Oh, the Things I Have Left Undone
By ANNE RAVER
JUST got an e-mail message summing up trends for the new year from Garden Media Group, a public relations company. Blues will be the dominant color of 2003, according to the Color Marketing Group. Pastels are out, bold colors are in. (I wonder, is blue a bold color?)
Soil is in, according to Soil Soup Inc., which makes an organic stew roiling with micro-organisms and nutrients. But dirt is out, according to Premier Horticulture, which promotes pre-mixed soil-less mixes.
Hollies and junipers are out, which is too bad because I'm going to plant more, and flowering shrubs are in, according to the Conard-Pyle Company, which has produced a new rose called Knock Out, which apparently doesn't know when to stop blooming.
And one more thing: plain pots are out, exciting containers are in. What a relief. I have three electric-colored pots in front of my kitchen door: orange, purple and chartreuse. They're recycled plastic, which is in, too.
These pots contain my movable herb garden, especially two prize rosemaries I couldn't resist buying last spring at the DeBaggio Herb Farm in Chantilly, Va. Every time I see them, I think, "Those herbs could die out there." But I want to push the envelope, given all the indications about global warming, to see if they will winter over on this south-facing terrace.
So I don't move them. I don't have time. I still have 100 bulbs in two vegetable coolers in my refrigerator. But yesterday, when the ground seemed to have thawed enough to jam them in, I had to go to a funeral.
I haven't put hay bales around my cold frame and the arugula is freezing. I haven't spread donkey manure on my big vegetable garden — because I need to borrow a pickup truck. I need to build a taller fence to keep out the deer, but I don't like that penitentiary look.
My New Year's resolutions just turn into one big guilt trip. I never got around to moving my old roses from their holding tank in the vegetable garden to their new home, an old foundation with three stone walls open to the sun. It's the perfect place for growing shrub roses, ramblers and clematis; maybe some fragrant lilies. But where did the fall, that perfect time for planting, go?
The new catalogs are arriving. It's time to order leek seeds, garlic and potatoes. And a Japanese apricot, or Prunus mume, the fragrant tree that always stops me dead in my tracks in February, when I walk through the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.
But I shouldn't buy any new plants. If I spent the entire year pruning the old ones, from those grapevines and pear trees in February, to all my flowering shrubs, right after they bloom, it would be December 2003. I look out my kitchen window at the mock oranges, which look like the thicket Sleeping Beauty was imprisoned by, before her prince showed up.
I will plant more trees, though, to grow long after I'm gone. Every day when I walk down in the meadow with my dog, I'm struck by the magnificence of an old cedar that stands at the brow of a hill. If I don't plant more — and protect them from the deer — how will others ever know such beauty?
I was reminded of this by David Kamp, a landscape architect based in Manhattan, who sent me an e-mail message with his thoughts on the lingering aftermath of Sept. 11.
"One resolution I have is to explore the simple power of trees to help restore balance in our lives and in our communities," he wrote. "Just trees — not flower beds, chunks of granite or plaques." He draws strength and a sense of continuity from trees. He sees them "as a chronicle of life, a witness." When the thinks of the most powerful places he has experienced, "they are often the simplest of gestures."
My cedar on the hill is such a gesture. And my resolve is to simplify. Make time to enjoy the moment of the cedar. Let the list go. The roses will get moved when it's time.
Gary Nabhan, a writer and gardener in northern Arizona, shared one of his thoughts for the New Year. "I've been amazed to walk down toward the sheep corrals through four inches of snow and see the arugula still fresh and pungent in the cold frame," he wrote in an e-mail message. As the noon sun melted the snow, he noticed "a jumble of greens" flourishing from seeds he had spilled outside the frame, when planting last fall. Those sturdy plants give him comfort, he said, as the nation's leaders seem "hell-bent" on war. "We must be like those arugula seedlings," he wrote. "Huddle together in the fertile micro-niches where there is still some warmth, and persist despite all odds."
Rather than falling for yet another purple pot, I'm going to try to simply tend the earth. Think about why the earth is heating up and what I can do about it. Conserve water. Plant native trees and grasses by my stream to help cleanse pollutants from the watershed. This is the kind of gardening the new year can't live without.
