True Dirt

shadow and light

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.

Posted by briggs at January 18, 2006 9:55 AM