Winter, it seems, regrets having spent so little snow on us, and is making reparations while it can. There hasn’t been enough snow so far this season to hide all the grass, and many are the Michiganders complaining about it: nowhere to snowshoe; no way to sled; not even enough for a decent snowman. But today we have four inches on the ground, and seven more are predicted for the weekend. I’m happy for those who can now enjoy their winter sports. Meanwhile, I’m perfectly content sitting inside watching the dance of snow come down while I page through my seed catalogs.
I potted up my tulip bulbs last fall, put them in the garage to chill, and last week brought them into the light and warmth of my front window, where they joined the amaryllis bulbs liberated from my dark but not freezing closet. I like to see spring start first on the windowsill, and watch it spread from there into the yard.
I meant to start my indoor tomato before Christmas so it could be setting fruit by now. A little late on that, but the seedling is coming along nicely. I had two of them last year, but they need really big pots that take up a lot of space, so I cut back to one this year. I’m trying to decide whether to put a trellis in the pot this time, or tie some twine to the curtain rod. It’s a Cobra tomato, intended for greenhouses, and quite tasty.
While I was rearranging pots to make room for the tulips, amaryllis, and tomato, I took advantage of an idea my friend Cindy gave me for reining in frolicsome spider plants. You stick a plant support into the spider’s pot, gather up all the spider plant runners as if you were going to make a pony tail, and catch them through the loop at the top of the plant support. Voila! A spider tower. My spider plant mocked me by immediately throwing a new runner out to the side. The will of a spider plant to propagate cannot be denied.
Happy New Year, the day that looks both forward and back. This is my antique clock, that rang in the New Year last night as it did through my childhood, when it sat on our living room mantelpiece and it was my job to wind it. I was the one among my siblings who’d wind it slowly enough not to break the mainspring. The little angels visit the clock when I decorate for Christmas, and they will fly back up to heaven, or somewhere, after January 6th when the decorations come down.
The best thing about decorating the house for the holidays is unpacking my ornaments and distributing them through as many rooms as possible. Doug helps me carry all the boxes up from the basement, and as I open them I lift out every Christmases I ever had. Which at this point is a lot of Christmases. It’s true I don’t possess actual pieces from my childhood any more, but those from my children’s childhood recall my own to me. The stars made of bread-dough clay, flowers of cornstarch clay, and god’s eyes of yarn, emerge from their careful tissue wrappings as though in a sparkling blaze, and light up the winter day. I put on Christmas music, sing along, pour myself some eggnog, and restore the ornaments to the season they were made for.
I used to make these yarn angels – it’s why I taught my daughter to make them. My children, grown now, refer to these ornaments as my Holy Relics. I hang them alongside store-bought travel souvenirs and gifts from a lifetime of friends. Every year an ornament or two breaks, or falls, or in some other way meets the end of its useful life, and every year I make something new and add it to the tree.
Recently a friend gave me a stack of books she cleaned out of her house. There was a whole set of encyclopedias and an array of books she had once used teaching English in Poland, including dictionaries and songbooks. The pages of the songbooks were large and inspiring, meant as they were for lifting voices out of paper and ink. Pretty miraculous. I couldn’t read them, but I thought they made a glorious wreath.
The encyclopedia was in English, so I can tell you the pages that made this wreath were full of Billiards and Bergamot, among other Volume Two subjects.
My new tree ornaments this year were also made of paper, this time Japanese origami paper. Another friend showed me how to fold it into pairs of flower petals, which were then glued together to make a circle. To hold the pieces together while the glue dried, I used the miniature clothespins my Dad used as clamps when he made ship models. My children, my parents, countries I have learned from, countries I have traveled to, all these cultures and all these generations fill the branches of my tree. Multiculturalism is out of fashion these days, but it’s beautiful and memorable in my living room, here at the time of year when the light prepares to come back.
Thanksgiving marks the pivot point between fall and winter. The leaves are all down, Christmas lights have begun going up, and a bit of snow has joined in the decorating trend. One of my surprises moving to Michigan from California, was still having fresh sage in the garden for the Thanksgiving turkey platter. I did have to brush the snow off of it, but it looked great and smelled wonderful.
The turkey platter is a family heirloom. I didn’t have the best relationship with my mother growing up, but as I set the table it meant a lot to me to have her silver, her black glass candlesticks, her blue Staffordshire souvenir plates, her turkey platter. I lifted and placed these things and thought about what her life was like, what she might have wanted to do with it and what she did. She used to tell me stories that changed as she told them, that differed from time to time. That was how it seemed to me then. Now I think it was all the same story, just seen from different perspectives.
Thanksgiving is a good time for appreciating what you have. No more zinnias or cosmos in the garden, but the nigella and goldenrod, standing tall and dry outside in the cold, make a lovely arrangement.
There’s leftover pumpkin pie for breakfast, while on the front porch the frost is definitely on the pumpkin.
Snow outlines the trees, blows off, comes back, blows off. The sky’s not the same twice in ten minutes.
On my windowsill another transition is happening: the poinsettias, so lush and green when I brought them in form the deck, are starting to turn red. The next season is coming along.
After weeks of summer and fall bumping into each other in a jumble, fall seems to be emerging triumphant at last. The stags are about done destroying small trees by using them to rub the velvet off their antlers. I’m still waiting for one of them to graciously leave his shed antlers in exchange – seems like the least he could do. Maybe this will be the year.
Between the light frosts and the subsiding hours of sunlight most of my flowers and tomatoes are gone, but out in front, facing south, one rudbeckia plant persists. It’s not the only rudbeckia out there, but it’s the only one still blooming. A mystery of nature.
Over in the shady section, a single foxglove has re-bloomed. It was pink the first time, but has paled in the shortened hours of daylight. The foxgloves are spaced widely, so in their case it’s understandable that individuals may have different amounts of light, or shelter, or competition from other plants. Less mysterious.
Out in the fenced garden, once the tomatoes were gone, I planted lettuces in the cold frame. They’re flourishing. This is very satisfying to me as a gardener, but the flaw in the plan is that I really don’t eat much salad in cold weather.
That was the trouble with radishes too, until I learned that they can be cooked. How did I get to be as old as I am, and never knew this? They’re so cute out in the garden, with their little round, red shoulders peeking out of the dirt, and they demand so little in the way of warmth and sunlight, I can’t resist planting them when random space becomes available. I’m still working out the best recipes for them.
Meanwhile, the main path into my woods needed help. I spread several layers of the Sunday New York Times over the old path, poured a bucket of water over that so it wouldn’t blow around as I worked, and topped it with mulch. That will be one less thing to do come spring, when things to do are plentiful. As much as I love gardening, there comes a time when I really need a break. If spring is the reward for winter and harvest is the reward for spring, winter is the reward for three seasons of hard work. Just curl up with a good book and eat all those quarts of tomato sauce.
The late warm season continues. Most of the flowers are gone, but there’s still a lot of autumn color. The spirea planted in front is mostly down to bare branches, but this one in a pot on the deck is still in glory. This is odd, first because the front yard gets more sunshine, facing south, and the deck faces north; but also because roots in the ground get more protection from weather than roots in pots do. Nature surprises us whenever she wishes. The potted spirea is a volunteer – a pot of nigella was colonized by free-range spirea seed, and quickly became too lovely to remove. Here it is garnished by a couple of immigrant maple leaves, likely carried by whatever forces brought the spirea seed.
Here’s the donor tree for those maple leaves, with just a little left in its branches to continue decorating the yard.
My herb collection has a mixed response to autumn. I had to bring the basil indoors, but thyme and sage will persevere outside all the way to Thanksgiving. The pot of mint may not last quite so long, but meanwhile has collected its own leaf embellishment.
Meanwhile, after much inspection via the internet, I ordered a memorial stone for my wonderful cat, Zerlina. Many of those offered had elaborate decorations and extensive text, but none came up to Zerlina’s level of elegance. I chose one in her colors, with a soft shape. Not that a stone will be puffy, but hard angled edges seemed wrong. Doug came out to the garden with me while I buried her ashes in the center of the garden next to the thyme, and placed the stone on top. I needed the hugs. Then I sat for a while on my glider bench, thinking about her. The thyme will spread, and maybe I’ll encourage it to surround the whole stone. I haven’t decided yet, but thyme sounds like it belongs with memorials.
Then I went back into the house, where I picked up all the pumpkins and put them back in different places. I had to remember that things can change. And I found a sort of puffy one for the hearth.
This morning my sprinkler guy, Craig, came and winterized the system. It’s pretty exciting to watch – he hooks up his air compressor, and it blows the water out of all the pipes at once, like an inverted thunderstorm. All over the yard, clouds rise out of the ground as if the woodchuck is popping open a lot of champagne.
We haven’t had a frost yet, but with the cooler temperatures and shorter hours of daylight, what flowers remain won’t need me to water them. When I moved here fifteen years ago, Labor Day was the time to bring in your tender plants before the frost. Now, Columbus Day is in plenty of time. My bougainvillea gets a spot the sunniest window.
Next up will be bringing the pillows in from the deck. You see the white puff on this one – that’s the spot where the little red squirrel has been pulling stuffing out and carrying it away. I tried to take a picture of him at it, but he was way too fast for me. I also tried to see where he was taking it, but he was too fast for that, too. My first impulse when I saw this marauder, was to save the pillow by bringing it in. Two considerations made me leave it out there: one, that taking it away would encourage him to break into another pillow, whereas leaving it might mean only this one pillow was damaged; and two, it was very entertaining to watch him pack improbable amounts of fluff into his mouth for each trip. Squirrels don’t hibernate, but build nests for warmth in the winter.
It doesn’t take a frost for the burning bushes to live up to their name. The color is glorious, and it’s very generous with its seeds, a benefit to the birds and small mammals that stay for the winter. Burning bush is not native, and in many areas is considered an invasive pest with no natural predators. Around here, though, the deer are happy to step up.
Out in the garden I still have a few zinnias, but mostly I have miniature pumpkins. I love growing them myself because they’re small enough not to overrun the garden, and I get to cut them with long stems and curlicues still attached. Here they are perched on the hearth of my fireplace, on normal size bricks for a sense of scale. I’ll go down to one of the farms this week to buy some big pumpkins – some for the house, and some to set out on the porch where, when they’re finished building nests out of my pillow, the squirrels will have a handy pumpkin snack.
I’m not complaining about the rain here. Michigan is far from the ravages of the hurricane, getting only its wispy edges as the system falls apart, and the rain – normal amounts of rain over ordinary periods of time – is necessary and appreciated. The tiny creek in my neighborhood is still a tiny creek. I’m grateful for that, and deeply sympathetic to the towns, counties, and states dealing with floods today. I wish for them a prompt return to the kind of day I walked out to in my yard this morning. Everything glowed. The burning bush was a lantern, announcing October – topiaried, as you see, by the deer. Burning bush can be invasive, but our local deer would never let that happen.
I always say that autumn is my favorite season, but really it’s the transitions from each season to the next that are my favorite places in the calendar. In honor of this occasion, I put pots of marigolds and black petunias out by the front steps. Petunias get a little goofy in rain, but they’ll have a good drink and then open back up when it’s over. Meanwhile they’re making little bats out of themselves, to go with the marigolds’ pumpkin spiciness.
Probably the biggest rain transformation is the driveway. The plain old asphalt is, this morning, an impressionist study in grey. There’s a lot to see in it – maybe North and South America? A witch with a teddy bear? The picture shifts, with the light, as I walk along. partly reflecting trees and partly tossing the light around.
The back section of the driveway has the added attraction of pine needles. A deconstructed haystack? The aftermath of a haircut? A length of houndstooth checked wool waiting to be made into a sports jacket? The little stack of logs at the far end is there to remind Edison, whose trucks have been in the neighborhood trimming trees ahead of blizzard season, not to roll their cherry-picker rig onto my septic field.
Clouds are pretty much smooth and grey while it’s raining, but after the storm they can get glorious. I hope people in the disaster zone recover soon, and reestablish happy relations with nature.
Robin Richstone 