There is a brief moment every January when the garden seems to hold its breath and wait for something. The skies are so changeable now, billowed clouds speeding past on a storm front one moment, noiseless inert greyness the next, or a brilliant blurt of sunshine before a dark blinding rain. Beneath all this drama the garden lies still and blank at winter nadir. The plum and oak, rose and spice bush are leafless, the annual borders bare dirt. The old lemon tree, an unchanging giant bonzai of shiny green and electric yellow, has the stage to itself. But it arches over an empty deck sogged with rain and moss and a tangle of pruned grape canes. All complexity of pattern and color, feathery, fat, weeping and upright shapes are gone. Only the spare geometry of fence and bedding borders remains.
For the last few weeks, between rains and sometimes in them, I’ve been doing the end-of-year cleanup, stripping roses of their mottled and virus-laden leaves, pruning the wandering climbers, pulling out summer stragglers from the annual beds and digging out candidates for permanent planting in more suitable sites. Weeds never sleep. And this is the only time of the year when the rain-softened adobe will give up the roots to a flick of the wrist instead of a pick axe. Its the time of the year when I get intimate with the inner spaces and spirit of the garden.
Standing on the next-to-the-top rung of my ladder, in the thorny embrace of climbing Cecile Brunner, I reach for a looping cane with my clippers and catch a glimpse of the hills above the neighbor’s rooftop. High above the hill line, a broadwinged hawk heads west toward the unseen bay. Later, picking up the fallen canes at the bulbus and gnarled base of the old rose, I displace a knob of rotted bark which reveals a cave among the roots and the pale eyes of a cinamon colored salamander.
Already the long shadow of the house has engulfed the yard and soon the half-light will make it difficult to see where I have left my ball of twine, scissors, and assorted rakes. Last winter I lost my wooden handled saw. It turned up in August, under a composting pile of ivy vines and hedge trimming, rusty and dirt encrusted. It may be barren and colorless now but in this winter light I dream of a new garden, or maybe the garden dreams of me.

The greatest invention of my gardening life so far has been The Green Bin. It is, simply, the city yard waste recycling bin, a giant green plastic (recycled) thing on wheels that gets picked up every single week of the year. Before The Green Bin I had to find a place to stash waist-high piles of pruned rose canes, sawed off lemon tree trunks, grape canes, buckets of weeds, fallen palm fronds, stacks of banana tree leaves, and other flotsam.
For many years the only way to get rid of these piles was to hire a guy with a truck who would charge an amazingly large amount to take my garden leavings to a dump. Then the city handed out small brown bins on wheels for yard waste that would be picked up every other week. I used to calculate how many bins it would take (in weeks) to disappear the piles. Often it took an entire winter to reduce the a summer’s worth. Then one day The (Giant) Green Bin arrived with it’s promise of weekly disposal. It was enough to reduce a gardener to tears of joy.
There are still piles of dead vegetable matter around my yard, however. Some are left during the winter months to shelter the salamanders who emerge in the wet months and can usually be found under terra cotta pots and among the piles of grape canes left on the driveway. Some small piles without branches are waiting for room in the compost bin. I never have enough suitable “brown matter” for the compost and have to import my father’s raked birch and magnolia leaves, hauling them in the trunk from my parents’ house in big plastic bags. They sit in the garage until another soggy winter turn of the compost pile requires a dry layer.
One of the joys of gardening (if what I do can be called that) is a long, meditative afternoon transforming a huge pile of branches and canes into fodder for the green bin. This requires doning appropriate gear (long leather gloves, shoes and socks, sturdy pants, long sleeves, a bandana, and sometimes, safety goggles) and standing by the green bin with my No. 6 Felcos and clipping dangerously barbed rose canes and thorny lemon branches into one-foot sections and tossing them into the bin. Sometimes the long-handled pruners are required for fatter branches. And sometimes I have to get the saw.
As I clip, I muse. My thoughts wander among the mundane and the profound bits of life as the occasional bird drops by, usually the hummingbird, sometimes a wren. The squirrel finds me unusually accommodating as he grubs in my flower pots. Clouds pass overhead. The freeway hums and subsides in it’s daily cycle. The towering Royal Palm across the street rustles in a breeze that never touches me. Plans and lists come and go in my head. And bit by bit the bin fills, the light fades and another round of recycling is complete.

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