The Gardener Who Planted Under Snow

A gardener in the north of the country was known, among the neighbours who watched from their kitchen windows, for doing something apparently absurd every year in late November. On the coldest afternoon that could still be worked with a spade, when the earth had begun to freeze but was not yet solid, she would go out into her front garden with a bag of bulbs and, in a snow that was often already falling, plant them.

The neighbours regarded her with fond concern. Everyone knew that bulbs should be planted in October at the latest, before the ground was hard. Everyone also knew that gardening in a snowstorm was, on the face of it, ridiculous. The gardener never explained. She would simply nod at whichever neighbour was watching, dig her small awkward holes with numb hands, tuck the bulbs in with a gentleness that was surprising given the weather, and go back inside to a cup of tea.

In April, when everyone else's spring garden appeared, so did hers. Only hers appeared two weeks later than everyone else's, and continued flowering, in wave after wave of tulip and daffodil and small ordinary crocus, well into May, long after the neighbourhood's early flowers had shrivelled into the tired brown grass of a warming spring. Her garden, by the first of May, was the most beautiful on the block. It was reliably the most beautiful every year.

She had learned the trick from her mother, and her mother from hers. The bulbs planted in the almost-frozen ground of late November did not, as one might expect, die. They did something better: they held. They rooted slowly through the frozen months, took no chances with an early false spring, and emerged when the season was safely on. The gardener's neighbours, who had planted responsibly in October, watched their early bulbs come up during the first warm week of March, get flattened by a late frost, and produce a compromised, half-flowered April.

There is a rhythm of work like this — work whose whole point is that you cannot see the result for a long time, and whose apparent absurdity in the doing is, in fact, its exact virtue. A book that is written for two hours every morning for four years before it is shown to anyone. A saving account fed monthly for a decade before it is drawn on. A friendship whose only maintenance, for years, is a birthday card. A prayer said quietly every night in a room where nobody is watching. Each of these looks, to the neighbours, mildly comic in the doing. Each is planting under snow.

The gardener, well into her eighties, still plants in the snow. She has trained, over the years, three or four younger neighbours to do the same. They are, all of them, the people whose Aprils will be worth walking past. If you can find, in your own life, something small and slightly absurd that you can do in the frozen months, do it. April is farther away than you think. It is also closer.