MindSpinner

The cold snap, which lasted nearly a week, proved a marked setback in the garden. There will be no peaches this year. My little Pawnee pecan tree, newly planted, shows no signs of leafing out a second time. Two roses are dead - the only hybrid teas - Memorial Day and Lasting Love. Standing over last year’s crimson rose, now a thorny gray fork, I promise the green-leaved clematis I planted to twine among its branches a more reliable support. The three-year-old variegated dogwood seems to have succumbed, along with the “hardy” rosemary I bought a couple of years ago. Other plants struggle to recover. The Weeping Japanese Katsura’s arcing branches have one or two living leaves here and there, as do the red twig dogwoods. Others are in a similar state. I’m going to give the “dead” things a few more weeks before I pull them out, just in case they are still mustering the wherewithal to try again, somewhere deep inside themselves.

I am struck by the lessons the garden offers about timing. Plants gradually hardened by coming winter endure much deeper cold than plants leafing out in spring, kissed back to life by lengthening days and warming sun. Spring’s new growth makes them vulnerable to sudden killing cold. Life, too, can work like this.

My neighbors covered a number of their plants with plastic on the eve before the frost - those would be the neighbors who put out rubber snakes to scare the birds away, as if we had a shortage of real snakes, or as if the rubber ones could terrorize the goldfinch and the robin when real ones obviously do not. I have so many plants, I would not have known to cover the pecan tree but not the new apple trees or the new currants and gooseberries. Instead I watched what lived and what died, and learned what the frost had to teach.

It is the wild things that handle nature best. The stonecrop is about to unfurl sprays of white along the garden path while the native phlox paints blue stars among the last of the daffodils. I think I’ll give the garden over seasons to the wilder things that have resilience scripted into their nature. Cold snaps have always nipped buds and threatened crops. There’s really nothing new about a killing frost in spring. What evolves is my sense of myself in the garden. I am less the artist, less the designer, than the bumbling apprentice, and my teachers are the frost and sun and soil, the yellow leaf and the green one, the rain and the dry spell, the forest’s edge, the birds, the insects, and the cottontails that cavort at dusk, promising to share my lettuces.