Weathering Winter
A Gardener's Daybook
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
In winter, when the only things growing seem to be icicles and irritability, what pleasures exist for a gardener or for anyone who lives in a northern climate? In his distinctive daybook, Weathering Winter, Carl Klaus reminds readers that the season of brown twigs and icy gales is just as much a part of the year as when tulips open, tomatoes thrive, and pumpkins color the brown earth. From the first cold snap of late December 1994 to the first outdoor planting of onion sets and radish seeds in mid-March 1995, Klaus kept track of snow falling, birds flocking, soups simmering, gardening catalogs arriving, buds swelling, and seed trays coming to life.
Gardeners, lovers of the out-of-doors, and weather watchers will recognize themselves in the ways in which Klaus has come to terms with the harsh climate and chilly truths that winter embodies. His constant, careful checks on the temperature and on the geraniums overwintering in the attic, his contentment in the basil- and garlic-flavored tomato sauce he cooked up from last season’s crops, and his walks with his wife in the bitter chill of starry January nights reflect the pull between indoors and out, the contrast between the beauty and the cruelty of the season.
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After the theatrical, profligate growth recorded in Klaus's lovely My Vegetable Love: A Journal of a Growing Season, it's hard to imagine what he'll do with sterile winter. But the dead of winter is a misnomer, and during the two and a half months recorded here, he recounts the swings in the season and his own mood. From the first wrinkly, overpriced store-bought green pepper, he thinks of his own crops. Working with the odd spider plant, household geranium or cymbidium orchid isn't enough for Klaus. Although the garden is largely inactive, the gardener can't be, and Klaus bides his time in optimistic plantings, in fears for vegetables exposed to harsh temperatures, in defrosting the bounty of harvests past and, most of all in gardening dreams, that first of which arrives in the indescribably enticing form of a seed catalogue. He's at his best when he describes the loveliness of winter, like the red of the barberry against the snow, or a day "so cold and dry that flakes glisten in the air and glitter on the snow." But winter is clearly not Klaus's favorite season, and too much of his daybook is thinking about the weather, checking the pulse of the season, looking for signs that it is on its way out. In this way, in particular, this seems like a prelude to My Vegetable Love, in which Klaus reveals his true passions.
