Stop Wasting Paper and Become a Better Gardener

River Birch (Betula nigra)

This winter:

A couple of weeks ago some architectural stuff was torn from the roof of my house by cascading ice. Said stuff (dangerously heavy) rocketed through a kitchen window, unleashing an explosion of broken glass. Everywhere. 

I discovered a twenty-foot section of rain gutter dangling by a thread after heavy snow had pulled the gutter's support screws from the overhang.  

The door to the chicken pen was frozen shut. I had to take the whole thing off its hinges to let the hens out that morning.

Etc.

Cattail Flower in Winter

But it is nearing the end of February, when our hopes stir again for what we will make of the 2013 gardening season. Or more accurately what the 2013 gardening season will make of us.

First, seed companies unleash truckloads of paper catalogues beginning the day after Christmas. I've mostly gotten off their mailing lists. If I need pictures the internet works fine, and that's where I order my seeds anyway. Honestly when Saturday mail deliveries cease this summer I'll rejoice in one less day of junk.

Next comes the deluge of emails and invites offering gardening classes, workshops, symposiums, conferences and lectures. The best of these presentations bring together urgent environmental concerns, aesthetics and practical knowledge (Doug Tallamy and William Collina come to mind); the worst of them show a slide set of 50 new varieties of annuals and read aloud from their handout. No intelligent gardener should have to pay a $65.00 fee for a list she can get for free, and then read it quietly to herself.

Ice Crystals in Little Deer Creek

Sidebar:

Speaking of handouts, what is it with audiences and piles of paper? Historically, when exactly did the handout become a binding agreement between the speaker and the listener? For twelve years I've been fighting this assumption, that a lecturer owes his audience a handout. 

Most handouts are glanced at and then tossed in the trash. This is an area of waste that garden speakers (and their audiences) ought to be more responsible about. I purposefully limit my presentations to a page or two whenever I can. If I'm feeling radical I'll forgo supplying a handout to my audience, but I'm guaranteed to receive a few complaints. 

(Please don't be one of those types. You can easily get these things called pens, which you can write on with something called paper, both of which can be conveniently carried into the presentation in something called a purse or a pocket.)

Red Twig Dogwood (Cornus sericea) 

Anyway.

Another opportunity for restless gardeners in mid to late winter is volunteering. Many nature centers and botanical gardens are in great need of help at this time of year. I belong to an organization called CFI. Last spring our service committee helped Blandford Nature Center plant hundreds of native shrubs. This March we'll be assisting Blandford with its annual Sugarbush Festival--tapping the Sugar Maples and making syrup.

It's too early to dig, but there's plenty of time before planting season begins to teach yourself, and others, new ways to think about gardening.

Early (Early) Winter

Snow and ice has been piling since late November. The forecast has been for below average temperatures and above average precipitation. Both have panned out. I've noticed that meteorologists are remarkably accurate in the high-tech age, although they have a tendency to sensationalize every drop of rain and snowflake as if it's the end of all creation. Weather forecasters have become shameless drama queens for the sake of scoring a few rating points.

Winter, for the record, does not officially begin until the end of this week.

The first really big dump was surprise if only for its intensity. Wet and heavy, virtually everything left standing in the garden was crushed, including the tallest and toughest of the ornamental grasses. Flattened like wet paper, the long shoots and blades now lie limply in ruins upon the earth. Most years I am able to enjoy the shuddering dry canes and seedy plumes lingering into well into March.

Winter interest, that's what we gardeners call it, or leaving a few things to look at for when the gloom seems eternal. Some gardeners subscribe to the scorched earth approach - picking out every remaining stalk and seed head still remaining by late autumn- No Plant Left Behind, if you will - for the sake of efficiency.

Others, myself included, like to see powdery caps of snow atop the Echinacea on a winter's morning, or flitting goldfinches devouring the remnants of Rudbeckia seeds. We find the blank winter garden sterile and sad, nothing to contemplate except frozen, lonely soil.

The mantra for some is to "clean" the garden of pests and diseases by not allowing them to overwinter on decaying plant matter. In the home vegetable garden this makes some sense (crop rotation and soil amendments should always be primary) but in the flower garden, bah.

I've never on my property detected an overabundance of plant disease. I don't trouble myself with a few spots of powdery mildew, anyway, so perhaps I am simply more tolerant than some. One gardener's "problem" is another gardener's shrug of the shoulders.

This morning I took another look around. Some of the miscanthus looks as if it's been hit by a meteorite but in other places things are not so bad after all. Sunflower stalks are indestructible as always, and there are plenty of milkweed hanging around, their silvery-gray pods still stuffed with gossamer. The new waterfalls in my ponds make spectacular ice formations. It's not so bad after all.

With nature one must learn to put things in perspective or find a different past-time.