Ice has the hollow in its silken grip. Blue shadows sheen the twilight and the sun glints like the sparkles Grandma Moses sprinkled over the snow in her paintings of Vermont. We haven’t had a winter like this in quite some time. I see why some might want to escape it!
But no Florida for me. Out here in our version of the country I have lived with the seasons for over forty years and the arc of the sun as it rises in the sky from December to June and the annual metamorphosis of the woods and fields into “earth’s immeasurable surprise” are everything to me.
The elaborate gardens my husband and I made in our youth – we had a deer fence and vegetable garden at one time and I actually tended a perennial border – have gradually given way to a pared down landscape of pots, shrubbery and groundcovers.
There’s no such thing as no maintenance. Even astroturf and cement must be cleaned. But there is such a thing as low maintenance and I approach it like a Zen student as I age.
I indulge myself with a small mixed border off the front porch where I have a structure of evergreen perennials like nepeta and sedge with room to pop in must-have zinnias and cleomes each summer. But now the landscape is reduced to its essential lines.
John’s ‘Satyr Hill’ American holly has thrived in the lowland by the compost pile; the fragrant Eleagnus (E. pungens) that screen the cistern and our two magnificent tree box provide our evergreens. There is also a fortuitous seedling holly that punctuates the borrowed view at the end of the meadow walk. It is a pleasure to watch it grow.
I so look forward to the daffodils, but ice is all around us now, outside in the fields, in the streets of our cities and in the hearts of many of our fellow citizens. Spring will melt the ice in the hollow and they say that love will melt the coldest hearts.
Hoop Petticoat/Narcissus bulbocodium