December Garden Advice
Cardinals like red candles in the sticks
It’s a damp morning, thirty-three degrees, and fog has settled over the campus like runoff from a glacier. A born Southerner, it took me years to adjust to these sorts of New England mornings, which are cold in a way the balmier states never quite achieve. Neither the zero-sum game of the Arctic nor the halfhearted flirtation of a southern winter, New England cold is prevailing, shameless, and assertive. The bare oaks and beeches scaling the hill behind my classroom endure it like martyrs. The birds move about like criminals on the run, except for the blue jays—who seem to enjoy suffering—and, as we drive to school in the dripping gray December pre-dawn, the occasional deer appears by the roadside like a ghost on stilts, the cold fog muffling its legs so that it seems to be sailing on a half-frozen sea.
At home, the last yellow maple leaves are giving up the ghost, drifting wetly to the ground where they curl instantly into a brown dilapidation. The stone sundial we picked up for free along a roadside in Ipswich, and that has since become a favorite, stands stolidly as a Beefeater in the center of a yard, its dial clamped to its head like a ceremonial helmet. Our birdbath freezes hard each night, the layer of quotidian ice thickening week by week until, around the eighth of December, it had run clean to the bottom of the bowl. The occasional sparrow still alights there from time to time, giving the frigid slate a disconsolate peck before darting off, cold and thirsty and bracing for weeks more of the same. It’s a season of austere beauties, of white lights from porch decorations licking frozen surfaces at night, of cardinals like red candles in the sticks, with Orion rising above it all like a prevailing spirit, wild and beautiful and severe.
It’s strange to think of gardening at a time like this but, for those of us who want it, there is always a little work to do:
1/ Make Winter Displays
The Classical Roots students and I have had great sport scouring the local woods for greenery, birch, and berries to make the potted displays we’ve placed near the school’s entrances. Birch, that white flame of the winter woods, loves to cast off big limbs this time of year and can be harvested easily enough if you’ve got access to a decent stretch of woodland. We lifted a few limbs from local trailsides, whipped them into two-foot sections with a bow saw, then placed them amongst some pine trimmings and scraps of bittersweet to make rustically handsome Christmas displays. The trick is not to make these look too intentional. Though we don’t have any here, red-twig dogwood makes a great addition to such decorations, especially when it rises like a plume of fire from between clusters of white birch. For the liturgically minded, the birch can later be removed so that only the red twigs are standing during Lent. Once everything is cleaned up, remember not to compost the bittersweet—it’s aggressively invasive. Burn it instead.
2/ Keep the Birds Fed
There’s a fine line between providing food for resident overwintering songbirds, such as finches, robins, and chickadees, and accidentally setting up a feeding station for their invasive rivals, the house sparrows. House sparrows will brutally oust smaller birds at any season of the year, killing them if they get the chance, so supporting large populations of them can do more harm than good. If you keep a bird feeder in your yard, there’s really no way to feed other birds without also aiding the sparrows, and that’s fine. The joy of a cardinal in full winter regalia visiting a feeder on a snowy morning is worth the risk of feeding some of its seedier neighbors. However, there are also more discerning ways to help resident birds endure the cold. If you have the time and energy, consider putting in chokeberries, serviceberries, or other North American shrubs that keep their fruit throughout the colder seasons. Not only does the red glare of these berries look excellent in a winter garden, it also supports native bird populations who know what to look for.
3/ Mulch Your Roses
Speaking of red fruit that brings good cheer in winter, this is the perfect time to mulch your roses, which will still be bearing bright red hips—actually the close relatives of apples—during December. My wife and I clip clusters of the delicate hips from rambler roses and decorate our dining room table with them. It’s free and a strangely tasteful sight, since rose hips tend to be a moody scarlet rather than the ribbon-red of most store-bought Christmas decorations. As you’re wandering the yard during these brief cold afternoons and doing the same, take a half hour to heap some garden compost at the feet of each of your roses. This protection does them good as the ground frosts over, and the winter rains will wash the nutrients from the compost down among their roots so that, by next spring, they will be fueled up, fortified against disease, and ready to bloom for you again.
4/ Buy and Read My Book
Christmas with the Green Knight: A Strange Pilgrimage is now for sale on Amazon. At $12, it’s a steal, fits neatly in a coat pocket, and makes a great December companion for the gardener. It’s a journey through the weird and wild medieval epic Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, where I argue that the poem is ultimately about Christmas, adding contemplative and devotional thoughts along the way. I also touch extensively on the symbolism of that favorite Christmas plant, the holly. As it so happens, the Green Knight is himself basically a holly tree, and comes bearing a sprig of holly when he appears in King Arthur’s court at the beginning of the poem. Even if you’ve never read Sir Gawain and perhaps especially if you haven’t, my book will aid and guide you through some of its best passages. All profits go to good causes, so don’t hesitate.
