Each season brings something different into view. And winter brings us a new palette, one that I connect with easily. Spring arrives with seven thousand hues of green foliage and an explosion of floral colors — from the strident yellow of Cornelian cherries and more traditional varieties of daffodils to the primary tones of tulips and some spring ephemerals. This explosion of color is warranted after a long winter, but it often feels shrill and demanding of our attention. My own vernal preferences lean towards white petalled daffodils with soft toned perianths and the cooler tones of spring magnolias and the soft blue squill that accompany them. A softer palette allows me to look more closely at the things that surround us and to take in their beauty in a different manner.
Summer, too, is awash in color as daylilies, iris, and allium, as well as phlox and summer annuals, turn the verdant greens of spring into a backdrop for their explosive hues. And just like the heat that accompanies the summer, these colors demand more of me than I often wish to give and leave me wanting a calmer, more contemplative, time. The fall takes on its own rich tones, and while the oranges and reds of helenium complement fall foliage, and the asters and ironweed provide a cool contrast to them, color still takes precedence over the finer features of the landscape, painting it in huge swaths of amber and gold. Fall grasses work to subdue and connect the display, but color is front and center, nevertheless. On rare occasion, one stops to look closer at a leaf turning color, but the picture before us is meant to be viewed broadly and as a whole.
But winter, often derided as gray and lifeless, has a palette all its own. Perhaps, it is in response to my silvered hair and aging form that I have come to embrace this palette as my own. When a frost this week brought forth the silvers of a culinary sage and the crystalline perfection of the frilly ice-covered leaves of Artemisia abronatum, I was happy to be in this stage of the season and in this stage of my life. The softness of it all and the ability that this monotone palette gives us to look beyond color is what I love about this season.
The dark green of boxwoods, covered in frost, called to attention the delicate rounded form of its leaves, something that is lost to the eye in other seasons when the boxwoods merely play a role in providing a sense of containment of the plants which they subdivide into beds and borders. This is the season when we get to look closely, to ponder the miracles of nature not in their grandest moments but in their subtlety and elegance. The light on a frosted Japanese white pine or on the purple cones of a Korean silver fir, allows me to take it all in, not just as a story on color, but as a rumination on function and form, the passage of time, and the evolution of a plant’s botanical parts as they mature and produce seeds that will become the next generation of plants in our gardens.
This has been a difficult season, with some loss and illness within my circle of family and friends, and these subdued tones allow me to see the beauty and fragility of such times in a different light, as part of a process and continuum. It is not merely a season of illness or death, but a moment in time that can be taken in for all that it shares with us. I know part of the comfort in this moment is not merely the beauty before me, but the understanding that this season, in all of its glory and gloom, will pass to be replaced with a time of new life and rejuvenation—and this may provide me with a newfound appreciation of the strident tones of the seasons ahead. But for the moment, I just hope to take in this season for all of the emotions that it stirs within me.
____________________________________
A gardener grows through observation, experimentation, and learning from the failures, triumphs, and hard work of oneself and others. In this sense, all gardeners are self-taught, while at the same time intrinsically connected to a tradition and a community that finds satisfaction through working the soil and sharing their experiences with one another. This column explores those relationships and how we learn about the world around us from plants and our fellow gardeners.
