WASTE OF TIME

I always like to get away from the garden in the winter. Usually I escape to books. Sometimes a snow deletes all the chores around the garden, at least for a day or two. Sometimes I just need to get away. Last Winter we went to Mexico, which was great for squeezing every last drop of chill out of my bones. But the lush tropical gardens, even the wild dry jungle of the Yucatan gave my botanist’s and gardener’s eyes a lot to do.
Where do you go?
This past weekend we drove to the Washington Coast. We rented a small cabin in a small Quileute fishing village at the mouth of the Quillayute River. A barren winter beach can really calm a gardener’s mind, even though the ocean is never quiet. The waves are constant and strong at La Push. So we retreated to our cabin and I read until I fell asleep. In the middle of the day!
When I woke I could hear my mother’s distant voice, “ What a waste of time.” Luckily she was only in my mind.
So, I though I couldn’t bring myself to get out of bed, I thought at least I could think about work.
But I failed.
I did spend a few minutes trying to imagine a beach garden. Really an oxymoron. Just considering moving the detritus to get started was daunting not to mention the waves. So I thought about our garden back home. How one big slow wave --that’s what a flood is after all-- passed through a few weeks ago. How one big wave 8 feet tall passed across our land depositing tires and stealing soil and plants. We have been so busy cleaning out the basement that I haven’t had time for the garden or the nursery that I wrangled together at the last minute with bird netting and posts. I did pick up a few lavenders of the north lawn that had been de-potted by the current and shoved a 100 yards down stream. I was actually amazed to find the potted pinks that I keep on an old metal shelf to keep them dry ended up 4 feet under water and still look alive, and well.
So, there I was at the beach wasting time thinking about the garden when I could have been counting waves until I was mesmerized. But I started thinking about beach gardens , and waves, and our garden, and floods. Remember the fun-filled and frustrating hours building sandcastles? What a waste of time. But what a pleasure, too. Sunny hours building, cultivating delusions of permanence.. And then a wave came....
Even though the flood was only one big wave it knocked down a sandcastle I was building in my mind. Was I wasting time?
I began to think about other gardens I made. That rose up, not unlike a wave, and crashed when I moved on. All our gardens are prone to the waves; months, years, decades, a lifetime. They crest and crash. And yet we are perfectly happy to build our castles in the sand. Snubbing out noses at impermanence.
Wasting our time?



Is surfing a waste of time. I’m not talking about internet surfing, but wave surfing. There were surfers at the beach, wet-suited young men gutsy enough, or is it ballsy enough, on January 24th to enter the cold North Pacific to catch a wave. I admire their bravado, or is it “madness” as my companion called it. All for the thrill of catching a wave for a moment or two.
Our gardens are momentary, too.
Declining and reviving constantly, moment by moment.
Dissolving when we leave-- a garden is the gardener -- wave-like into a larger reality.
So what if we made our gardens in that larger reality? Would that be less of a waste of time?
Or should we just keep surfing, through the seasons, the years,the floods, and the chores?
And stop wasting time.





Life in the surf holds tight.

YELLOW

Even though Mahonia "Arthur Menzies" is screaming April yellow, It's still winter. I even heard a rumor of snow.

BLACK AND WHITE

This is not a black and white photo. This is just January in the Northwest.

ME AND MY

Today I saw my shadow for the first time in weeks. Maybe even a month. He stood (lied?) before me tangled with shadows of tree branches on the lawn, as if I were up in that tree pruning. I decided to play with my shadow. Not in the way a child plays making funny shapes, but with my mind, the word, the concept of shadow.
We all have a shadow side. According to Jungian psychology, “It is everything in us that is unconscious, repressed, undeveloped and denied. These are dark rejected aspects of our being as well as light, so there is positive undeveloped potential in the Shadow that we don’t know about because anything that is unconscious, we don’t know about.”
I wondered about the shadow of a garden, not the shade but the dark underbelly. What we hide, like the compost bins bowel-like digesting, or the shelf of chemicals in the shed that we can neither use nor throw out.
I wondered about the shadow of the gardener and how that manifested in his garden.
Later in the day I went to a lecture by the Seattle based landscape architect Barbara Swift, of Swift Company. She titled her lecture “Beginning to Get It”.
She was adamant in her use of long lasting materials, and simple in her design.
She also chided us about our “retail therapy” gardens. How we clutter our spaces, getting in the way of our experience of the space. She acknowledges that consumption is an antidote to the disconnectedness of modern culture, but a fleeting one, like chips. How many times have I bought the “ coolest new plant” only to toss it out at the end of the season, or the end of the month, in disgust. She encouraged us to pare down our appetites for new things for the garden, and to sharpen our appetites to the experiences of the garden.
For me it is not so much all the clutter as it is all the activity. How much do we really need to do to the garden? And how much is some craving for busy-ness? Why do I fear my lazy shadow? Why do I fear the part of me that takes pleasure even in the dandelions in the lawn? Why do I garden?
Why do we garden?
I am not asking you , dear readers, to go into analysis to figure out why you garden. I wouldn’t even ask that of myself. What I am asking myself is to look at the motivation behind my purchases, my activities. Am I just “control-freaking” nature, or “expressing myself”? Do I really need to?
I have begun watching my motivations as a gardener, like I watch the slow progress of the twiglet witchhazel I ordered from Forest Farm grow inches at a time.
I want to stay put and let the garden work, not work it.
Maybe like Barbara Swift I’m “beginning to get it”.
Maybe there’s still time for me to learn how to garden.

IN BLOOM TODAY

I was expecting to find only the most reliable Winter bloomers to showing color today. After all the erratic weather we’ve been having it’s hard to imagine anything wanting to bloom. But beyond the determined there was also a few surprises. These photos were taken in a clients garden which could be considered zone 8 most years. At the farm zone 6.5, or worse, there is nothing blooming after the flood.


I wish I could photograph scent, this sweet box, Sarcococca ruscifolia showing both flowers and berries, is a real sweet wake up call this time of year.



Helleborus foetidus 'Chedglow' one of my favorite plants.

My favorite witchhazel, 'Jelena'. It's rusty colored flowers vanish in the winter garden so siting it in front of evergreens is crucial.


The big surprise today was this lonely daffodil, soon to be joined by others. Rijnveld's Early Sensation is the earliest blooming daffodil I know of, but January 15th, unheard of.

DEEP/RECESSION

The waters were deep, and now receding. Thank God. Here's some during and after photos.







Michael is 6 foot 2 inches you can see from the line of debris on this hedgerow of roses that the water was higher than that.

There's a pear tree under there.


The Cherry Orchard.




Cardoon "flowers" still standing after being totally submerged in 3 floods.






Curly kale at our neighbor Dan's farm still looks tidy in it's rows though the current was strong enough to push huge logs miles.




Everything feels so surreal.