Winter Arrived Here Last Night

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.

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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.

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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.

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