Clarity in Winter

The 4th season, winter, is much maligned by most gardeners and ProfessorRoush is no exception in that regard.  As I grow older, my enthusiasm for colder weather ever ebbs and my casual glances at more southern states on the map grow ever longer.

Winter does, however, provide a gardener with one benefit in spades: clarity.  Loss of foliage and flower exposes the skeleton of a garden, highlights her hidden secrets and lays bare the flaws of our efforts.

I noticed, today, how Coralberry (Symphoricarpos orbiculatus), a common weedy shrub on the prairie, has incorporated itself unnoticed into one of my 'Therese Bugnet' rose bushes, the red fruits of the wayward shrub blending cheerfully with the burgundy-red new twigs of the rose (photo at top).   The season also throws back the curtains on my Harry Lauder's Walking Stick (Corylus avellana 'Contorta'), revealing just how badly the straight suckers of the grafted plant launch themselves skyward among the crooked branches I crave (photo at left).  Every spring I remove an armload of these straight stems and they immediately resprout to spoil the symmetry.

Winter exposes the activities of insects unseen and nesting birds in clear detail.  I found these bagworms on the top of a trellis, hanging from, of all things, a wisteria vine that provides the trellis shade in summer (right photo).  How, oh how, did these bagworms know that the wisteria would be unprotected while their preferred perches, the junipers of my garden, are all sprayed each June?

 This nest, in my 'Banshee' rose bush, is a repeat homesite for birds, although I forgot to look here this past summer to see if it was active.  One locates nests in the summer by observing the birds, not the plants, for their feeding patterns, protective dances, and loud scolding of passersby.  In the winter, a nest like this hints at a life unobserved, leaving a gardener to imagine all the possibilities it hid.  Was there a successful fledge?  Did a cowbird insert an imposter into this family?   I'll never know.

     

The gardener resolves, each year to do better as we see the bones left behind from a summer's toil.  This Lamb's Ear (Stachys byzantina) escaped my best efforts to root its invasive nature from my garden (right photo), persisting even now in the protective embrace of an enormous Russian sage.  In summer, one sees the forest and not the trees.  In winter, one is left with the details, the struggles of life laid bare, ground gained and lost, homes built and vacated.  Clarity is what a gardener gains in winter; clarity of our highs and wins, and clarity of where we must improve.    

Fake Blogs in Winter

There is, in my mind, no sustaining solace in the drab brown of a Flint Hills' winter.  Oh, I could ramble about for a few paragraphs extolling the virtues of the subtle hues of amber and gold and taupe in my winter landscape, but then that would be "Fake Blogging."  Just as "Fake News" has joined the lexicon of our political debates, "Fake Blogs" should be called for what they are; ill-conceived attempts to paint pictures that don't really exist.  Fake blogs wax eloquent the delicate beauties of bark when there are no flowers or foliage to distinguish one ice-laden tree from another.  Fake blogs discuss the delicate dancing of grasses as a blizzard bears down and smothers the garden.  Fake blogs pretend that browsing glossy garden catalogs is a suitable substitute for the feel of warm earth in your hands. 

I wait in January, interminably it seems, for the smallest, briefest indication that Spring is coming.  A flash of blue from a bluebird, a hint of green in the rushes, and my heart beats faster and my spirits lift.  Difficult to find, those moments, as Yoda would say.  When the snow melts, there is a brief period on the prairie when the grasses have enough remaining moisture to display their mahogany and umber undertones.  Then dry in a twinkling, the rolling hills of brown stretch to the horizon, dead grasses blending individual hues to a bland carpet of boring.  Life is color, death is drab.

Last week, when the weather teased me with warm sunshine and clear air, I strolled during lunch to the K-State Gardens, seeking signs of Spring.  I wanted only a brief glimpse of a timid peony breaking through the ground, or the slightest sight of  a subterranean squill squeezing through the frozen crust.  My desires, like a foundering ship against the shore, dashed by the dry remnants of dead perennials, the only bright spot, Bittersweet, both in name and in spirit, as pictured above.  Russet sumac berries failed to break the brown monotony and puce coralberries merely blended into the bleakness.  I left, back to work in walled confines, to wait further, sullen and sad.

Thank God, in such moments, for Bittersweet and Fake Blogs.