Winter arrived here last night -- a freezing wind rattled the wind chimes on our porch furiously for hours, and it was 24 F this morning. We've been able to see winter in the distance for most of the month -- the Blue Ridge is in plain view on the horizon, where winter comes weeks before it reaches us -- and we could,
if we wanted, drive over to West Virginia and visit winter any time after September. For central Virginia, Winter comes from the west, and starts at the higher elevations before creeping down into the hollows.

There's nothing wrong with being cold, though you can get too much of it. It feels fine to go out and work in the cold. As kids we ignored the fact that it was cold, and spent as much time as possible out in the freezing temperatures. When I think of rockhounding or fossil collecting, my first images are a cold activity conducted with numbed hands in the icy shadow of some frigid abandoned quarry in western Pennsylvania. There's no
reason not to gather rocks and fossils in the summer too, but the vegetation makes it harder to get to the ground in some types of places. I ought to be out working on this year's garden expansion now, cold and windy though it is, and my only excuse is that I am writing this instead. I did go out and take a picture or two.

Out in the cold this morning, I reflected on how plants have a singleness of purpose we can't completely understand. Consider these Japanese anemones. They are a fall plant and primed to take some cold, but last night's cold snap was the last straw. As one can see, these anemones were intent on staying green right to the last moment possible, and the last moment came and they seem a bit dismayed and almost embarrassed about it. Of course we don't have any insight into the emotional life of plants, but the sense that they must have one grows on a gardener over time, if he keeps gardening.

I remember when I thought of plants as automata, little biological machines (or in the case of climax hardwoods, very large and old biological machines) for processing chemicals into plant tissues and genetic
material. As I worked with seeds, slips, sprouts, scales, seedlings, rhizomes, tubers, bulbs, clones, or mature plants of various kinds, the idea that plants were just some sort of insentient machinery sloughed off like an old skin and I, the would-be gardener, re-emerged in a new one. Plants have a ferocious concentration of will and intentionality. They are creatures of incessant desire. We might say their wants are simple but that probably is our ignorance.

When we consider the extreme chemical complexity of the plant world, the phenomenal molecular range plants exhibit, their ability to concentrate some of the most sophisticated organic compounds found in nature, and the plain fact that in many cases no one knows why, maybe we should be willing to entertain
the possibility that there are realms of plant consciousness--though we would not be well placed to imagine what that would be like. The best fun of plants is the certainty that they will present you with mystery after mystery. They have their own ways. If it seems too much to say "a mind of their own," that may be because we aren't sure what mind is.

For instance, cold though it is today, and nearly December, our new Japanese camellia decided to pick this freezing windy day to
open its first bloom. It expects to be blooming steadily for the rest of the year, come frost, snow, blasts of ice or what have
you.

I have been shoveling a variety of vintage local muds to create new flowerbeds and transplant shrubs and perennials. The days leading up to the winter solstice are not a recessional during which the vegetable kingdom takes some time off and goes to sleep. Far from it. These rainy, muddy weeks with their intermittent bursts of warm sunshine and chilly overcast are a period of intense activity for plants, most of it underground. Taking a spade to the established beds turns up the roots of the perennials being moved and the crocus bulbs that just happen to be there, both charged with activity. The crocus bulbs, or croci as we laughingly call them, have thick bushy beards of white root underneath and hard white horns like the horns of extremely tiny goats on top, basically ready to foliate and bloom possibly as early as mid January. The narcissi are starting to think about spiking too. 

One puts these disturbed little bulbs back carefully into their friendly mud. Meanwhile the roots of the perennials are fat and white and anything but sleeping. Invasive spreaders like monarda are running strands of fibers sideways through the mud, not an inch deep; but under the iris rhizomes, the roots are bloating up on water and heading straight down, vertical. Moving big clumps of old herbaceous peony, we find silvery white stalks like an incipient asparagus, some turning pink, branching off the woody roots and climbing up to within a few centimeters of the soil surface, there to poise for a couple months before starting out of the ground like celery stalks. This is not rest; it is self-aggrandizement, co-optation, the marshalling of resources before the days of sun-warmed aggression when, as Lear said, “Ripeness is all,” and all the hot irons strike, sending the insects
mad.

We have three kinds of mud. The least interesting is the new garden center dirt for the garden expansion, which has been screened and mixed with a bit of aged manure. It is a silty mud from the other side of the
mountains, mud from the Shenandoah, pH neutral, not a simple product and no doubt reasonably bacterial and fungoid to a limited extent, but containing no fauna visible to the naked eye. This comes by truck and  gets dumped in holes. 

Then there is the mud of established beds. This dirt has some local history. Obviously some of it was once Julius Caesar and a lot of it was mastodon dung, back in the day, but we also find the remains of the charcoal briquets from the great 4th of July grill-out of 2011, and fireplace ashes, areas of decayed peat moss, the relics of former mulches, flowerpot shards, a lost marble, and of course worms, bugs, aerated holes, strands of vegetal and fungal life, and invisible bacteria; this stuff’s as alive as any great city, and the rains of autumn turn it not so much into the slimy mud of lore and legend as into something a little like chocolate cake. The beds are man-made. They’re part midden, and if no one feeds them, it’s hard to imagine how such beds would form. They look natural, they smell natural, and they’re full of organisms. When you find this stuff, it’s evidence by itself that humans are close by, using tools.

The third mud around here is the real natural local substance, red clay. This clay is the truly ancient byproduct of long-ago  erosive cycles that featured an awful lot of leaching and saprolitic decay as the local metamorphs sloughed back into their constituent Precambrian elements. It has the texture of unfired pottery. Virginia red clay lavishly supports mainline forest, climax trees like the hickories and oaks and maples, and understory trees like wild cherry and dogwood, indeed a tremendous variety of trees and shrubs and floor plants. What it won’t for the most part support are the tame, effete, cosmopolitan boutique plants that we might purchase for our established beds. Plants that have lived their whole young life in mineral chocolate, so to speak, often just sigh and die if placed in some grisly crevice hacked out of the brutal clay. This stuff’s for hero plants, not for ornamentals; it’s for plants that have it in their nature to be the scaffold of the created world.

If you spade the yard grass off your red clay, you find a root system less than 2 inches deep, indicating just how tenuous your weedy yard really is, and a useless scurf of disappointed organic material being fought over by the worst and most desperate kinds of piratical ants. Below that, red clay appears to be just about sterile. And yet it has worms. Not many and not commonly. You find more beetle grubs than worms. Really, it’s perfect for beetle grubs. Nothing will bother them there, while they pursue their inexplicable
metamorphosis. But it’s not perfect for worms and you wonder what they think they are doing. Are these bitter worms, worms in denial, outcasts, just lost worms; or are they pioneers, explorers, visionaries? 
One would like to interrogate these worms. They are either much stupider or much more ambitious than the usual sort.

It’s a great pleasure to work with good rock. I’ve nearly used up the excellent Laurel Mountain sandstone pallet I bought from the garden center. The photo shows one of the walls. I like the eclectic effect. To me, it shows well from all angles. I don’t know whether this sandstone really comes from Laurel Mountain or from some related quarry, or whether the stone company trucks it in from western Virginia, West Virginia, or Pennsylvania. This is a fairly common form of coal-country sandstone. It’s either Pennsylvanian or Mississippian in date and it is a coal-associated rock. This sandstone comes in flat, fairly uniform slabs that tend to break off square, rectangular, or as flat triangles. It’s easy to stack or to stand on end and piece together. Some pieces are stained with iron and some pieces have squiggles of carbon or thin bands of carbon and bog iron grit. It comes from the sandstone phase of the cyclothem, representing beach sand washed over a coal formation either because the sea level rose or because the plant-bearing muddy deltas that hosted the
coal forest subsided, or both.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/148194/cyclothem
 
The processes making these rocks were highly repetitious and are not too hard to understand. The muddy shale-bottomed swamps where the coal forests grew were a little above sea level. The ground was eroded clay and silt from inland, and iron was among the minerals dropping out in these layers. The coal seams and the shale beds can be anywhere from a few feet or a few tens of feet thick to mountainside-thick, depending on how long they were above the local sea level. When these beds sank or the sea rose, the result was a beach. The sandstone representing the beach phases of these cyclothems can also be anywhere from a few feet thick to hundreds of feet thick. The parts of these landscapes that were not muddy coal-tree deltas or sand beaches tend to be locally missing. Over time, lots of time, as the sea level fell again, or as the land rose, or both, the cycle would reverse itself with incursions of mud and plant debris until the delta overwhelmed the beach with brackish or fresh water and the coal forest reasserted itself, starting the next cycle of the cyclothem.

One can’t help enjoying the carbon seams in this sandstone. Floods or storm events would wash layers of iron-rich clay and masses of plant matter downstream onto the sand, to be buried, ultimately as a black streak in a white rock. Some of these bands are probably the debris of single events, one particular hurricane. Those forests, rivers and beaches, with their enormous dragonflies and bizarre amphibian wildlife, seem very very distant somehow and not easy to imagine, and yet it is just a fact that we can easily handle those beaches if we want to — stack them into walls. Somehow they speak of an unfathomable patience, a
tremendous leisure of sand and sea always ready to start over.

Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Book of Sand” is one of my favorite stories. In this story a fictional Borges purchases at fabulous price a mystical book with an infinite number of pages—a frightening Lovecraftian artifact which despite its measureless length must rationally enclose an unimaginable middle page. In the end he hides it—from himself, as much as anyone. Strangely enough, there really is a book of sand, divided into folios of outwash and deposition. While the full scope of the real book of sand is utterly beyond the scale of human life and indeed beyond the scale of human existence as a species, we actually can turn some of the pages—they make great flowerbeds—although, like Borges’ narrator, we find ourselves limited to the parts we think we can understand and maybe invited to wonder what we are, after all, in terms of such gulfs of time.