Dreaming Of A White Garden

First published in the February 22 issue of The Oxford Journal by Sara Mattinson.

What does it mean to dream in mid-February about working in a lush flower garden? Is it a sign of an early spring?

On the coldest night of the year, I dreamed about gardening, a dream likely inspired by my mother’s phone call from Georgia wanting to know what zone we live in (she wants to plant moonflowers). An armchair traveller, she’s been reading about Tuscany all winter and already has called to inform us that she wants to plant a rose garden. So while the house snapped and cracked in the minus 27 degree night air, I dreamed about the work to be done when the snow is gone and the plants are growing. 

Winter is hard on gardeners but good for gardens. Freezing improves the soil while snow insulates plants. The bitter cold kill pests and diseases. While cold winds and blowing snow cleanses the   weed-weary spirits of gardeners, it is also Nature’s time for cleaning up her space. 

Gardeners survive winter by obsessively reading plant catalogues, drawing big, dark circles around preferences and enticements, however improbable. The catalogues slip between the sheets with us, our bedtime reading full of luscious, lulling words like begonia and peony, lily and alstromeria. As a result, we dream in splashes of red and pink, yellow and purple, with long strokes of green. Sprouts of colour blooming in the dirt our of minds. 

Winter erases the gardener’s memory. We forget the failures and excesses from the year before, and begin to believe (again) that this year, it will all work out: the ornamental grass won’t spread, the weeds won’t come up, the $30 plant won’t die, the mail order roots won’t rot while we wait for the ground to drain. The long, dark, snowy days of winter allow us to forget the impracticality of gardening, the time and expense, the backbreaking work, the endless watering, the finite results we eat or gaze upon for a few precious weeks. 

In my dream, I was in the large flower garden in our front yard, laying slate rocks to widen the garden paths that are tangled under plants every year by mid-July and digging up poppy plants to transplant them to other garden beds. The dream gave me answers to questions I had yet asked, questions that would have chewed at me, like black flies, in June. What to do? What to do?

There is only one cure to this mid-winter madness of dreaming about gardening: It is time to begin ordering roots and seeds because every gardener knows, winter is over when those boxes of possibilities arrive. 

Mid-Winter Night's Dream

Minus 22. Coldest morning of the winter. I let the husband get up first so he can build up the fire again, get the house warm, heat the kettle. 

A frigid mid-February night (only one of a few in this mild winter of ours) yet last night, I dreamed about gardening. Prompted by my mother phoning from Georgia earlier in the day to ask what zone we are in. We built onto our house for her and she has a second floor balcony. Not sure if she wants to plant in pots on the balcony or plant in the ground to entwine around the posts but she wants moonflower and jasmine; what she wants and what our zone will allow may not be compatible. 

I'd already planned to put clematis there. The gardening wars are about to commence. 

In my dream, I was in the big flower garden down front, the one that needs work. Much work. We renovated last summer and so lived away from home, and away from the gardens, for four months. I don't think I even pulled weeds, let alone tended the garden the way I had for the four previous summers. In my dream, I was digging up poppy plants and knowing where to move them; I was trying to place chunks of slate in order to widen a pathetic stone path that gets overgrown and unusable by mid-July. 

It was all so real. But the best part, now that I think about it, in my dream, there were no mosquitos and the work I was doing didn't hurt my back. 

What does it mean to dream in mid-February about your gardens? Is it a sign of an early spring? 

Deer In The Moonlight

The deer have found the carrots hidden in the garden. We didn't insulate them under straw to overwinter them; we simply never got around to eating them all, even with the rabbits, or tilling up the garden to rot until spring. Yet the carrots are frozen and buried under snow, and the deer have never bothered our vegetable garden before. 

There was one, a doe, standing in the garden when I arrived home from work, and two more, her old fawns, in the back field. They took off, but not in a great panic which is nice to see, the old girl picking her way slowly, without real concern, across the snowy field to catch up to her two offspring who had disappeared awhile ago into the woods. When I told my husband, he said they might return at night to feed again.

At midnight, under that great spotlight of a full moon, when the pup stirred, I got up to see if she needed to pee but no one was stirring in the dog bed by the time I reached it. Luckily for me. If I'd opened the sliding door to let the pup out, I would have disturbed the three deer standing in the garden munching carrots in the moonlight. 

I wonder why this winter, a mild and easy one, they found this buffet. Is it the only time we've left food on the earth's table? Or are they beginning to believe that they are truly safe in our backyard? My sleepy eyes were filled with loveliness and I returned to bed to dream about green grass and flowers. 

Last Days In The Garden

As I knelt at the edge of one of the flower gardens in our front yard, I noticed a green sprout. This streak of mild weather has a daffodil reaching for blue skies. It’s disconcerting to see a harbinger of spring just as I’m trading T-shirts for turtlenecks in the dresser drawers. 

Next year’s bulbs are planted now. Red and pink coloured tulips by the driveway for my mother-in-law to see when she drives by; yellow daffodils and white crocuses in the new bed out front to give my husband something lovely to look at while he smokes on the front deck; and daffodils and crocuses in corners of other gardens just because. I may just have planted them but I already am anticipating the beauty and the hope that will sprout in me when those tiny green shoots appear next spring just as we’re getting tired of cold winds and winter boots. One eager daffodil aside, those will arrive regardless of the warm weather now.

I’ve only been a gardener for four years and what amazes me the most is not how physical the work is but how this physicality focuses my mind so intently that I cease to think. My world narrows to the trowel in my hand, the smell of overturned dirt, the placement of the bulb in the deep hole, the pressing down of my hands upon the soil. No matter what bothers me inside the house, it does not follow me into the garden. Who knew worry and anxiety are allergic to dirt? 

In her book, The Spirituality of Gardening (Northstone, 2005), author Donna Sinclair writes about gardening as a spiritual practice: “It is kin to what some do in church, synagogue, mosque, temple, or around a sacred fire: singing, kneeling, chanting. It is holy ritual, the repeated effort to draw closer to the Creator whose joy and beauty suffuses the earth.” 

While the neighbours aren’t going to hear me singing and chanting,  I do sense the sacred in the dirt, the divine in the endless flowering of the plants, the glory of birds and buds, even worms and spiders. Then there is the not-knowing if this hard work will pay off but having faith it will. When I kneel in the garden holding the large, white daffodil bulb on the palm of my hand, I am engaged in a prayer that asks simply to be granted the honour of its presence. When it is ready. 

And I pray I’m doing it right. My gardening efforts require faith in the plant to overcome the limitations of the planter. While I wait for the magic to appear in May, I’ll spend the winter poring over a  gardener’s holy book: the Veseys catalogue. 

A Second Growing Season?

My younger sister and her family live in Georgia, in the country about an hour south of Atlanta. They have two growing seasons there; the first one begins in March and the second one in July or August. Imagine! Twice the opportunities to grow tomatoes and peas and zucchini and pumpkins (is that why American Thanksgiving falls in late November?).
We may be catching up here in northern Nova Scotia. When we can let the chickens out of their fenced pen to roam around our one-acre yard, it means it's time to clear the annuals out of the flower gardens. Yet many of my annuals - sunflowers and zinnias excepted - were still in bloom. They seemed worn out, likely tired of coping with the temperature extremes of warm days and cold nights, or perhaps they are simply weary of treading water after all the rain we've had, but they are still in bloom. In fact, my osteopernum were not merely in bloom - they were reblooming. The plants looked so strong and healthy, you would have would have sworn it was July. I didn't have the heart to rip them out of the ground.
Here's the thing: although I believe in global warming and know it's humans paving the ground and spewing poisons into the water and atmosphere that has caused it, it's tempting to enjoy the prospect of a second growing season. Think of all the hard work that goes into creating and maintaining flower gardens (as well as vegetable gardens but those are my husband's domain); if those gardens could last two months later, that's more time to take pleasure in the sights. If that's the case, however, I'm going to have to plant more late-season bloomers like asters, helenium, and sedum.
And perhaps if we can offer a second growing season -- and no cockroaches -- I'll be able to convince my sister and her husband and their four kids that northern Nova Scotia is as good a place to live as southern Georgia.