A man, a plan, a garden

If you are a gardener, January is the absolute nadir of the garden season. There are gardening chores to be performed into November, and the December holidays usually furnish opportunities for decorative greenery. If you're alert to it, signs of spring can be observed before February has run its course. But January offers up nothing, unless you count dead Christmas trees left by the curbside. The only thing you can do with your garden in January (with or without the aid of garden catalogues), is dream about it.

My garden is among the things I hope to write about in these here parts. Or perhaps I should say ex-garden, as the very small plot that I used to work avidly has fallen into disrepair over the last decade.

In any case I have a plan. Blogging about the garden is a ploy to goad myself into actually doing the hard work of restoring it—even if only to avoid the shame of writing regular updates about my failing to work on the garden. In turn, working on the garden is a ploy to goad myself into more writing.

For a number of years I've been thinking about writing a book titled "In Praise of Small Gardens." Indeed I kept mulling the core ideas for the book even as the actual garden was undergoing its slow, steady decline. So my plan for 2024 is revive my garden and either give birth to the book, or flush it out of my system through this blog.

In coming posts I'll describe what the garden was, why it declined, and how I'm reworking it. I realize no one is clamoring to read the minutiae of one amateur gardener's struggles, but I'm hoping through this work I can get at larger themes of how we relate to the natural world, and how we align our desires with what is possible, and what is sustainable. Stay tuned.