Archive: Around Town

Dan SegalIn some perverse twist of nature's balance--or maybe it's just a blustery source of poetic longing--the onset of cold weather brings wist for the summer garden behind us, and yearning for its next awakening in the coming spring.

In this unique moment of the year, mid-fall, when the garden is truly done, when you must admit it--unlike in early October, when the frosts are but a tickle if they've come at all--emotion wells up in the gardener. There's a bit of regret for what wasn't done, for the choice plant that captivated you in May but never made it into your own garden, for the persistent patch of weeds you meant to get this summer, finally, and didn't. There's something gnawing, like angst but something more organic than angst, more natural, that comes from our knowing the coldest season approaches and we just can't devote the time to our garden that we'd love to, that we know would make us happier if we could, and now it's too late again, one more year of being slightly out of sync, not having enough time to relish the garden, to savor it, to pay homage to it by way of work, to praise it with our time and attention.

Gardens and their gardeners don't have to enjoy intense relationships, but it's a pleasure in which some of us indulge. The garden is a unique relationship partner--alive, not ageless but potentially immortal, beautiful in ways that inspire love and emotion but lacking vanity or self-consciousness, in some ways stoic and unflinching but in other ways fussy, tempermental and needy. It's something you begin, you engender, you spin into motion, but then it begins to spin on its own. The garden does need us but won't die without us; we need the garden (for some of us, much more than the garden needs us), but of course it's hard to say we'd die without it. Rather, we'd languish, falter, fade, suffer in unfulfillment. Unplugged from the power source.

I remember the first year I gained the habit of riding a bicylce to and from my college classes, each day a few miles each way, realizing the ride gave me energy rather than sucked it from me. In this way, the garden feeds us, and in the most anthropomorphic way, the garden must plug into us too--it must, right?

The emotions and the bond are more than the common image of the winter gardener poring over seed catalogs with a steaming mug of something. We may do that, but there's more going on. It's more than daydreaming of the summer garden on a cold November (or February) day. It's our built-in biological longing for the season of life and productivity, the season of sustenance and survival. Of course we don't eat daffodils, and our survival doesn't hang on how the Hydrangea grows. But Hydrangea season is when the earth puts out, so to speak--or when it lives out the life we yearn for off-season.

So existentially, we become our garden, our garden becomes us, we fall in love, inextricably, and as it is with a true love, the whole thing grows more beautiful each year even as you both age and time undoes the youthful ribbons and bows. The love becomes complex, which explains how it can contain the angst and the regret and the wist and still burst with beauty each cycle, each year, even each stroll--each time you look. The garden becomes your love, your lover, and you become the garden's. Somewhere along the way you become one. Its spring emergence is yours, literally and figuratively, so the meanings you draw from the garden's yearly awakening may change over time.

So in the sumac's dying but defiant torches of leaves, or in the frostbitten asters, you see the garden's own wistful soul, and yours, and the twining of the two souls heightens the passion. You hear in the garden's last rant of the year music or voice that is the sound of yearning, not just for a stay of the weather, but for life. For another day of life, another day to express itself, to express its own love for its own life. And maybe its love for you.

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