And So To Bed

There's something about leaving the garden--really leaving it, abandoning it for four months--that makes me feel like I'm a deadbeat dad [or mom]. I walk away, I don't look back, I don't see it's cared for, I leave it to the open elements, the munching deer, left to fend completely for itself. And so last week I left my garden, not to return until April 1, when the house tenants move out, and I can move back in. I did cut down the dead stalks and weeded, but being clueless, lazy and hapless, the flowerbed wasn't frozen when I left, so I did not winter mulch it. !!! What a terrible, unbelievable "don't"-- not to winter mulch. Some part of me cast my garden's fate to the wind--literally! What survives this Darwinian winter of punishment will live to bloom another season, and what succumbs I will mourn. Like a passage from a Virginia Woolfe novel, I can picture the garden standing there alone, bracing against the winds, shuddering at the approach of deer, dessicating at the hands of sharp winter winds. And I'm not there--I'm gone. I especially think of my beautiful garden "follies"-- my gorgeous twig fence [see the photo at the top of the blog, and you can just about make it out] and my precious stone garden seat covered in moss...they are my sentries, and will watch over things until I can get back. Whatever else dies, my fence and my garden seat will survive, to greet me come April.
Until then, I can hope most anxiously for a traditional winter mulch for my plants--a snow cover that lasts all winter. Fingers crossed. And, now, to bed for the long winter's night...