And so to winter. The leaves have turned golden and scarlet and now they lay faded and browning on the ground. The landscape has changed. Last week the curtain of leaves vanished and I looked out through the dark naked branches to see landmarks that had been hidden. The wonderful thing about winter is that it will end with spring. Our own lives are not quite so blessed, unless you believe in heaven. I do. It is the only thing that makes sense of life in the end.
But I also believe in life's seasons. I like being an Older Lady because it brings a nice settling into the world kind of feeling. So I am surprised by a bout of impatience and depression about the progress of the garden. At the moment, with nothing happening in the garden, I feel as though winter has set in for me. Everything has come to a halt in the garden. It's not just that it's cold, naked, dry, and the ground amazingly hard compared to the deep earth that came from all the summer's long rains. It has come to a halt because other demands are being made on my time and money. A lovely chunk of money I had set aside for the garden has been swallowed up by more mundane demands.
There is a sense of Ground Hog Day about this. Other gardens and other irrefutable demands collided elsewhere. I remember feeling real shame at my last house when a visitor mentioned that my garden was not mulched. Hard to believe that at that moment I couldn't afford to go and buy some sugar cane bales. Oddly enough, when I did not have the money to buy what I wanted to plant, we still developed a garden. All our trees came from the back of the nursery where my son worked - deformed, poor things, that we nurtured. I had an entire border called The Gift Garden, full of things people had given me from their own garden. It was hard to leave some of those things behind.
That memory turns my current woes around a bit. There must be other ways to achieve what I want to do. So the geese are not yet housed, the place is not fenced, the dogs are chained, and I will have to save very hard to afford the boundary fences before next Christmas. Without fences to constrain and contain the animals, domestic and nocturnal visitors, there isn't much point in putting crab apples and roses into the ground. Linda does not complain, but all her work is rapidly undone by the animals. I tell myself that if I do not plant some of these things this winter, I lose two whole seasons of growing and establishment. I tell myself (angrily) that I need all the summers I can get at my age. It's late in life to begin a new garden. But then, I also tell myself that these are silly artificial deadlines. It really does not matter if the roses don't go in this year.There are still other roses in the garden. It's just the lure of the colored catalogues of new things.
And in fact, I am reclaiming a lost garden. It is only half an acre, and only one field, that I am actually landscaping. The rest is magnificent. It is all tolerably good and it will be beautiful in spring. It doesn't pay to be impatient. This is a hobby not a living.
Tomorrow Little Ben is going to finish piling up the last of the tumber from the field. He doesn't have work at the moment and this will pay his phone bill. This is a blessing for both of us. I can't afford the man who will restore the dunnies, or the fencer, or the bob cat man who will rip up the field...at least, not this month. It can wait. It can lie fallow. We can just potter away doing the things that are cheap and free.
I'm going to see the man who owns the beautiful trotters down the road and ask for some old straw and manure. I am collecting shredded paper and raking the leaves for mulch. At least we can double dig and enrich the earth. When the roses come, we will at least be ready for them.
