A View From My Garden

The days are getting longer, the sun is rising higher in the southern sky. It is not all that noticeable, I must confess. The skies are grey with winter silence. No cacophony of unbridled bird choirs greets the day. Winter is a time of silence, and spring must burst upon us with brilliant activity. .

Yesterday as I toured the winter garden, I noted the Japanese iris has put up about 4-6 inch bright green leaves, rising out of the pond like slender green swords, put there perhaps by the Lady of the Lake, or her Japanese counterpart. I looked to more practical plants for equal signs of greening but the forsythia's stems are as bare as they were in November, and the native gold stem and red stem dogwoods are still enjoying displaying their vividly colored winter structure. It is still winter, though the grass grows greener with each melting snow.

January 21st is behind us now, and each day the sun will spend a longer time traversing a slightly higher arc, and we can be sure that this increasing sunlight is not going unnoticed by our plants. Trees, shrubs and perennial flowers use various signals to tell them when to start the next season's growth, but primary among these natural signals is the number of hours of daylight; what botanists call the photoperiod. Right now, though it may not appear so to us who watch and wait for signs of spring, there are all sorts of wildly important biochemical changes going on beneath the earth and in the crowns or leader branches around us.

I wonder if in more primitive times, when we lived so very close to nature and to the soil; when we worshiped sun and water for their life-giving support, I wonder if then we too were conscious of these tiny changes in the flow of winter, inexorably advancing toward spring? Does our own blood churn slightly, shiver and reach toward the sun?

A dear friend of mine, a wonderfully cultures and educated woman who is first generation Norwegian and so may have particular insight into the winters of the north country, always does her daily walks in South Dakota's fall in a short-sleeve T-shirt and light jacket. She says, when asked about the cold November winds, "But if I wear a warm coat now, what will I wear in February?" In March, she takes off her winter coat and says, "My blood is thick enough now, it is time to get ready for summer."

Ah, summer. Yes, we must be ready for it, for if we are not, then it will whisk away into fall and winter almost without our notice, and the shortening days will bend our spirits to the winter-silent earth. Still, I would not again live without fully rounded seasons. Like the trees, the forsythia, the dogwoods and the poppies, I raise my face to the sun peeking through a hole in the sky and rejoice within myself.

Friends have reported to me that they have seen several robins in the neighborhood in the last few days, and one reports from Paradise, from the Magic Triangle, that he saw a robin a week ago! Another, has heard an early morhing bird song. These are false signals, no doubt, for it is barely past the 21st of January, and there are days and days of gray skies and cold rain ahead of us. The early robins will go back to the warmer place they ventured from, and the native plants will keep their peace. I will go back to browsing my seed catalogues and try to send off a sensible order. It is not quite time to start up the greenhouse, but it is close!