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Column: Tilling the imagination

Anyone who knows me an inch (or cubic inch), knows that my off-season is spent dreaming about what lies beneath. Winter is truly the gardener’s best season, for it allows a lingering of thought and is most generous with its time.
WINTER_frostyTrees
: Monday should be mainly sunny, with a high of -7 C, and a nighttime low of -13 C. File photo.
Anyone who knows me an inch (or cubic inch), knows that my off-season is spent dreaming about what lies beneath.

Winter is truly the gardener’s best season, for it allows a lingering of thought and is most generous with its time. In fact, the very act of dreaming a space is a necessary step for its proper realization.

To encourage these reveries, I’ve been poring over some delightful books, tucked under blankets and sipping hot tea. That’s when the bitter winds of winter are the sweetest.
Since the first snowfall, I’ve read the entire Anne of Green Gables series, “pitching and mooning” over Montgomery’s generous descriptions of Anne’s Avonlea home.

Anne is best known for her imaginative predilections for all things beautiful and nostalgic. Her descriptions of Green Gables’ more natural adornments are no exception.

From the early spring blooms of Anne’s “Snow Queen” — the generous cherry tree whose branches scrape her East gable window — to the late summer goldenrod that paints the Cuthbert’s pasture a golden hue, I am besotted with the magic of it.

It’s enough to forget the gale howling right outside my own gabled window. In fact, the gale becomes romantic in its wailings. Thanks to Anne, I’ve enough descriptive fodder to paint even the darkest day with a silver line.

Even when life is “a perfect graveyard of buried hopes” (or at least buried under a foot of snow), somehow it still finds a bright light through her inspired narrative.

Another gardening read that is perfectly wonderful is “Virginia Woolf’s Garden: The Story of the Garden at Monk’s House”. Written by Caroline Zoob, this lovely coffee table book is the gardening story of Leonard and Viginia Woolf’s purchase of Monk’s House and their subsequent transformation of an overgrown country house to a brilliant patchwork of garden rooms.

Using excerpts from both Leonard and Virginia’s diaries, Zoob patches together a vivid homage to the artists’ lives and the centrality of the garden to their creativity.

Zoob and her husband were the caretakers of Monk’s House in Sussex, England, where visitors can meander the rooms and enjoy roses and hydrangeas, peonies, and daffodils all planted by Leonard almost a century ago.

The home and its many outbuildings, including Woolf’s writing lodge, haven’t changed, save for better plumbing and heating.

In its early years, Monk’s house was positively medieval, and it wasn’t until the publication of “Orlando” in 1928 that the Woolfs could live comfortably. The land surrounding Monk’s House was purchased and new gardens were planned.

“Leonard and I have bought a field … and we are making all sorts of ambitious schemes for terraces, gazebos, ponds, water lilies, fountains, carp, statues of naked ladies…” Woolf wrote.

She complained in her journals that she always “lost Leonard in the garden,” and yet its ethereal beauty sustained her.

“Our garden is a perfect variegated chintz … asters, plumasters, zinnias, geums, nasturtiums … all bright, stiff, upstanding, cut from brightly coloured paper as flowers should be.”

My own garden is presently sleeping under three feet of snow. But I can wait. The dreaming of next year alone is satiating enough.

For now, I’ll be content to take Anne’s lead and enjoy the warmth and colour a vivid imagination can offer.

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