can bring forth that burst of color in spring for the few days that it is out in the sun. The False Indigo which teased me with just a few blue flowers over summer, looks burnt to a crisp, with its almost black leaves still desperately clinging to the stems. The Blue Star which decided not to flower, and instead chose to reward me with a filigree of yellow leaves in fall, is now just a few bare stems poking out through the ground. The Milkweed on which I had pinned so much hope, cast forth a few leaves and then disappeared, without a sign, at the first hint of cold. The seed heads of the nomadic Black-Eyed Susan, which appears in a different place in the garden each year, pop up here and there on sturdy stems. The driveway appears to cover itself with a thick layer of dried leaves, all shapes and sizes, almost as soon as we clean it. The late bloomers and the early prodigies, the quick-faders and the long-lasters, the quiet backdrops and the stellar stars, the gaudy show-stoppers and the shrinking violets, the ones that keep promises and those that don’t (or perhaps they will another year?): they are all welcome. It has been a slow realization that I need them all, for the garden would be a lesser symphony, without each one of them.
Before the fast-approaching time of rest, there is still work to be done. Each weekend, I try and tackle a different chore, starting with my vegetable boxes. The cucumber plants are the first to go, followed by the chili peppers, the eggplant and finally the beans. I take out the netting carefully hung over the four sides of the boxes in an effort to keep out the always hungry deer. I rip out the cucumber plants and place the scraps on the compost heap, repeating the process each week with a different plant. A couple of weeks later, and it is time to remove the skeletal remains of the beans, leaving behind only the herbs: oregano, rosemary, parsley and a few stems of mint. I cut the rosemary and oregano to the ground and bring them in to dry and save. The strawberry plants, which carpet both the boxes are still green. So is the parsley which defiantly keeps sending out curly leaves of shocking green, and I leave that as well, to harvest another day. Stakes and trellises are taken out, tied together and stocked. Another week goes by, and when I go out, I realize that with the netting gone, deer have eaten the last of the parsley and all the remaining leaves of the strawberries. There goes my last harvest. I gather some of the fallen leaves and put them in the boxes, over the now neatly clipped parsley, the straggly stems of mint and the one beanstalk I have forgotten to remove, covering them like I once spread blankets on my sleeping children.
In a few months from now, it will be time again to wake up. Through icy winter storms, bitter cold and howling winds, sudden warm days that send out false signals of spring, each plant and tree will struggle for survival, fighting its own battle, emerging when it is right for it. A few may lose the fight, most will emerge the better for it. I wonder what the year ahead holds: will it extend hope to the late bloomer or only sustain the early prodigies, will it be full of quiet backdrops or produce stellar stars, will promises be kept or not.
And so, with some good memories and some bad, some trepidation and some hope, I put my garden to sleep.
