Quiet moon garden

The January garden is a welter of ice and snow sculpture. Lumps and spikes of shifting design spring, as if from a lucid dream. The effect is deepened by white-out snow, when heaven and earth appear to meld into seamless whiteness. The world seems magical in its serenity, and its promise of renewed vitality brewing in the earth below. The new year sparks with anticipation of fresh plantings, and a review of past successes.

The return of the light brings an excitement of colorful new blooms and fruits portrayed in catalogs with cheerful description. I can’t resist trying at least one or two new selections each season. I like the marigold Mummsy from Park Seed with four-inch blooms and unique, upward-pointing petals. I’ll give a hyacinth bean vine with edible, long purple pods and stems a chance. I’ll experiment with the Zucca d’Albenga, a slender-fruiting zucchini vine from Baker’s Creek Heirloom Seeds. It’s a fun challenge to choose from the rich abundance.

To garden is to connect with primal energies of the planet. The garden offers security, a paradise in the wilderness. Earthly paradise developed into a walled garden, a place where we can explore our roots safely, and be surrounded by all that is familiar and comforting. Garden enclosures hold back harsh winds and extremes of weather. The utility of producing food has become integrated with the ideals of beauty, modeling Eden and sowing pleasures, via ritual. This includes artistic ornament and structural reminders of myth and whimsy. An identity with culture and history is created, integrating Nature with the garden. The act of gardening brings us home.

Nature improvises by making colonies of mixed species, including heat-mitigating shade and fruit trees. There’s an ongoing evolution of modulation and alteration without set rules. Mimicking nature, a developing garden can explode into maturity, as a critical threshold of diversity is achieved. I load my garden with crowds of different plants inviting many birds and insects to naturalize along with wildflowers. Routines in the natural cycles of garden work reassure my hand and back of their connection to Spirit.

In January, snow’s free and fertile mulch fattens the land. Weighty wintry snow invites me to judicious pruning of damaged limbs. As I hibernate and wait for the sun to get a little stronger, it’s a good time for sampling garden books. I’d like to read a copy of Scott and Lauren Ogden’s “Plant Driven Design.” Toby Hemingway, author of “Gaia’s Garden,” offers an ecologist’s take on garden diversity. I look forward to reading the classic by Richardson Wright, “The Gardener’s Bed Book.” While editor of House & Garden magazine in the 1920s and ‘30s, Wright composed 365 lyrical and humorous essays for this volume.

The art of gardening bridges our enchantment to natural design. A frontier of fluid ideas are framed within the wild. Private utopias are exposed, telling a story of sanctuary and ease set against the buffeting chaos of technological life. In effect, the garden is a universal metaphor for the sacred in nature. A gardening ethos of love and care is consistent with the revivifying tendency of the wild.