Time in the Garden
"Gather ye rosebuds while ye may." "He's in his salad days." "She's past the first flower of her youth." We are late bloomers, and then we let ourselves go to seed. It's harvest time, apple blossom time, tulip time. April showers bring May flowers. And in the garden there is sometimes enough thyme, but never enough time.
Gardeners, whether we realize it or not, are obsessed with time. Our language shows it, as do our figures of speech. The days, the hours, the length of daylight and darkness, the seasons, the frost dates -- all of these are important to us.
Gardeners measure time not in coffee spoons, as did J. Alfred Prufrock, but in the passings of the seasons, the arrival of the blooms.
Depression sets in, for many a gardener, when the days get shorter. Not necessarily because of Seasonal Affect Disorder, but simply because our time for playing in the dirt is numbered. We count the days til the average last frost date. Then we count the days until we can start to plant seeds. I don't know about the rest of you, but once the seed is planted, I start measuring things in hours. I plant, tuck the seed flats under the lights, and go upstairs -- only to return before bedtime just in case something happened to sprout. Sprout they do, often more quickly than I could reasonably expect (although never that same night) and almost inevitably more quickly than the seed packet has promised. And then I count the days til spring, when I can put them into the ground, or the days that the package tells me I must wait until I get blooms or fruits.
So, I wait for time to plant, time to move things outside, time til bloom, time til frost.
We love to discuss out favorite times in the garden. For some it is dawn, with the dew still fresh on the leaves, the buds just shyly unfurling to meet the day. Being something of a vampire, I see this moment only if I am still up after a long night. My own best time is in the evening garden, just as dusk is falling. The fragrances of white flowers rush forth to lure the night-time pollinators. The light fades, and for an instant those same night flowers take on a glow as if they had an inner fire. And then we sit, enjoying scent and shapes and memories of the day in the garden.
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