Finding beauty in the cold light of day
For restless gardeners, the next four weeks offer a window for sowing spring peas. Common garden peas, snow peas, snap peas - all will take to the frigid soil like ducklings to water. They also face their own infant perils: Freshly sown peas can prove a delectable snack to squirrels as well as chipmunks perking up from their winter lethargy.
When the peas sprout, crows find them a sweet delicacy. That peas sprout at all is a bit of a miracle: If you put bean seeds in the ground in winter, they would sit in the cold, damp earth until they rotted, but peas are drawn from their torpor by soil temperatures as low as 45 degrees.
For all the early risks to the pea vine, the later difficulties also cause worry. If it gets too hot as they merrily bloom and fruit in May and June, the harvest will be poor. That is why early sowing is recommended in our mid-Atlantic area, assuming you have a bed ready to go - you can add trellising a little later. This advice also assumes the soil is not frozen, a condition that brings a lot of garden play to a screeching halt at this time of year. I like to sow pea seeds thickly - two inches apart in a double, staggered row - so that if there's a problem with germination or with animals, I may still get a decent crop. A pencil makes for a perfect dibber.
If pea sowing is not on your weekend agenda, or if your soil is frozen, now is a great time to give an annual pruning to deciduous shrubs, and I count rose bushes in this bunch. With loping shears, thick gloves and thornproof clothing, you should get in there and remove suckers, old unproductive canes, stems that are rubbing or damaged, and those growing inward. A sufficiently groomed shrub will be healthier, more productive and, not least, look good. Viburnums and lilacs are great candidates for this. Don't prune bigleaf hydrangeas, which must run the gantlet of late frost damage. Groom them after June flowering.
Beyond the seasonal chores, there is a compelling reason to be out in the garden now. There are moments of effect and beauty that speak to late winter, forget the impending spring. The other day, I wandered through the grounds of Brookside Gardens in Wheaton, Md., to savor this time.
If you stop to look at plants, you soon dispel the idea that winter, particularly late winter, is a period of stasis. You will find a few things actually in flower: the Christmas rose, the stinking hellebore, a few varieties of witch hazel and giant snowdrops.
The wintersweet is a gangly and somewhat forgotten shrub - perhaps if it were native it would be favored more. It steps awkwardly onto the stage in February, when its nondescript twigs bear waxy blooms of dull yellow. But, it has a sweet and penetrating scent, and at Brookside it can be found between posts of a wisteria arbor in the Fragrance Garden. Here it is positioned well, perfuming the air when we least expect it, then receding into the background.
Wintersweet belongs to a time past when we used to fill up our gardens with large shrubs that bloomed nicely for a couple of weeks but then did little else the rest of the year; philadelphus and lilacs are other examples. I think in the right spot and with some sensitive pruning, the wintersweet is still a useful garden plant.
But I digress, because February isn't about flowers. It's about seeing different aspects of the beauty of garden plants, such as the perfect candleflame symmetry of a dawn redwood or the sublime harlequin patterns of ash tree bark.
In a month or less, the star magnolia will burst open as one of the first showy woody plants of the year, but its buds now are superb. They are wrapped in a shaggy, silver green coat of fur, lovely to look at and soft to the touch.
The yellow- and red-twigged dogwoods don't glow as much as in northern gardens, but they can still make a striking effect. If you needed to create a large rain garden, a massing of them would be stunning in front of a hedge of, say, yaupon holly. I took a picture of an improved variety of the bloodtwig dogwood, named Cato, and the framed image had something of a Jackson Pollock drip painting feel about it, energized by chaos.
The winterberry is an obviously conspicuous display - Brookside's pondside stand of Winter Red is old and fruitful and eye-catching from afar - but my bushes were robbed of their berries weeks ago by birds.
Elsewhere, the slow-growing lacebark pine with its mottled bark is divine. It's a pity you have to wait quite so long to savor its show. I had forgotten about Brookside's stand of Alexandrian or poet's laurel, which is an attractive, evergreen ground cover much in need of wider use. (It is hard to propagate and difficult to find; the botanic name is Danae racemosa.) It has lustrous spear-shaped leaves, and has the feel of the sweetbox about it, except it is larger and the branches are more arching. It deserves a place in the shade garden as a filler and a textural foil.
But finding the essential February scene is simpler. Cattails at the edge of a frozen pond speak of a deceptively rich time of year. Last year's foliage is the color of straw, and battered, but the flower spikes are defiantly present, hanging in there, like the gardener in winter.