Winter Gardens

That morning, I’d overheard a heating repairman tell my next-door neighbor that winter had caught a lot of people by surprise. “Lots of calls for servicing,” he said before plunging into the guts of the central heating machine.

Red-faced from working in a cold wind, I was taking a break in the lee of an outsized Meyer lemon tree. When I’d stepped into the courtyard at 6 am, there’d been a crust of ice on the water in a garden watering can. This, the week before Thanksgiving. What kind of winter lay ahead?

I moved the potted plants indoors this year earlier than ever before. These winter evenings, the post-dinner silence is broken by the muted crash of croton leaves on the dining room’s clay tile floor. My wife and I look up from our game of dominoes in the living room to congratulate ourselves on having brought the plants inside early.

Winter is my favorite time in the garden. The demanding, sweaty work of summer and early fall means lettuce, green onions, sugar snaps, and winter herbs for soups and salads. On morning bicycle rides, I survey the gardens I pass. New gardeners have discovered sugar snaps and snow peas. Most of mine never make it into the house. My grandsons and I eat them like candy straight from the vines.

It amuses me to think that I grew up hating yard work and working in the garden. An uncle in the seed and plant business came up with stupefyingly dull work for me to do. The most inane was pruning spent crape myrtle blossoms to encourage, you guessed it, more blooms. The work had all the meaning of star counting.

My grandsons know me as a gardener. I stopped using herbicides when my children were little and liked to grab vegetables from the garden as they raced by on their way to play. Now our grandson, six-foot-five-inch Cullen, and his pre-school cousins help themselves to satsumas from a tree in the yard as do UPS drivers, refuse collectors, runners, walkers, and parents pushing baby strollers.

A twenty-five-foot-tall Meyer lemon tree and a mutant, fifteen-foot-tall satsuma are opposing sentinels in my winter garden. The trees are the result of not following pruning instructions and planting hybrid seed from supermarket fruit.

The satsuma grew from a seed implanted in a piece of store-bought fruit that I spit into a pot of dirt. The tree that grew was the rough stock upon which fruit-producing wood is grafted at the nursery. For years, the tree did nothing but grow tall and wide. Then, horticultural wizard Ed O’Rourke suggested I twist wire around some of the tree’s bigger branches. That would disrupt the phloem/xylem transfer, Ed said. Anyone else would have said the twists of wire might force the tree to bloom. However you say it, the tourniquets allowed nutrients to go up, but not down, and the tree was made to flower.

The sight of two hundred satsumas, some of them twenty feet in the air, proves an arresting image for people traveling our street. We’ve grown used to knocks from strangers at our winter front door asking permission to pick a few satsumas from “the miracle tree.”

The satsuma does look like those fruit trees you once saw advertised in the Sunday supplements.

The Meyer lemon, well, that was careless neglect as opposed to my usual careful neglect in the garden. The tree produces about fifty lemons each fall and winter on the grafted part of the plant. The rest of the tree, reaching more than twenty-five feet skyward, is the rough stock I never got around to pruning. In addition to the low-hanging lemons, there is a lemon the size of a grapefruit about twenty feet above the ground. The branches’ bayonet thorns make the giant lemon safe until gravity asserts itself.

In the winter, mindful of plants growing just outside the walls of our house, I delight in the hysteria of television reporters shivering like community-theater actors to dramatize a coming cold night. When hurricanes are in the news, these intrepid reporters stand in the boiling surf as gales rearrange the hoods of their rain jackets. It’s harder to show a predicted hard freeze, so the reporters bundle up to stand outside the TV station, shivering as car traffic glides past.

Unlike garden writer and broadcaster Louis Miller, I like the look of sheet-draped azaleas on frosty mornings. Miller was making a point when he said, by all means cover the shrubs, trees, and flowering plants in your yard ahead of a freeze if you “like that look.” Maybe covering plants that are low to the ground traps enough heat from the earth to save the vegetation if temperatures don’t stay below freezing too long. Chances are the plants will survive whether you cover them or not.

What Louis was saying—in that folksy way he developed years ago at the hardware store where he started out—was a hard freeze lasting for hours means the end of the garden until spring. Not the end of the garden, but the start of a rest.

I stand, parka-clad, in the night before a morning with temperatures expected in the low twenties. In the cold, clear air I hear the Byrds singing “Turn, turn, turn. To everything there is a season.” Folk singer-songwriter Pete Seeger took the words, almost verbatim, from the King James version of Ecclesiastes:

“To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the sun. A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted.”

Inside my warm house, gardening books piled beside the fireplace will help me map a strategy for the spring renewal of what has become for me a practice not too unlike religion. Gardening is faith: testing the unknown, expecting the best when best evidence is to the contrary.

The house is quiet in winter. There is the clack of dominoes and the tiny sound of ficus leaves falling to the floor in the dining room. The quiet is shattered from time to time by the shrill warbling of a motion-activated bird from the dollar store. Thus do the long-married amuse themselves in the cold weather months.

Winter gardens, especially front-yard gardens, are good places to watch and listen to the life of a street. Listen to an essay Ed Cullen read for NPR’s All Things Considered called “Winter Cyclists”: http://goo.gl/m3Hg4d.