JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2003

It’s time to talk about the pleasures of winter. Even for the gardener who loves nothing so much as burrowing mole-like in the dirt, there are joys of the season that we would do well to acknowledge.

As a child growing up on a north-central Kansas farm, I yearned for nothing so much as a good blizzard. With any luck, the side roads would get blocked with five-foot tall drifts, making travel impossible for a week. Even better, the lights would go out, prompting kerosene lamps to reappear from the attic. By lamplight, my father and I would play checkers after he had milked and fed the cows, while my mother would join the neighbors in listening to each other’s conversations on the telephone’s party line. Our number was three long rings and one short. Grandpa and Grandma, living a quarter mile away, had “three longs.” Everyone knew when the neighbors were getting a call, and we learned their news as soon as they did.

Hardly surprising then that I instantly loved John Greenleaf Whittier’s poem “Snow-Bound” when it was assigned in 7th Grade English. “Shut in from all the world without, We sat the clean-winged hearth about, Content to let the north-wind roar In baffled rage at pane and door...”

The man had captured my feelings exactly, although I deeply regretted the lack of a hearth. We had a coal-burning furnace in the cellar, which meant I awoke to the clanks and clangs of my father cleaning out the previous day’s ashes and then lighting a new fire with kerosene-soaked corn cobs.

This past fall, I found myself remembering the poem and anticipating winter without the usual dread. I imagined how nice the clivias would look once they returned from outside to the bay window in the living room, and I was ready to forgive them for blooming erratically—or not at all. The niche between the front hall radiator and the staircase had proved a perfect home for the cast-iron plant (Aspidistra), and the spot looked strangely bereft without it. And I was actually impatient for the cold weather that would spur the Cymbidium orchid into bloom. One recent autumn was so mild that I left the orchid outside until Thanksgiving. This past year, after it came inside, I doused it with one of the new 10-60-10 fertilizers now on the market to promote extra bloom, and I was rewarded with five, or was it six, flower-filled spikes. As for the African violets that summered on the porch, when they erupt into bloom this winter, I will have to visit them behind closed doors since my black cat likes them even more than I do and thinks they are dinner.

So we hunker down, but we needn’t suffer when there is much to enjoy. An amaryllis shooting into bloom. A grape ivy cascading from the top of a bookshelf. The elegance of the peace lily (Spathiphyllum) in or out of bloom. If conditions are right…an orchid.

Plus all those catalogs for dreaming and seeds to start. Do you know that you can—indeed, should—start geranium seeds in January?

Shut in from all the world without—it’s a wonderful place to be.