Winter, they say, is a season of sleep. Most of nature has put away her baubles, her flowers, her fruits, her pretty things; has turned over, stretched, yawned, nestled her mossy head into the crook of her arm, and fallen into the long slumber of frosts and timid daylight.
Throughout 2021, I visited the botanical gardens in my hometown on a weekly basis. The gardens are extensive. One finds damp, sunken gardens and wild, forgotten beds deep in ferns; immaculately groomed gardens with hedges clipped to attention, and luxuriant, almost sensual gardens with a bedroom tangle of blossom-heavy stems. I had always loved plants and flowers but this…this felt like a revelation. Never before had the offered cups of lotus flowers stopped me in my tracks, so stately and expectant they looked to me like miniature temples. Scarlet koi darted beneath neat, folded edges of lily pads as sunlight jinked through amber water. Somewhere behind me a fountain burbled, and a wind told secrets through the stars of the Japanese maples. So mesmerizing was this sight that I often startled when some other visitor kicked the gravel path behind me, hoping I might step across the stone foot-bridge and leave the gawking to someone else.
Over the months, I grew to know the gardens as particular friends of mine. I mourned when the field of wild zinnias folded in on each other and dried to seedheads. I rejoiced at the scent of a hundred types of roses, snuffling deep in a manner that no sane adult should, unless she finds herself in a rose garden fit for Versailles. Through the spring, the summer, and the fall I walked the same paths again and again and felt that I – personally, I – owned these gardens. The gold-touched junipers could be mine alone and surely the orange azaleas spread their rare color just for me. Whose eyes beyond mine deserved to hungrily gather the sight of anemones on anemones, or the raving burgundy spires of cranberry-scented snapdragons? Jasmine clambered up trellises to hail me, and the jungle path of the tropical gardens, winding secretly along the canal’s bank, had grown close with banana trees and orchids and elephant ear plants to shelter me, their friend. I felt almost jealous when I entered a hither-to private garden and found someone already there. He ambled across soft turf to inspect my favorite shoal of black-eyed Susans. Wasn’t my love for these flowers enough? But of course that is the right of all beautiful things: they must not be owned, only loved. And if I could not own them (a pass to merely look is not ownership, really), then I must let them be loved by others as well. After all, there were plenty of hours I could not dance attendance when I suppose the gardens should be adored.
Throughout the year the gardens and I shared a passionate, decadent love. Ever changing, ever developing, glad to meet and sad to part. I say that the feelings were mutual. I am not sure a garden could unfurl such beauty week after week after week and not mean a little by it.
And then, the frost.
I am no one’s fool. I knew that the frost would come and with it, the dying-back of the summer’s joyous blooms. I knew that the vines would be clipped and the hedges shorn, the vestigial remains of the perennials softly tucked beneath dark brown mulch. I knew the fountains would be stilled and the seedheads of the annual beds clipped and saved for next season. I knew the bale of sleek turtles to whom I clandestinely fed the occasional clementine would have buried themselves deep in the mud of their forest pond. I knew all of these things in my mind, but my heart was not ready for all of my friends to so roundly go missing at the same time. Never mind that they would return with the spring. Never mind that nature needs her sleep after the carousel of good times we had shared. I missed my gardens and the abundance of warm weather and honey-slow sunlight on fragrant blooms.
I wouldn’t leave the gardens alone, not even in winter. Their shorn appearance could not discourage my affection. Fewer visitors than ever showed up, and I took grim delight in it: my love alone returned week after week to the silent paths.
The gardens slept. My breath blew white puffs of vapor over the dried grasses and dark holly trees. And then, at a twist in a path that I seldom walked in the blooming season because of its unassuming, rather boring quality, a glut of colors: camellias!
So winter had a party dress after all!
Shocked, and more than a little delighted, I stepped onto the pine straw trail which led through a grove of camellia bushes. Smooth silver branches held the glossy leaves and heavy flowers. Where the rest of the gardens had been fast asleep for weeks, the camellia grove just now awakened. Bright pinks and pale, confectionery blossoms adorned the stiff branches of these formerly unremarkable bushes. Red, white, and even peppermint-striped blossoms studded the grove, their bright yellow centers like candles in the forest understory.
I laughed. My gardens had not forgotten me. They did love me back. Loved me enough to leave a postscript in their January love-letter; a promise to return, come spring, to the riot of colors which had so enriched the year for me.
I stood in the camellia grove and kissed the silken petals of one peony-red flower. Nature is indeed a many-splendored thing.
