| November 24, 2020
November
This November has been gray, gray, gray. But gray days tend to be warmer days this time of year and so I have been able to be outside, tending to the final chores of the season, getting the garden ready for winter, getting the last bit of joy from being out in the garden.Gray days area also wet days, and that is a gift as well because, unlike children, plants want to go to bed wet.
The pleasures of my November garden are small but the delight they give me is large. How can the Geum, one of the earlier of spring bloomers, still be at it this late in the year, and yet I find orange blooms, and more than one. On the ‘Summer Snowflake’ Viburnum a few white blossoms linger, standing out against the brown of dying leaves and bare branches. While raking the leaves away from a favorite Chamaecyparis, I discover a strawberry plant with a single white flower. No chance of that flower becoming a berry, and yet there it is. Dare I say “nevertheless she persisted”?
The leaves of the Heptacodium have mostly fallen. They create a pattern of large golden ovals that carpets the garden beneath the tree. I see this as I take down the last of the Brunnera, still a crisp green and white despite the early frosts. I also see this from my kitchen window, where the pattern emerges even more clearly. With the Heptacodium unleaved, I can now see the little red apples hanging on my distant crab tree, ready to feed the birds for another winter. Closer up, the leaves of the little cherry standard have, astonishingly, turned to a golden orange. Who buys a cherry tree for fall foliage, but there it is.
The small tasks of the November garden delight me as well. There are bulbs to plant, Chionodoxa and snowdrops this year, I first encountered Chionodoxa one wet March day when Sara and I visited Kew Gardens in England. I fell for the haze of blue they create in early spring and coveted that pleasure for my own garden. I can plant daffodils – the deer won’t eat them — but not tulips because the deer will eat them if they should come up which is unlikely given the squirrel preference for these bulbs. I appreciate the spring ephemerals, however, for their early rising and their willingness to clean up after themselves and every year I add more.
There are leaves to rake, but not that many after October’s exertions. A late mow mulches most of the ones that have fallen on the lawn. Where the gardens are concerned, I waver. Leave the leaves where they have fallen to add cover for the plants from the cold, protect the ground bees and other insects as they hibernate, and add nourishment to the soil as they decompose? Or rake them out to get a jump on spring chores and to keep the voles from having a place to hide and chew?
In November I must finally take down the annuals and perennials left up to the last possible moment for their beauty and variety. The annual blue Salvia, tiny seedlings in May, now require a spade to dislodge them despite their frost-bedraggled state. The last of the Rudbeckia nitida, still sporting the occasional yellow bloom, comes down and so does Joe Pyeweed. The blackberry lily with its straw-colored leaves and sharply black berries could be cut down or could be left. I waver and land on the side of leaving up.
I take my final walk through the garden just before Thanksgiving, making sure that all the water sprouts have been pruned off the shrubs and trees, and all the big leaves have been raked off the grass. I give all the evergreen shrubs a final fluff to remove the leaves that have fallen on them from neighboring trees. It is getting cold, it is getting dark, early frosts have taken their toll. It is time to say goodbye and go inside.
November can bring sadness, of course, for the light is going and the cold is starting and I have just said goodbye to another season of gardening. Sometimes, even now, on a hike in the country, say, I catch a whiff of burning leaves, and I am struck by waves of longing. I want to be a child again, walking home from school or play in twilight, smelling the leaves my Dad has piled high against the curb and set on fire. I want to see the lights in our Main Street home, turned on early against the earlier darkness of the season, and to find, once again, my mother at the stove, cooking, and my father about to come in and start reading.
Tristis est anima mea, usque ad mortem. “My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even unto death.” These words, the opening line of a 16th century motet by Orlando Lassus, assigned in my History of Music class, imprinted themselves on my heart that first November after I left home for college. I was desperately lonely and depressed. I knew nothing then of Seasonal Affective Disorder, only that, bereft of friends and family, the ever earlier darkness made me weep, and I was as sad, I believed, as Jesus had been during his last night on earth in the garden of Gethsemane. (At Swarthmore, I should note, our analogies were never modest.)
As a gardener, I now wonder if Jesus, bereft of human companionship as one after another his disciples fell asleep, found comfort for his sorrow from the plants in the garden of Gethsemane. I look back through the New Testament to see if there is any hint to this effect and find that only in the Gospel of John is Gethsemane specifically called a garden. Was John, I wonder, a plantsman who knew about the comfort plants can provide to one whose soul is sad? It was the elms that gave me hope in my own dark days at college.
Sara laughs as every November Sunday when daylight savings ends I ritually turn on all the lights in the house at 4:30. Then we share a good meal and a glass of wine and I tell her that I bet Persephone misses her mother in the winter just as I miss my garden. I tell her that sometimes I think of the garden as my mother because it comforts me and feeds me, because I can be myself when I am out in my garden, and because I am never alone when I garden. Sara takes advantage of a pause in my confession to suggest that perhaps comparing myself to Persephone is a bit of a stretch, even if I too have a seasonal cycle, even if I did graduate from Swarthmore.
Still, she understands my November blues. In a different winter she might propose that we take a trip to Alabama to visit her sister-in-law who lives on a mountain in the northwest corner of the state. It is lighter and warmer there and besides we both love Louise. This year we just get out the L.L. Bean catalogue and start looking for ski pants. If we want company this November and winter, the visits will have to be in the garage or out on the deck.
Let’s hope those ski pants work.
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