Frozen

On this, the first official day of Spring, I stick my shovel tentatively into the ground, here and there, and find that, indeed, much of my yard is still frozen.  I talked to a construction worker a few days ago who told me that in places they were finding it frozen to a depth of two feet. That's practically permafrost.  This explains the agonizing delay in the appearance of spring bulbs.  Either they were killed outright by the cold, or they just can't get through the soil yet.  (Though nobody reading this blog needs to hear it, it bears repeating that globally this has been the fourth warmest winter on record, so the climate-denying know-nothings yet again have nothing to work with).

All this provides me a much-needed opportunity to learn patience and humility.  We gardeners, despite our pretensions to work with nature, really work against nature, if by nature we mean the wild.  Michael Pollan, in his indispensable early book, Second Nature, reminds us quite bluntly that a garden is a civilizational artifice, something we do over-and-against nature's singular imperative, which is to over-run everything and establish climax forest (or prairie, or desert, etc.).  We are less Thoreau Romantics than Voltaire Rationalists, even when we prefer the tangled English garden to the order and symmetry of the French (see last posting).

Left alone, nature would quickly swallow up our proudest achievements, as the recent book by Alan Weisman, The World Without Us, demonstrates quite devastatingly.  Using that paragon of the human will-to-build, NYC, as a model, Weisman makes it clear just where we fit in the scheme of things.  You don't have to read his book though; just take a look at an abandoned lot in your own city, or at the yard of your neighbor who imagines himself a naturalist because he's too lazy to tend to his property.  His "natural landscape" turns out to be all opportunistic weeds and trash trees, a far cry from the old growth forest he foolishly imagines growing in his yard.  And that's to say nothing of his role as a distributor of weed seeds for the neighborhood, making the rest of us work that much harder to undo his thoughtlessness.   

 

But I digress.  We gardeners hold back that natural super-abundance.  We tame nature, at least in the short run.  By choosing what grows and what doesn't grow, by creating artificial micro-environments for the cultivation of what WE want, we shut out nature's drive to plant a succession forest in our back yard.  And that's fine.  Indeed, that's absolutely necessary if we're to live in a city or town, and not an oak-beech forest.  There's a certain power in that, perhaps even a bit of prideful self-importance.  After all, we are the ones who beautify and feed the world, and what could be more important than that?  So to remind us not to get too full of ourselves, Mother Nature sends us drought, flood, and, most recently, the Deep Freeze.  She reminds us quite plainly that we are not in charge; at best we get to play on her sandlot.

We gardeners need to find that middle ground between arrogance ("I control my yard") and helplessness ("there's nothing I can do with my yard").  We need both boldness and humility.  Mother Nature giveth and she taketh away.  The sooner we understand that, the sooner we develop that perfect Taoist relationship to nature, neither master nor victim. The sooner we learn, river-like, to flow around the boulder rather than smack right into it, the greater, paradoxically, is our power.  We then garden in gratitude to nature for allowing us to play on her sandlot, and in response to that gratitude, she blesses us with what we need, no more and no less.

I may be getting too theological here.  Really, I just want to learn the humility and patience that teaches us that we don't get to decide when to put in that flame azalea or start our beet seeds.  Nature decides, on her own schedule, not the Farmer's Almanac's.  It's different every year.  Our job is to watch and wait for the opportune moment.  And then plant something that will make Mother Nature proud.