A Winter Garden
by Carol Lee

The gray days of winter are upon us, our hardy perennials long asleep, our gaily colored annuals now only a memory. Once in a while, the sun glistens on freshly fallen snow and comes crashing into our eyes, recalling summer. The crackle and aroma of the fireplace warms and beckons. Longing for the first sign of crocuses in the snow, I wonder, will winter ever end? Fortunately, I have my monthly garden club meetings to look forward to . . . ice storms and power outages notwithstanding. It's like being able to garden all year round!

How did this happen to me? If my best friend had told me ten years ago that flower gardens would become my passion, I would have thought she short-circuited somewhere. Sure, I had always planted a few tomatoes and greens, but once I moved to Northern Dutchess I found that I harvested better veggies from the local farmers' markets and farm stands. So my first year here found me with no garden at all . . . and a hole in my soul. As well as holes in my landscaping: everything we planted was a smorgasbord for the deer: white pines, Japanese andromeda, Thorndale ivy and low-growing junipers, to keep the huge sloping ground fill under our new house from eroding. We planted it and they ate it. The deer even climbed up to eat the junipers, eroding the slope the junipers were there to protect. Surely, there was a better way.

Garden clubs were an anomaly to me, but while borrowing some gardening books from the library, I was invited to visit the Rhinebeck Garden Club. I knew nothing about growing flowers: but if that didn't matter to them, what better way to learn?

The other club members became an immediate source of information and encouragement as I developed an interest in flowers. Immediately I had access to shortcuts and some really good money-saving tips. And gardens of club members were truly inspiring to me. I never went home from visiting a garden without first stopping to pick up a few hundred pounds of topsoil, manure and peat to accompany my enthusiasm and, if I were lucky, a bunch of plants someone had shared with me from their gardens as well.

An example of the tips I learned: did you know that the deer do not eat buddleia (the butterfly bush)? You can buy a small one for $3 in the spring and have it look like one you paid $25 for by the fall, when it's in its glory! Buddleia attracts butterflies and hummingbirds, is similar to lilacs in color and aroma and flowers right up to the first frost!

Another wonderful thing I learned was to plant crown vetch in place of those 500 junipers. In summer they are lush, green, bushy, and resplendent with pink clover-like blossoms. Sure, the deer eat them down to the ground in the fall, but there's no dislodging those roots — or the soil they're planted in! But watch out, they're invasive!

A more general lesson the club has taught me is the importance of drought tolerant plants and water conservation (except during this last year's incredible precipitation). Coneflower (Echinacea purpurea), double sunflower (Helianthus multiflorus), gay feathers (Liatris), red hot pokers (Kniphofia uvaria), a variety of sages; all the lavenders, and marigolds are just some of the many flowers that will continue to bloom in the baking sun with only the most occasional rainfall. (All flowering plants must be watered well when first planted to establish good root systems, but these can then be ignored!)

Imagining the baking days of summer may seem strange during winter's chill. But gardening is particularly important to me during these days when there's so much cold and gray outdoors. In fact, the garden club brings sunshine into my life year round. In December we create holiday decorations and floral arrangements for historic Hudson Valley estates such as Montgomery Place, or for the Rhinebeck Village Hall, or make holiday decorations for club members who are shut in.

Throughout the winter months we may provide horticultural therapy programs at nursing homes and senior centers. And nothing brightens a dreary day more than to participate in floral design study classes, where we make arrangements with purchased flowers accented with winterberry branches, bayberry or whatever else can be found above the snow.

Winter is also a time to plan our gardens for the spring, to continue studying horticulture, to learn how to attract birds and butterflies, how to get rid of slugs, or how to build a cold frame. And, bad as it is outside, there's plenty to do besides reading and catalogs.

For one thing, I'll start some seeds indoors. I'll have spring in my sunroom in February by forcing tulip, hyacinth, and narcissus bulbs. Not to mention, of course, the grandest bulb of them all — amaryllis. After they finish blooming, I cut back the stems, plant them in the garden for the summer, to store energy, rest them indoors in the fall, and start them blooming all over again next winter. I also usually force a few forsythia branches by setting them in a vase of water. When these start to bloom, so do I!

As a special promise to myself this year, I'm going to start my dahlias in pots indoors in February so they'll be ready to bloom shortly after I plant them in the garden in June! Dahlias are the most incredible flowers! Despite their high maintenance (the tubers need to be dug up in the fall after the first frost, stored indoors over the winter and replanted again in the spring after the last frost) nothing compares to an outrageous display of dinner-plate-sized dahlias in the garden, or in vases around your home, in every imaginable color and combination.

All this "gardening" through the winter adds color to my life! In fact, according to an August 26th Wall Street Journal article, "Flower Power: How Gardens Improve Your Mental Health," recent scientific studies confirm what most gardeners already know: that communing with nature is good for the mind. In fact, "One study published in June found that people who were exposed to nature recovered from stress more quickly than others who weren't; what's more, the positive effects took hold within just a few minutes."

I feel rosy just thinking about gardening!

Carol Lee is president of the Rhinebeck Garden Club.