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A Gardener's Journey into Winter.

© Carol Wallace

I have a love/hate relationship with this time of year. I look out the window at gloom and the skeletons of bare trees. Our ancient furnace is slowly dying, and so heat is sporadic; when it leaves I must trek three floors down to the basement to give that furnace a good swift kick. (It works!) In the garden, the only color left comes from a few New Dawn roses on the arbor, and my guess is that a close inspection would show me that those are frozen. Fall is in full swing, and winter is approaching all too quickly.

My gardening philosophy in autumn is simple. I pull up tall and ugly dead annuals. I mulch. And I leave the rest alone.

I am weary from a summer of hose-hauling, bucket-toting, digging and dragging, moving and mulching. So, the dead leaves on the daylilies aren't pretty. They form a protective cover for the new shoots that will emerge in spring. So they stay. Fallen leaves, as long as they don't form a mat over precious plants, are also left to become mulch. So are the skeletons of smaller annuals. I am a minimalist gardener in Fall.

There is a method to this madness. I may be weary now, but I know that I will be ecstatic in spring, when I am champing at the bit, and my husband has to put figurative (and sometimes literal) reins on me to keep me from plunging out into the frozen dirt.There will be only a few nubs of emerging green and some frozen weeds when I can no longer endure being an indoor prisoner. But they will seem beautiful. In spring I am happy to have things to cut down and rake, and to uncover tiny treasures.

But now, aside from the grasses, which for the time being have transformed themselves into tawny gold columns of light and motion, the garden is gray and brown, with tons of apparent space left by now dormant plants. It's too cold to wander around, coffee cup in hand, taking inventory.

And so, from this point on, any gardening that takes place happens in my imagination.

And that is where the love part of my relationship with the journey into winter comes in.

Somehow, at this time of year I can forget that spring is mostly anticipation. The daffodils and Iris reticulata will emerge from winter sleep - but all around them will be bare earth. In spring I constantly fight the urge to install huge and interesting rocks in the empty spaces between color bursts. The dim recesses of memory tell me that there are lazy plants down there, reluctant to emerge from their snug beds.