7 Pining for the Garden Takes

It doesn’t look like this today…

It is an excessively gray day here in Binghamton. It looks like snow but the weather websites all insist that it doesn’t, so that’s very curious. Let’s see, are there any takes floating around here?

One

I know that February is technically the shortest month of the year, but I always find it the very longest. The rigor and usefulness of Lent haven’t yet arrived, but the snow and cold and slush remain interminably. I find it fairly unbearable in February, waiting for Spring, and knowing that it will never come. To make myself feel better, I’ve been scrolling back through pictures of my garden and also reading all the gardening books.

Two

My favorite in the world is Eleanor Perenyi’s Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden, which is so beautiful that I’m afraid it will end and that will be terrible. I love this passage:

Americans resent the vagaries of weather to a degree unknown to other peoples. England’s generally abominable climate is forecast in positively poetic terms–‘Intervals of sun and cloud over East Anglia’–and in Italy a light chop on the Mediterranean sounds Vergilian. The majority of Americans crave a sunlit perfection, as if hell itself weren’t a warm, well-lighted place, and have accordingly migrated by the millions to the Sun Belt, where the real prediction, not often uttered, is that they and their crops, planted in areas never intended by nature to support such exploitation, will die of thirst within twenty years unless a miracle occurs. Not only that: Bulldozed and overbuilt southern California is regularly bunt over by man-kindled fires and bids fair to be destroyed by mudslides well before the long-predicted earthquake comes along. Californians are only continuing the well-worn practice of building where floods and washouts are regular events–all our alluvial plans are examples of the same recklessness. We aren’t, of course, the only people who have chosen to live on the brink. Ancient history testifies to that. From the flood plains of Mesopotamia to volcanic regions around the world, always heavily populated, the record is of one catastrophe after another, beginning with the Flood. But we are surely, in modern times, the least realistic and least equipped to deal with quite ordinary and predictable happenings. Our cars are so constructed (they didn’t used to be) that an inch or two of snow is enough to swamp the roads with accidents. I don’t know how they do it, but in northern and Alpine Europe (and Japan’s northernmost island, Hokkaido), trains race through blizzards and arrive on the minute. In the United States, a commuter railroad like the Long Island, with no mountain passes to cross, no elaborate connections to be made with other international trains, can and has collapsed for more than a week after a snowstorm. No wonder the prospect of a little bad weather makes us nervous. We aren’t equipped to handle it physically or–what is more important in the long run–psychologically either. Weather is a force we have lost touch with. We feel entitled to dominate it, like everything else in the environment, and when we can’t are more panic-stricken than primitives who know that when nature is out of control they can only pray to the gods.

Three

And I read Elizabeth and her German Garden again last week. This bit is so great:

There has been no rain since the day before Whitsunday, five weeks ago, which partly, but not entirely, accounts for the disappointment my beds have been. The dejected garden went mad soon after Whitsuntide and had to be sent to an asylum. He took to going about with a spade in one hand and a revolver in the other, explaining that he felt safer that way, and we bore it quite patiently, as becomes civilized beings who respect each other’s prejudices, until one day, when I mildly asked him to tie up a fallen creeper–and after he bought the revolver my tones in addressing him were of the mildest, and I quite left off reading to him aloud–he turned around, looked me straight in the face for the first time since he has been here, and said, “Do I look like Graf X–(a great local celebrity), or like a monkey?” After which there was nothing for it but to get him into an asylum as expeditiously as possible. There was no gardener to be had in his place, and I have only just succeeded in getting one; so that what with the drought, and the neglect, and the gardener’s madness, and my blunders, the garden is in a sad condition; but even in a sad condition it is the dearest place in the world, and all my mistakes only make me more determined to persevere.

Four

I am alarmed and anxious because I saw this yesterday:

Vegetable seed sellers experienced skyrocketing demand last spring as concerns over potential food shortages drove some of the demand; gardening also helped pass the time during quarantine—leading seed companies to post virtual “out of stock” stickers on some popular seed varieties. As seed starting season begins again, sellers say demand hasn’t slowed down.

“The demand has been massive,” says Mike Lizotte, co-owner and managing director of American Meadows and board president of the Home Garden Seed Association.

There is no seed shortage—yet—but some seed companies are already starting to report issues.

My own garden will be in a sad and sorry state if I can’t get some seeds. I guess this will bring me to a new level of gardening–having to creep into my neighbors’ gardens by night surreptitiously to take cuttings.

Five

Here are some pictures of all the stuff buried under the snow.

Six

I do have some pots of stuff I dug up and brought in for the winter, just to give myself some hope. The one that’s doing the best is this curry plant. It isn’t very elegant looking and isn’t actually what anyone would make curry with, and I almost never cook with it, but I like walking by and smelling it whenever I’m trying to shove the dogs out into the snow.

Seven

As rain and snow fall from the heavens and return not again but water the earth, bringing forth food for eating and seed for sowing, so is the word that goes forth from His mouth (rather than mine, thank heaven), it will not return again empty–as surely as February giving way to March. Go check out more takes!