Archive: Around Town

Dan SegalThis is not another ‘looking out my window at the snow, drinking a hot mug of tea and poring over seed catalogs while daydreaming of the summer garden' piece...I have read 100 versions of that article and while it's fun to read and easy to write #101, this isn't it. No, the only reference to seed catalogs here is this: the article about starting off the new year with a clean desk, which I cut out because it offered some tips that seemed to be written expressly for my desk, is now buried under seed catalogs, on my desk. I can still see the corner of it, sticking out like the ear of a hiding critter.

Part of the headline-"...with a clean desk"-is still visible. But for how long? It's January 5th as I write this, which means I'm almost past the point of "starting" the year. Another ironic tip in the article is to throw out those things on your desk you know you won't read or use, even though you say you will. Is this one of those articles I've cut out before, only to find a year or so later, yellowed and dusty, that I'll enjoy reading but wince at the date?

For different reasons, we all save things for the winter. Indoor projects, clerical work, art-anything that doesn't fit into the kinetic pace of summer, or can't be squeezed in between fall and the holiday marathon. Forget doing those things in spring. So the winter in my mind should feel like an extended stay at a northern lodge: pristine, quiet, relaxing, a fruitful cocoon. My mind's winter is bright with sun and white with snow, spruce and pine boughs cradling fresh powder, aspen bark flashing against the dark conifers, the world sparkling but silent, cold but invigorating, a time of clean, perfect renewal. In my mind's winter, I write with ease-tapping a vein-but more than that, I articulate those fleeting quarks of wisdom that whiz by in the 4th dimension, coming and going in the same pulse, leaving us bewildered but excited that we'd figured something out, something big, a unifying notion, even if it's gone. In my mind's winter I remember those, or catch them by the tail again, and articulate them.

At the moment, it's winter, and as it passes, with me in it, I have to accept what I'll call Real Winter. In real winter, I find myself unfolding very small scraps of paper with a few cryptic words on them, some legible, having gone through the wash or just spent a long time (for a scrap of paper) in the console of my truck or in a jacket pocket. These are the quarks, and capturing them again, in full color and 4 dimensions, often proves elusive, frustrating and a little disturbing as I try to answer the question, "What was I thinking?" Plus, trying to write in a narrowly defined period of time is appealing in the mind's winter, like a retreat at that lodge, but in real winter it can feel more like homework, which can sap motivation and clog the creative arteries. The pressure's on, even if the muse is on break. And the bright, Adirondack-like imagery of my mind's winter-the soft white epaulets of snow on the shoulders of conifers, sparkling in the morning-that usually comes a few times each winter, but only lasts a few hours each time. Real winter brings freezing rain, sleet, wet snow that makes quick brown slush on the roads, or wind with the dry snow so it doesn't hold on the trees. Real winter.

This is not to complain about winter, because I love it the way it is and I try hard to live realistically. Which is to say that while I enjoy imagination, fantasy and a sense of the ideal, I have found great value in life seeing the practical side of things. The reason it's important to understand both real winter and the mind's winter is to see something real, how we really work, how life as a human being really happens. A super-reality that grows from both. We have notions, visions, plans, but the details of our lives, when they play out in reality, rarely set squarely against the mind's version. But it's in our real lives that we find the real things we enjoy and love, even though they aren't perfect. The mind's winter is beautiful, and serves a purpose, giving us something to strive for, a star in the eye, a Platonic ideal, or more mundanely, a goal. The mind's winters (and all other mirages of the mind) are the artwork of our signature trick that makes us unique, as far as we know, in the universe of living things: we have elaborate visions of the future. Even if they beguile us in vain, our visions are colorful, mesmerizing, alluring, and sweetly spun. If they are only stylized placeholders to be unplugged when our life-laden realities come, that's okay. Without our notions of how things will be in the future, real winter would seem more dreary, not less. But tethered to each other, real winter and the mind's winter give us just the right balance.

Today, on day 2 of this piece, the clean desk article I clipped a week ago is now buried under one more layer of sediment, with less of it peeking out today, making it more likely to be fossilized forever. The new deposit on the pile is a keen essayette copied from a nursery/landscape trade newsletter and sent to me by a friend. It laments the excision of passion and art from gardening, as a new demographic of homeowners ushers in a new wave of social priorities, economic drivers, ideas and vocabulary. The romanticized, old-time ways of gardening-passing plants to a neighbor over an imperfect picket fence of hand-hewn boards, or sharing plants down the generations in coffee cans or wheelbarrows by the ancient trick of root division-may be passing before our eyes.

Today ‘gardeners' buy so much pre-fab: the pre-selected planting kits, the pre-treated soils in bags, the pre-staked vine, and most ironically, even the pre-cut, faux-wood picket fences modeled on the old ones over which plants and garden love were once shared. In fact, fake plants even show up in gardens because they're easy to maintain (well, of course they are, but don't expect to collect much seed from them...). Saving time is nice, but what the trend exposes is a loss of the true nature of gardening: creativity. Closely allied to creativity are ‘artistry', ‘passion', and ‘individualism'. This topic isn't immediately new; it has been brought to our attention in plenty of articles and books, but it commands our deepest thought now, as we need to be ever more vigilant over the loss of love in gardens. What does it say about a culture when love and creativity in the garden are replaced by facility and convenience? If a garden's real value to all animals is a beautiful place to pause, or spend some time in heightened awareness-in the moment, senses fully alive-then what does it say if we begin to create gardens whose purpose is to command as little of our attention as possible?

A final thought: the notion of an idyllic garden is a fine example of the mind's idealized version of a reality. Most gardens hint at that uplifting, suspended sense of life, at least in some special nook or corner or drift. But in reality, most of our gardens are compromised, with weed problems, plants that don't perform as we'd hoped, design errors, etc. Still, we cherish the archetype of a magical, mythical garden, even as we know our own gardens may not match up. It's part of what makes us gardeners, and part of what makes us human.

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