image: Ivy Dawned (through Creative Commons)
Over the winter months, I tended a Winter Garden of words. Inspired by the idea of a garden designed to be at its best during the winter months (whether outside or under an elaborate glass structure), I used the Word Garden blog as a space to grow ideas for a new piece of writing, Winter Garden | Word Garden, now available to download.
From December 2010 through to February 2011 I asked readers to answer the question: What would feature in your perfect Winter Garden? Winter Gardens that don’t have the protection of glass canopies are creative in their use of colour, texture, light and smell; so focused on those four elements. I asked people to leave a list, a poem, a description, or just a single word for me to respond to.
Have you read The Snow Man by Wallace Stevens?
AS Byatt said in an interview recently that she doesn’t believe in God, she believes in Wallace Stevens, and that pretty much sums up the way I feel about him.
The Snow Man
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
Will, that’s gorgeous, thank you!
spicy fragrance, candles, cosy hammocks, books to indulge in, fleece, architectural plants, evergreens, warmth, a place to nurture, nourish and refresh!
A ray of sun’s suddenly appearing and transforms the space by a slow movement of light.
The snow is like a goldy glitter rug and show you strange fluid ways, fluctuating and bluring in the shadows.
And then you are overlayed by a fleecy frozen silent where just few sounds like a birds away or the wind in the trees can arise. Everythings becomes a fascinating shape but you just have the time to dip into this new frame that the worm light desappears. The only thing which survive is this frozen silent and you rediscover by your first step in the snow that you will never belong to this idle fancy.
My secret winter garden would be a place of crystalisation, where all this kept instant which never stop to flow out of our hand could be frozen in a fascinating shape, echo of our deepest feeling.
A flash of red berries on frosted ground.
The moon and a barn owl
Here’s a text and image about a product fitting your wintergarden by our studio: Studio Makkink & Bey:
‘The garden well looked after, all year round. Each season has its own colours, smells and waste. The hay of summer, the leaves of autumn, all this can be used for non-durable furniture. Extrusion containers press the garden waste into endless benches which can be shortened to any length. It’s up to nature to decide when it’ll claim them back.’
Image here: http://www.studiomakkinkbey.nl/images/001992image.png
snowman. snow, carrots and coal.
Musty compost, yellowing sunsets, cold wet earth, misty breath, swirling leaves, burnt lips from hot soup, icy windows, and glowing embers
I don’t like winter, never did. It makes me shrink, the way frozen leaves do.
I often wonder what it must feel like to be a plant and live without any thought of travelling anywhere. Just being, here, in a garden, would I know that there are others gardens, other plants I’ll never have the opportunity to talk to ? And I guess I would even more dislike winter, as one must feel cold in the sharp wind, cold under the snow. And why do we call it a “coat of snow”, in french, when it is everything but warm ?
I don’t like winter because I can’t be in the garden. Very selfish when you think plants have a right to and need for a nice long sleep before growing and flowering again.
The good thing about winter is that I can start dreaming of my next garden ! Many plants will still be there, faithful and ready to sprout at the first sign of spring and meet newcomers, those I didn’t grow last year.
And the happy ones are my indoors plants : I’m all here for them, all competition gone.
So, my winter garden is my other garden, inside the flat, at last.
Thanks Regine! Could you tell me what the French is for ‘coat of snow’? Funny that in English we say ‘a blanket of snow’ – I wonder if there are examples from other languages….
My perfect winter garden would be a place of water and stone, maybe tightly clipped dwarf conifers, neat rectangles of very short grass, nothing else. Fields of cobbles, dry stone walls, lengths of stone flags, mirrors of water turned to ice, the barest bones of a garden without growth or greenery, a garden that celebrated the wind and the frost, a garden that could reflect moonlight and starlight, be filled with candles on mild nights, left to the darkness on others. A garden at its best under a thin covering of powder snow.
A few years ago I had just started to learn to play the harp and attended a course for beginners in Edinburgh. The course was supposed to be for novices only but attracted far too many people and mainly students who were way beyond novice status. As the morning progressed I became so dissillousioned that I seriously considered launching my harp from the battlements of Edinburgh castle! In a bid to calm down I sat in the sun in wonderful parkland and leaned against a tree. Out of the calm the wind started to gust from behind me, the harp, the future of which was still being contimplated, stood before me. Magical and ghostly sounds surrounded me as the harp played it’s own view on a future together. Spellbound I listened and eventually joined in as the harp screamed, wailed and moaned. From that moment I became as one with the instrument and still to this day play in the garden on windy spring days.
Please consider sound generation in your garden of ideas ,it is a very powerful force and conjours very strong imagary and emotions.
Hope all is good for you.
Neil Jxx
I just love this last post – the harp playing itself. What an image! I wonder if the snow billlowing past my window in Kent (northeast wind) would play it too.
Pale green hellebores, snowdrops, early violets, a stone Victorian bird-bath of a boy, a bare pear-tree where five fat pigeons sit together for warmth.
And the last verse of a poem written in very old age by EJ Scovell about her husband Charles Elton, the founder of British ecology and a naturalist – they made a crescent garden, lived together 60 years in a tall cold house covered in creeper – ‘Winter Song’ -
Walking in the green winter
That has drunk the snow
We talk as sea-borne strangers would
When travelling was slow.
Spring is in doubt, a death ahead,
Summer a life ago.
(She’s published by Carcanet.)
Be happy and lucky, winter gardener, writer-gardener
with love
Maggie
My winter garden would have to feature a frozen pond with black ice to stand on.
The first thing that comes to my mind is the wintry scene from Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Mr Tumnus in his flying scarf wound loosely around his neck, a package in one arm and snow fluttering to the ground as he looks around for Lucy.
A winter garden ought to be magical! Where the plants are white and frosty but alive and growing. Perhaps there would be stars as flowers and snowdrops for leaves?
Oh, and small twinkly lights would be beautiful!
Thanks Jean, have a read here: http://secretgardenproject.wordpress.com/2011/02/28/winter-garden-10-white-magic/
Sarah
I am thrilled to see you making use of my creative commons photo!
http://www.flickr.com/people/ivydawned/
Maybe some of your readers would like to drop by and tag up a few of my others. Here is the info:
Why do I license all my photos Creative Commons? Because I have been part of public service websites which depend on these photographs for illustrations, particularly wikiHow, which is very grateful to those who have generously provided some of their work. I thought I might as well add to the pool of what can be used by sites which are so useful to the world. After all, I don’t plan on marketing my work, but my work does have value, and I am more than happy to share that value. We all give something of ourselves to the community, and in my case, some of what I share is my photostream. I get a lot of pleasure out of contributing photos to the public at large for use in illustrating Wikipedia articles or blogs, or church or school newsletters or school projects or whatever.
I have enabled tagging by the public, so that anyone dropping by can add more tags to any photo, which of course helps those who need Creative Commons photos to find what is useful to them. So tag away!
If you are going to use one of my photos, please link to the photo used, please indicate that the photo is used Courtesy of Ivydawned through Creative Commons (linking back to this page, please). Also, please link to the CC license, which typically will be creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en
Thanks again. This is a lovely blog.
Thanks Ivy. I find Creative Commons work massively useful, so really appreciate you making your work available. I’ve updated the photo so it links to your page now too!