“People often ask me how late my gardening season goes. In a round-a-about way, I’ll say “Thanksgiving”. But realistically, it’s until the snow flies and often beyond. Packing the truck this morning, I found myself shoveling snow, to load in my tools: shovels, rakes, a broom, forks and an edger. Might be frozen ground or not, depending on the sub-region. Vermont is a variable crap shoot, in terms of temperature on any given day. I live above 1500 feet, so we got slammed with a wet snow earlier in the week. But in the Champlain Valley, things are different, as I knew they would be. “Look at this”, I said to my hired help. “These roses are ready to bloom”, and as I held a tender stem under my claw, we could all see the vibrant, hot pink of its perfectly formed bud. Life is ready to go, and go and go. “Should we trim these?” she said, gesturing to another shrub, denuded of leaves. “No, that’s a lilac, and I’m not confident we’ll have flowers in the spring, if we do that now”. There’s a lot to think about in November, and winter is not really as long as we imagine it is. A dark shelf of cloud hung heavy to the north, and the weather report was predicting rain by 1 pm. “Let’s just work as long as we can”. I’m not into being wet for a whole day, but a partial day, I can manage. I’d bought 2 pairs of new gloves on Wednesday, with my compatriots in mind: rubber on the outside, insulated with a cozy polar fleece on the inside. An impulse buy, along with rolls of burlap, in 3 foot, and 5 foot widths, to wrap bushes at another job. “I’ll have it done by Christmas,” I texted my client, an artist friend gone south to Maryland for the winter. Deer had nearly destroyed her plantings of dwarf Alberta spruce and Arborvitae a couple years ago. It’s what we routinely deal with, in managed, ornamental gardens. The quality of life issues we are dedicated to, are aesthetic. I feel honored, like a Japanese Samurai with battles against chaos, and lawlessness in the domestic arena. I’ve lived too hard, to not appreciate group efforts at painting serenity, with flowers, and finely formed shrubbery. It carries the old world value of grace of surroundings. I guess that’s spiritual, when you get down to it. A gesture, a nod, a boundary between human degradation, and uplift. They took turns with the hedge clippers, while I went at the tree Hydrangea, with my loppers. “Does this look right?, she asked. I took a moment to consider the shape of a conical conifer. “It’s beautiful,” I said, and I meant it. We sat on a tarp to eat sandwiches, around 3 pm. It was still not raining. We had dodged a bullet. Thanks to our super insulated mugs, the dandelion brew we were drinking, was still hot. This is a privilidged life, i might have thought. But instead, I pondered the invasive grass I was about to separate, from the fancy grass I was poised to hack down.A perfumed geranium smell wafted between my cheddar and onion, mixed with catmint, and freshly cut yew. My boots caked with mud, part frozen compost, part field dirt, were holding up well towards the end of a cold day. Two pairs of socks, a layer of down, a jacket of LL Bean fake wool, long underwear from some expeditionary ski-wear company, all were not yet soaked. At 4 pm, it started to rain. “I figure we can work another half hour.” I said, looking at the moisture from a survivors point of view. It was going to get dark, anyway. Too dim to see tools, or delicate elements of any kind. Each of us copes differently. One began to sing show tunes, as the rain came down harder. Another referenced “laughter yoga”. Our chatter eventually died down to a diligent minimum. “It makes me happy to please the client,” I murmured, as we dragged our last tarp, and stood back in soaking outerwear, to appraise 7 hours of outdoor work. It did hold up, the amount of care we’d placed here, for folks we hardly knew. The jokes we’d made about one of us spending the night, were just that. “I guess we’ll need another day here,” I concluded. True to form, I’d underestimated the enormity of the property. “I don’t know why I do that,” I admitted. “It always takes longer than I think”. We debriefed around the extended forecast. Colder in the short term, but warming again, before Christmas. For what is Christmas, but a time to say one thing is ending, and another more joyous, if not fractured, chapter is about to begin.”
