I prefer sneezing.
It’s been windy and rainy and the back yard is soggy. Winter is here in earnest, which makes the following development even more strange. . .
I find myself wanting to plant things.
At the end of this season, when I was out there pulling up tomato plants and surveying the ruin of my neglected garden, I was making vows to never garden again. Put the whole thing in grass and be done with it.
I was guilt ridden that it had gone so downhill while I was working full time. Listen, when you start tomato plants from seed, you feel responsible for them okay? And I had decided if I couldn’t keep a garden properly I was not going to do it at all.
Then the seed catalog came in the mail.
I poured over its pages last night, three times through and even got out my pen and circled things I would like to try and grow. I could not believe how easy it was to forget all my failures and want to try again. Maybe it’s the sight of all that freshly turned up earth in my raised beds now that the dead plants and weeds have been removed. A clean slate, a new beginning. The possibility of “the best garden ever” looms like only a pipe dream can in the dead of winter while toasting your toes by the fireplace. (There are no weeds in pipe dream gardens).
Although if I was really honest, I already think I grew “the best garden ever” about 7 years ago. It was the summer that I first experienced an empty nest. My youngest had gone to live with his brother and make his way in the world, and I found myself looking at a huge garden that spring whose main purpose had been to feed our family of five. It had done it well too, but I was not going to put in dozens of tomato plants, and who knows what other vegetables just for myself! I decided to plant the whole thing in flowers. I made paths with old roofing material and many grass clippings, and placed my portable garden swing near the middle and mapped out my plan. One half of the garden, I planted in about 10 varieties of sunflowers. Then there were gladiolus, cosmos, shoo fly plants, feverfew, calendulas, marigolds,Love in a mist, alyssum, delphinium, adjuka, blue flax, violas, poppies, morning glories, and a patch of wildflowers. It was a veritable jungle of color.
I remember coming home one evening from wherever I had been that day, with a thunderstorm threatening. In the lowered light of those clouds at that time of day, the colors of the flowers were intensified to the point of glowing. I ran around snapping pictures like crazy. It was an amazing sight.
And that summer, I earned enough money to buy myself a new pair of Birkenstocks by selling sunflowers to the local florist. I grew several varieties that year that have multiple blossoms and the more you cut them, the more they would bloom. I had a sunflower forest. And that fall the birds had a feast cleaning up the seeds from the leftovers.
So, even though I was making big plans last night, I don’t think I will ever top that garden. But I will aim for a more meticulously tended one I think. Not so grand in scale, but something more subtle and well groomed.
At least that’s the pipe dream of December. We’ll see what happens in April.