“Old December’s bareness everywhere!” — William Shakespeare
The oak trees have shed their leaves and dropped all their acorns. No more falling nuts banging on the car, bouncing off the roof, or bonking our heads. Now they are on the ground, making for hazardous walking. There is a bumper crop this year (“bumper” coming from an old English term for a large glass of wine filled to the brim). Conditions must be right throughout the year for a large crop of acorns. In spring, oak trees produce dangling, male catkins and tiny, indiscrete female flowers. The female flowers only open for a brief week and rely on the wind for pollination. That week must be free of frost, with a gentle breeze, and not too much rain. Later, in the summer, there must be ample rain. Then large quantities of acorns are produced in what is known as a “mast year.” From this abundance of food, populations of deer, rodents, and ticks increase — not good for gardens or gardeners.
“I’m planting a haycorn Pooh, so that it can grow up into an oak tree, and have lots of haycorns just outside the front door instead of having to walk miles and miles. Do you see, Pooh?” — A. A. Milne
Our native deciduous holly, Ilex verticillata or the winterberry, is also having a bountiful year. In the wetlands, the bushes are covered in bright, red berries adding colorful punctuations to the bleak landscape. Holly plants are dioecious (from the Greek, meaning two households), with separate female and male plants. When planting in home gardens, at least one male bush must be included for good berry production unless wild bushes are nearby. Cultivars and hybrids with red, orange, or yellow fruit are available for the garden in a variety of sizes. But it is the wild winterberries that I admire the most. Sown by forces without human influence and flourishing untended, they are a part of a world outside and beyond us, a gift from the earth.
“The garden in winter is an emotional experience. You think in terms of decay and disappearance and coming back. You feel the life cycle of nature.” — Piet Oudolf
It is a good thing if a gardener is not overly tidy at the end of the season. Leaf litter is the home of many small creatures and also provides some protection of plant roots from the cold, as well as being food for earthworms. Standing dried stalks of echinacea, sunflowers, verbena, and teasel are full of seeds for winter birds. They are also, along with ghostly, sere hydrangea flowers, perfect structures for snow to settle upon. Filigrees of new snow on crisscrossing branches and mounds on seed heads complement the uniformity of ground snow. Once the skies clear after a storm and the cerulean sky is a backdrop to a blindingly white snow cover, the garden becomes beautiful in its hibernation.
December 21 is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. Although it is only the beginning of winter and there will be months of cold and snow, there will also be increasing minutes of sunlight. On a clear morning at this time of year, if you get outside as the sun rises, the slanted light produces crazy, long shadows. I will go into my dormant garden and cast my own long shadow, remember summer, and accept the beauty of winter. The shortest days produce the longest shadows.
“The crisp path through the field in this December snow, in the deep dark, where we trod the buried grass like ghosts on dry toast.” — Dylan Thomas
December 2019