This Garden Cooks! : Looking Ahead: One gardener resolves to reflect, read and bloom

For those who missed my essay in the Sunday, January 13 Chicago Tribune...

“Half the interest of a garden is the constant exercise of the imagination. You are always living three, or indeed six, months hence.” -- Alice Morse Earle, “A Taste for Gardens” (1897)

In the coming weeks, snowdrops will push their leaves through the frozen soil and unfurl their delicate little bell-shaped flowers. But gardening season remains a long way off so I stare out the window. And reflect. The occasional snowfall in the past month has concealed or at least relieved many of the little errors I’ve planted over the years. There are the shrubs--viburnum, ninebark and weigela--that outgrew their intended space. There are hordes of non-native grasses that decided to sow themselves around the perennial border and elsewhere. There’s the small grove of river birches that, in retrospect, should have been the more attractive alders, or swamp white oaks that hold their burnt umber leaves throughout the winter. Who knew?

And so I resolve to “fix” this year’s garden with a few resolutions. But before I put pen to paper in my garden journal, I checked with a few other gardeners to learn their New Year’s intentions.

Susie and Rich Eyre of Rich’s Foxwillow Pines in Woodstock have practical plans for the conifer and perennial gardens surrounding their 19th Century farmhouse. “Our garden resolutions for 2014 are to use more compost, more water, and more mulch,” Susie said. (I make a secret note in my garden journal that she said nothing about adding plants. I’ve seen their garden. I predict they will add many plants but she doesn’t realize it right now.)

Jean Starr, editor of the Midwest Peony Society newsletter, is a realist. She admits that just because you have a resolution doesn’t mean that it can’t cover multiple growing seasons. “My resolutions are usually a carry-over from previous years. They include adding organic fertilizer in the form of compost or composted manure.” Check. “I’m not adding anything new until I remove the plants I don't intend on keeping.” Check. “I plan to continue indulging my penchant for unusual plants because that's one of my main reasons for gardening.” Check. (Jean loves perennials, especially peonies and day lilies. I make another secret note that she is going to buy many new plants that will patiently wait in their pots for a spot in her garden in Chesterton, Indiana, while she decides which existing plants to evict.)

Garden designer Patti Kirkpatrick of Joliet is still pondering what she might do this spring. “I guess my gardening resolutions for 2014 would be to plant more suitable-for-drying species to make an all naturally decorated Christmas tree this year, reclaim my neglected edges, and replace more fences in need of repair.” (I make a secret note in my garden journal, resolving to be more like Patti Kirkpatrick in 2014: thin and ballerina-like. With a knockout garden.)

A few snowflakes are falling as I look out toward our big vegetable garden. When the wooden picket fence surrounding it finally began to rot last fall, we dismantled it. (When I say “we” I mean My Spouse. My ever-patient spouse who admitted that his resolution this year is to not move any more small trees that I’ve planted no matter what.) Fence shopping is boring in the middle of winter, so before I begin making concrete resolutions (besides the usual ones--lose weight, eat healthy, exercise, etc.), I turn to my bookshelves in search of a distraction.

I come across the American poet Ogden Nash, who in 1943, penned “My Victory Garden.” The poem’s last stanza is my favorite:

"My farming will never make me famous,

I'm an agricultural ignoramus,

So don't ask me to tell a string bean from a soy bean.

I can't even tell a girl bean from a boy bean."

My resolutions last year focused on growing edibles, including beans of all types, along with “add more tomato plants, get the soil tested, put in raised beds, take out more lawn, put in some apple trees.” A few of these things were much easier to accomplish than my annual, yawn-provoking “exercise regularly” resolution.

I page through a slender volume, “In Your Garden,” a 1951 collection of newspaper articles by Vita Sackville-West, whose English garden, Sissinghurst, continues to draw visitors long after her death in 1962. In one winter column, she wrote about planning a grey, green and white garden--an ethereal moon garden to be enjoyed on a summer evening.

“I cannot help hoping that the great ghostly barn owl will sweep silently across a pale garden, next summer, in the twilight--the pale garden that I am now planting, under the first flakes of snow.”

And then it dawned on me. My gardening resolution is not about gardening. What I really want to do is sit in my garden and observe rather than work feverishly kneeling and planting, dividing, edging, watering, fertilizing, pruning and tweaking. And so I revisit one of my favorite quotes by James Douglas from his 1930 book, “Down Shoe Lane.”

“It is a good idea to be alone in a garden at dawn or dark so that all its shy presences may haunt you and possess you in a reverie of suspended thought.”

A reverie of suspended thought. Into my garden journal goes this year’s only resolution: “Read More, Weed Less.” (I make a secret note to revisit that entry frequently.)