February Garden Advice

whatever ice might form

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This morning we woke to that peculiar silence that signals another wollen coating of snow. Despite early predictions that this winter in New England would be warm and wet, the last five weeks have been punctuated with regular dustings and hounded by cold wind. No blockbuster noreasters to send everyone scrambling to the grocery store for milk and bread they don’t actually need, but evenings full of the soft thunder of plows, of keeping the heat cranked and tossing restlessly as the latest white coat thickens on the eves.

It’s all very atmospheric and far superior, in my view, to a muddy winter where hiking is somehow both more possible and less desirable. Even though shoveling the drive for the eighth time in four weeks seems theoretically like a chore, I always find it delightful once I’m doing it. We think of the seasons monolithically: winter as one large textureless stretch of bare branches and flinty sky. But in reality, there are a dozen micro-seasons nested inside it that unfold in a sort of austere pageantry for anyone who takes the time to watch. A December snow is an entirely different thing from a February one: those late-fall storms are always thick gray and waited for, even by the birds, with the most absolute and weighty silence of the year. Standing on the porch at the start of a December snowstorm, you can actually hear the rattling breath of the first flakes hitting the grass. By February, though, the birds have adapted to the new landscape and sing merrily through the pink evenings and white mornings, especially if the clouds clear off and give them a sun-caught branch to perch in.

Indeed, the year is less like a stagnant pond that freezes and thaws and more like a river that’s always flowing underneath whatever ice might form. By the time you become aware of the changes, they have already been going on for quite a while. When, for instance, did the house finches settle on the hawthorn tree on our street and form their little morning choir? Did the buds on the magnolia always seem so fat, or are they magnified by wintry anticipation? The weeks go on, leaving their delicate tracks in the snow and, some day soon, I’ll wake to that shattering morning where migratory birdsong thrums through every atom of the sunlit air, and I’ll know the earth has pivoted back while I wasn’t watching. I won’t have seen it coming. I never do.

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Between now and then, though, there are a few practical tasks to consider.

1/ Buy Your Plants
You’ve done your planning and now is the time to make sure you have what supplies you need to execute those plans. Though I am a big fan of filling out your borders by propagating hardy perennials via division—something I talk about extensively in my Gardening Guide—it’s inevitable that some new specimen will have caught your eye. Hopefully, a long January of hard thinking will have prevented you from springing for the first flashy hybrid rose in the catalog. But, in any case, if you want to get the right plants for your garden at the right moment for their planting, now is the time to pull the trigger. I’m somewhat in awe of the way major garden suppliers can sort and sift their orders by growing zone and send off the tender new plants so that they arrive just when any given gardener needs them. It’s a logistical miracle we shouldn’t hesitate to praise. And it’s far better than trotting over to a big-box store one Saturday in May with nothing but a green craving and a vague plan. That way lies disaster.

2/ Pot Up Bulbs
Speaking of big-box garden stores, the day will come soon enough when the garden centers are full of lovely and expensive potted displays of bulbs. Given the early arrival of such displays—often several weeks before the local ecology can produce a single daffodil—the gardener’s starved eye falls on them with understandable hunger. And you could do worse than make such a purchase. For the last several years, in fact, I’ve bought three or four such pots to decorate our front and back porches around Easter and then, once the blooms faced, transferred them into our borders, where they come back every year. It’s a great way to build a rolling display of bulbs as a sort of aftereffect of doing some decorative pots. And that’s a satisfying kind of resource management. However, I’ve decided to go one better this year by purchasing the bulbs myself and pre-planting a few displays. This is done by buying small numbers of bulbs that will bloom in sequence—say, daffodils and muscari, then tulips, then dutch irises, and layering them into a pot in a 50/50 mix of potting soil and vermiculite. You want to put the latest bloomers on the bottom layer of soil, working upward, lasagna-style, until you finally cover the earliest bulbs with a good layer of soil and perhaps some decorative stones. This done, you can tuck them into a shed or even store them in a relatively sheltered place outdoors, awaiting the day when you see the first green shoots. They can then be given pride of place on your porch as spring displays.

3/ Take Stock of Tools
The inside of a shed is often a questionable place at best and a dangerous one at worst. It’s every gardener’s curse to ruin their best intentions over time, turning the clean rows of organized shovels and hoes into a dangerous pile of angled metal that has to be sifted through, with cursing, by September. But the better you care for your tools, the less likely you are to be harmed by them, and the less likely it is that they’ll need to be replaced. So taking a little time in February or March to sift through the lot, sharpen your snips and clippers, oil the blades, and hang them neatly, is well worth your time. April, as Eliot rightly tells us, is the cruelest month, absolutely crammed with urgent tasks for the gardener that cannot be ignored. You don’t want that frenzy to be complicated by broken or disorganized tools. And there’s something encouraging about spending one of these brief February afternoons preparing the way for the work to come. It thickens the skin, gets the blood pumping, and fills the heart with anticipation. Somewhere under all that ice, the season is flowing on and on.

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