Night Gardening

Tomorrow has arrived. Since those first few days of vacation, a slumber has set in, or the need to do something else. Sunny mornings perfectly good for gardening, still warm enough to laugh at a hard frost, have been spent sleeping late, drinking coffee, and reading. Then the afternoons get eaten by the need to straighten the house, cook a meal for friends visiting, or painting the front door, the bathroom, the staircase.

The week speeds by. Strange how that always happens. When you want time to drag, it always chooses to do otherwise. Now, we are confronted with the day before we leave for a trip down to Delta country, New Orleans and Houston. We’ve had that cold, hard frost already two nights in a row, the landscape in the early mornings covered in a film of diamonds. It almost looks like snow. There are still terra cotta pots full of roses and lavender, and winter gem boxwood waiting to be freed from their bound roots and put into the ground.

It is always like this, the mad rush before leaving home. There is always something that needs to be done, that can’t wait because the loss will be too great. If we don’t plant the roses, the lavender, and the boxwood, they will die. The terra cotta pots will crack. So at 3:00 in the afternoon, we fuel up with hot, dark coffee and begin the Herculean, if not Sisyphean task of emptying the pots with their frozen dirt and root balls. We hack at the concrete-like soil with hand shovels and screwdrivers. We are elated when we realize that if we can get past the initial crust, the earth inside the pots is soft and we can pry the plants out.

We work doggedly together, then separately when we see the sun starting to slide past the mountain ridge. We are not cold, even though the temperature now is below freezing, the worst time to try and transplant. I wonder if any of these prized canes and woody stems will even survive the upheaval. We spend several hours bend over digging and pulling. Our backs and forearms, our hamstrings begin to burn with the fever of too much.

When darkness finally descends, we can still see for quite some time because the sky is so clear. We light tikki torches to keep at the work in the perennial garden, and turn the outdoor house lights on that reflect a warm glow over the stone garden. Finally, most of the plants are all in the ground, one way or the other, and most of the pots are clean of dirt. We lay the pots face down near the gardens so they won’t fill with water if it rains while we are away. Caleb takes the last of the boxwood, ten pots in all, the ones we can’t shake loose from the terracotta and puts them inside. They are lined smartly in front of the French doors in our bedroom. I feel a little like the garden has come to haunt me.

There is still packing to do, a hot shower to take, a warm dinner to eat, some unfinished business to attend to. I collect the red and white striped sling chairs and put them away for the season, stripping them of their fabric to be washed and stored until next spring. These chairs have become our symbol of summer, and our reluctance to fold them up is testament to our reluctance to move on past autumn. By doing so, we are finally putting our season to bed.

I look up at the clear, vast sky littered with stars. At this late hour of the evening, the night sky is the inverse of the morning field, covered in a film of diamonds.

-Deirdre