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Fool Your Senses into Believing it's Garden Time

© Carol Wallace

Looking out my backyard all I see is white - pristine white in some places and in others white marked with a crosshatch of chicken tracks. Add a gray sky and one wonders why anyone bothered to invent color film.

Underneath I know my plants are sleeping peacefully. To them snow is a blanket - Mother Nature's Mulch. To me it means slogging out to the back 40 in snow higher than my knee boots to gently relieve the evergreens of their burdens. After that it is simply something that slows me down just when the cold weather makes me want to move faster.

The snow came just in time. Our autumn and early winter was so warm that some of the bulbs and perennials started to peek out, no doubt wondering why their sleep time seemed so short. My Helleborus niger actually lived up to its name for the first time in this climate and flowered at Christmas. The winter-blooming honeysuckle Lonicera fragrantissima which normally blooms in very early spring bloomed last month. I was delighted - in the warmer air I could actually enjoy the fragrance that is usually stunted by spring cold.

But now winter has settled in for real. It is a time of trial for the impatient gardener. How does one survive the times when the ground is too frozen to work?

Sense the Scent
Howard Deutch, our Garden Adventures editor tells me that he survives winter with the help of a large terrarium. When the doldrums get too bad, he opens it and takes a deep breath. The scent of moist soil and greenery restores him for a while.

I've never been that enterprising. I hold on (barely) until the Philadelphia Flower Show opens in March. I am not by any means a morning person but greet the alarm gladly on Flower Show day - even though I know we have a two hour drive before we see growing things - and then an interminable search for a parking spot. But that incomparable moment when you walk through the doors and inhale and your soul fills with the scent of damp earth, moss and greenery - even the scent of flowers - it's worth both the wait and the hassle of getting there. It's even worth the price of admission.

As stopgaps, some people resort to flower scented room sprays or aromatherapy. I keep a little spray of lavender close by and that help sometimes. At least you can close your eyes and pretend.