The English poet A. E. Housman gives me an unexpected take on the death that comes with winter and the promise it holds of spring. “The night is freezing fast,” he writes, “Tomorrow comes December;/And winterfalls of old/Are with me from the past;/And chiefly I remember/How Dick would hate the cold.” Dick would hate the cold if he were alive, but Dick is, in fact, dead and buried. Or, rather, not buried but carried forward in the movement of the earth because he has “woven a winter robe,/And made of earth and sea/ His overcoat forever,/ And wears the turning globe.” This holistic onward movement that keeps the dead man snug in the rhythm of the seasons is surely akin to the whole concept of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, in which Mistress Mary Quite Contrary discovers the bulbs and buds poking out of apparently dead earth and branches inside the walled garden, and where Dickon, the child of nature, shows Mary and her sickly cousin Colin how closely their own health and wholeness depend on this cyclical emergence of life—evidence that life has not died but has merely gone into hibernation.
Snow and deep freezing arrived in Vancouver last week, the middle of January. Plumes of the Miscanthus sinensis outside my window were delicately bowed by their light coating of white. Crows waddled up the branches of the maple on the boulevard pecking for bugs under the moss. I’m hoping they can’t hear any chafer beetle in the grass beneath them. The back garden, with its scattering of tracks, bird, cat, and raccoon, looked positively tidy under its blanket of white. (I am, in a way, sorry to have shut the raccoons out of the garbage with bungee cords, but animals as resourceful as they are do not, really, depend on the debris they can tip out of my bins onto the drive.) A shame, perhaps, that the hardy fuschia was blooming so late that I didn’t cut it back, and now its branches were long and stark. But my sturdy clumps of Sedum, also unpruned, held out any remaining seeds to all comers, as did the more delicate Astilbe. Fat and surely drunken squirrels hung upside down on the ends of the branches of our massive Hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna for the grown ups), grabbing for its still-numerous haws. Buried under the snow will be all the seeds they have dropped, biding their time to sprout into hundreds of new hawthorns all over the herbaceous border and the lawn. This garden I love represents constant war between natural processes and my particular desires, but every stage also brings particular aesthetic delights. Branches of Forsythia, which must be gathering their strength to pop into life, shone gold in the sunlight but the stark and handsome habit of the lilac, branching its arms to heaven, and the corkscrew curls of the Corylus avlellana ‘Contorta' remained stark and dark. Fall has been so mild that the most delicate ferns have retained their shapes and tracery even when brown, as do the mops on each variety of Hydrangea.
Nothing I could do out there just then. I enjoyed absorbing the peace of hibernation from the warm side of the window.
However, now the snow has gone, the temperature has risen, and the rain has returned, so I take the kitchen compost bucket down to our large covered boxes at the back. As before the snow, I avoid treading in the same place twice; on grass as soggy as this, I shall be leaving not delicate tracks but muddy damage. The compost box is swollen and the fence has begun to lean against it, so dumping my kitchen bin becomes a matter of pushing against the fence and propping the lid of the box against it as it collapses again. Repairing these ravages of winter and wet will be a job for when spring returns.
And this is when I see what has been hidden from view indoors: the catkins on the Coryllus; the fat black berries still on the Hypericum inodorum; the green nubs beneath that brown Sedum, green nubs at the base of the rattly old leaves of the Hellebore, and could those be snowdrops under the shrubs? Here are the broader green tips of the Spanish bluebells on which I wage my annual war every spring; some, in close communities, are very welcome, but a hostile take-over in every part of the garden rather less so. In the tub, around the Hibiscus that’s supposed to hide the laundry lines under the deck, yes, the hyacinths and the tulips know that the world is turning and spring is surely on its way as, more confidently, do the gladioli. And if I pay attention by my front steps, I can see Cyclamen hederifolium providing its little splashes of low-lying colour among the soggy leaves. These have not done well, having confused their turn on the turning globe from the start, the weeny corms trying to sprout in the mesh bag I bought them in when my plan had been for a later season. Maybe they will be like babies, just needing to learn how to sleep through the night and wake with more vigour, fully rested, when the day returns. I have great faith in the powers of the natural world to right itself—and need to have, given what confusions I provide for it in my own garden.
So the world that sleeps is waking. The garden that has been secret will come out of hiding because it knows that spring is coming. Dick’s death contains its own promise of life because the turning globe is tipping toward the sunlight and nurtures what is dormant into resurrection. We don’t need religious faith for that concept, just a chance to step outdoors.
Author: Susanna Egan, Master Gardener, Vancouver Chapter
