dreams

It's that time of year. The cold weather has finally arrived and the snow blankets the garden. On the loop that I run, which takes me around Sturgeon Point, I get to peek into some of the lovely gardens of "millionaire row" where I enjoy this garden ornament, one of a pair at the top of the steps that lead to a lovely cottage that seems to breathe out an aura of stories, design, history and beauty.

The seed catalogues are arriving and I'm beginning to make long dreamy lists of things I'd like to grow in my garden this coming summer. I really do think that without this quiet season of whiteness, like a blank page upon which to doodle out design ideas and planting schemes, my gardening life would be quite different indeed. I know I'd miss the doodling, even though my schemes so often go astray into my bewildering piles of saved paper. But without my doodles to refer to, I'd have no sense of order at all, nothing to help me set some priorities on every pretty thing I'm sure I want from the garden and seed catalogues!

It doesn't matter at all that my systems for organizing my paper don't work too well. I can spend hours poring over old design ideas I've had, reworking them, tweaking them and making those "want" lists, full of the plants that fill me with lust. This usually means I have created many more bits and pieces of paper that I try -- not too successfully -- to file in some orderly way! The favorite pieces of paper get copied so that it's a copy, not the original, that gets folded, unfolded, dirtied and stained as I shop, mark out new beds, plant and play in the garden as soon as weather will allow.

That sounds more organized than I actually am, as I have many versions of the same idea on scraps of paper, some dated, some not, some labelled as a first or second or third draft, some not, some intended for a particular spot in houses I lived in long ago, some a more generalized idea that I may translate into something for a specific spot in this garden...oh dear. I'm not organized at all! It is, I admit it, a very intuitive, daydreaming method which will keep me happy for hours but is doubtful as to effectiveness!