Down To Earth: A Winter Diversion
By Jim Long
February/March 1996
I am fortunate to live in an area with a long growing season, and many of my herbs are green most of the winter. Thyme, for instance, is green and harvestable almost all year around. So, too, are sage, winter onion, and even rosemary when the winter is especially mild. Yet like most gardeners, I work to prolong the season a bit more.
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Eventually though, the hard freezes do come, killing all but the hardiest of plants, and I go into mourning for the loss of vegetation. Friends try to cheer me, but I like green in my garden all year long. I like blooming flowers and fluttering butterflies and all the sights and smells of the warm season. Winter to me is just the space between two green seasons, and if I were a bear, I would probably hibernate to get through the brown-gray-black season.
I console and distract myself with reading about gardens and looking over slides of gardens that I’ve visited on summer lecture trips. I enjoy memorizing the seed catalogs, page by page, learning about new plant releases, choosing plants to grow that I haven’t tried before, and planning new plantings. I take great pleasure from cooking up new dishes with the bounty of herbs I’ve harvested and processed during the previous summer. All these activities are pleasant, but I never stop missing the green of the warmer season.
By winter’s first seriously icy blast, I really miss the lushness of the garden. I begin to crave green and annually buy a bucket of green porch paint, saving it for a warm day of painting outside in a pitiful attempt to turn a bit of the world back to green again. And I indulge in an activity that many people probably would consider a bit odd: I go about tasting dead plants from my winter herb garden.
It is not something I plan ahead of time. One crisp, cold, sunny day, I feel that I just have to get outside, and automatically I start munching dead sticks and leaves as I wander along the garden pathways. I stop beside frozen chocolate mint, pick a few leaves, and pop them into my mouth. With an icy coating that hides a still-green leaf inside, they are preserved and perfect—a vision of summer through a windowpane of ice. The minty flavor of the ice is also perfect.