“A loose sally of the mind, an irregular undigested piece.” ~Samuel Johnson’s definition of the essay.
MY FIRST VISIT to the garden in the new year. I had intended to come after breakfast, but various home projects intervened, postponing the trip until after lunch. Following a quick visit to the greenhouse, I entered the garden carrying two watering cans to be filled with water from the custodian’s “office” in the Alumni House. Before unlocking a back door, I stopped at the front of the patio and took a few minutes to view the garden. The temp was in the low 40s, no notable breeze. We had a thin cloud cover, but there was enough sunlight for me to read the sundial and note the gnomon’s 1:30 afternoon shadow. One could not ask for a more pleasant day to visit the garden in January, but my initial observations were dominated by a sense of the garden being surrounded and dominated by taller buildings, crowding against the outside walls. Because the garden’s vegetation looks so uniform and undifferentiated, my eyes kept slipping over the garden wall and noting the Commonwealth apartments, the new building with the Jimmy Johns, the roofs of older homes east of the campus, the cross on St. Paul’s UMC, the two college apartments north and south of the garden. Normally, I feel like the garden is a sanctuary, a blessed retreat from the urban landscape, but today the garden was oppressed by these human structures. With no much of the garden’s plants reduced to their bare bones, there was nothing hidden in the garden, no secret paths, nothing interesting enough to hold my attention. The garden was unable to harbor any surprises.
A FEW OF THE DAY’S PRECIOUS MINUTES thinking about the garden’s sculptures. In the last eight years, we had added over 100 sculptures and permanent structures for the garden. Not all the pieces are on display during the winter, but there are dozens of stepping stones designed by an artist in Iowa City and benches built by two wood-workers in Michigan and several sculptures by an artist-blacksmith in Wisconsin and over two dozen pieces by a sculptor artist in Marion. A consistent principle underlying the choice of these pieces is that they will not be unduly loud or detract from other elements in the garden. Their assignment is to blend into the environment. The one notable exception northeast of the patio is a 6' tall polished steel piece, informally titled “House of the Rising Sun,” with its plates of luminous-colored plexiglass. But that’s the exception. Many of the garden’s pieces are a quiet black or rusted brown, easily overlooked as the eye scans the garden.
PERHAPS I HAVE MIXED FEELINGS about the value of surprises in a garden. When I was teaching composition classes in a previous lifetime, I would often remind students of the Robert Frost principle: “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” The principle should also be applicable to gardeners in their gardens. If I don’t feel a sense of surprise and discovery when gardening, I should not expect visitors to experience anything fresh and unexpected. But as I walk around the garden, I begin to think that Mr. Frost’s devotion to surprise may miss a fundamental attraction of gardening–and of poetry. On several occasions this afternoon the pleasure of the walk came from confirmations that what had been observed in previous winters was again true this January. Perennial flower gardens are governed by recurrent cyclical patterns, and a substantial pleasure comes from seeing those cycles fulfilled. During the walk I saw fresh leaves on several hollyhocks, green daffodil spears pressing through the frozen soil, the coneflower seedheads offering nourishment for visiting birds, the beautiful golden foliage of the Hakone grass, the shriveled red fruit of the flowering crab apple trees. I’ve seen all these phenomena in previous years, and I know there’s no guarantee they will happen again. So every year I take more photos of the coneflower seedheads, their presence offering a beautiful reassurance in the rhythms of this natural world–rhythms over which I have few persuasive powers. I am the gardener as observer, the recorder, jotting down a few notes, taking a few photos, celebrating the pleasures offered by different moments in the rotation of the seasons. The pleasures of the winter garden are like the joys that come from singing familiar Christmas carols. I have no desire to sing “Silent Night” throughout the year, but at Christmas, it’s the perfect song. I have the same feeling for the winter garden. Thank goodness for the other seasons, but a day like today in a January garden in Iowa turns out to be darn near perfect. . . . and I was not seeking any surprises.
AS USUAL, when it’s been several days since my last garden visit, my first stroll around the garden is absorbed with collecting trash. I always find at least one Reese’s Buttercup wrapper and there are invariably a few plastic bags snagged by the garden shrubs. Today, I picked up a gray plastic bag on the patio filled with a large, moist, brown dog turd. The weight of the bag’s contents would suggest it was not a wind-blow deposit. Another unexpected discovery was a cardboard carton for a Budweiser six-pack, recently buried under the snow drift in front of the NW garden gate. Only with the recent warm weather had enough snow melted allowing it to emerge, though still anchored in the surrounding ice.
SINCE WE LEAVE most of the garden’s plants untrimmed through the winter, the garden can look more like a nature preserve than a formal flower garden, allowed to provide protection and sustenance for various birds and insects. But in a few weeks we’ll need to do some serious “cleaning up” (a phrase I often used but dislike, suggesting the garden is dirty and needs a thorough scrubbing). After today’s garden walk, I pruned many of the plants in the beds around the SE park bench. I cut back the Joe Pye weeds, their seed heads now reduced to bare skeletons. I also trimmed the purple leaf loosestrife, phlox, monarda, penstemon, and several wild aster-family immigrants that this past summer and fall produced hundreds of small daisy-like blooms. Fortunately the ground was not frozen, at least on the surface, and I could remove the roots for several tall goldenrod, one of the garden’s more beneficial but unduly aggressive weeds. The soft soil under the leaves and the yews made me feel like it was early spring, not the middle of January.
IN ONE FLOWER BED I removed all the old daylily foliage. I was surprised I saw no emerging daffodils. In the fall they often send up green spears that appear just above the surface, like submarine periscopes, checking out the landscape, helping them determine when it’s time to rise to the surface. But this year the daffodils give no evidence of wanting a quick jump on their spring emergence. In a small herb bed, I trimmed back the oregano. Their gray/brown stems are not particularly attractive, but the trimming releases a rich, evocative herbal fragrance, making this one of my favorite winter tasks. And once the old vegetation is removed, it’s a pleasure to see the area covered with tiny green oregano leaves, eager to spring into action.
WHILE WORKING IN THE GARDEN TODAY, I saw no birds or squirrels. I did come upon several piles of rabbit turds, deposited by the two resident rabbits, but I saw no evidence of them today. The garden felt like an empty village, but that is an illusion. It may be a quite different scene at other hours of the day, and the vitality of garden’s underground life is well beyond my comprehension. As I was dumping recent prunings in a compost bin, the garden lights came on. Both of the lights on the pergola are working, but nine of the fifteen post lights are not, including all six at the east end of the garden. Fortunately, there was still plenty of dusklight for me to put away my equipment and head home.
BEHIND THE NE PARK BENCH, there is a group of crab apple suckers, 2-3' tall. Their red bark resembles red twig dogwood, and their tight arrangement suggests they might have been intentionally planted there to render “winter interest” and create a contrast with the tall miscanthus grass behind them. Every year I cut to the mother root dozens of these clones, like trimming toe nails that have grown too long. In the spring they will be removed, but for the winter months they are welcome sentinels.
THE RED, TUBULAR STEEL SCULPTURE that usually resides in the garden’s SW lawn quadrant was designed and constructed for me by a previous student. This piece was intended for a flower bed in my garden at home, but once I started taking care of this college garden, I decided to bring it on campus so more people could see it. Today, I was struck by how the sculpture’s thin shadow in the snow created a beautiful doppelganger, a perfect complement to the sculpture’s clean, precise lines. There were several moments in the garden when the morning shadows created temporary images on the snow that could never be seen at any other time of the year. The winter wind had turned the snow’s surface into a perfect canvas for images cast by both man-made objects (the steel chairs on the patio, the steel lawn sculptures) and the garden’s plants (the tall stonecrops, the coneflowers). Another object particularly attractive in the winter is the staddle stone behind the NW park bench. Staddle stones were originally designed to support granaries and protect the grain from rodents. At some point they became a common motif in British gardens, and one of my first purchases for this garden was a staddle stone. Because of its modest, gray/brown, earthy surface and its location behind a park bench, this large stone mushroom does not receive much attention from visitors. But with its current snow cap and how the heat of the stone has created a depression around its base, the staddle stone has acquired a distinctive presence.
IT’S IMPOSSIBLE for me to walk through the garden in the winter without looking at coneflower seedheads. Although they enter the winter with such an elegant, symmetrical, fibonacci-spiral display of seeds, this late in the year, most of these miniature bird feeders--a featured item on the luncheon menu for visiting finches, juncos, chickadees, and their brethren–have lost their topmost seeds and now resemble the heads of tonsured monks. But I still find them endlessly appealing.
THIS FALL I ORDERED A BOOK on urban lichen, intending to study the authors’ descriptions of the lichen most likely to be found in a North American urban setting. Although the book focuses on lichens in New York City, I thought it likely a garden in Cedar Rapids would share some common species. It’s now the end of January, and so far my serious investigation has not begun. And once spring weather arrives, my mind will inevitably turn to other garden phenomena, and the lichen will modestly retreat into the garden’s background. While I have been lax in my efforts to identify and understand the lichens’ individual personalities, I do love looking at them and will continue taking their photos each year, trying to discover what changes may be observable. The most extensive and diverse lichen community is on the SW wooden park bench. The bench, rarely in direct sunlight, is covered with green, gray, brown, and orange lichens. Last summer someone volunteered to remove the garden’s benches for the winter and thoroughly clean them. I expressed my appreciation for the offer but pointed out that these benches played a prominent role in the winter garden. The benches would remain unscrubbed.
AN AFTERNOON that involved cutting back dead foliage in a perennial flower bed, raking up the daylily/iris/spurge/penstemon trimmings, and carrying everything to the garden’s largest compost bin. This work requires minimal skill, demanding no more knowledge or dexterity than what I would have had 70 years ago. The ground is frozen so there is no digging or weeding: all I do is cut and carry. My tools are a pair of 10" Klaus Titanium garden scissors and an anonymous hedge shears. Although the trimming would go faster using my electric string trimmer, I prefer to work with tools requiring neither a motor nor batteries. There’s an intimacy with the plants that is lost when I’m walking across a flower bed, lugging the trimmer and its electrical cord. I prefer being a slow gardener. Perhaps not everything will be finished on time, but I want to enjoy my hours in the garden. My measured pace strikes me as appropriate for an 18th-century style flower garden. Most of the garden work is being done by the plants and other organisms that live here year around, whether it be January or July. I’m primarily a beholder, a valet, a barber.