SNOW

What does a gardener do when the ground is white with snow and the temperature is below freezing?  There are many options including cleaning the house or the potting room.  We settled on the latter.  Our potting room is in an 1835 kitchen built about ninety feet from the main house.  The outside walls are faced with early twentieth century tiles.  There is one room downstairs, with large ceiling beams supported by sister beams.  We turned on our little gas heater and began.

We removed stones, broken pots, and miscellaneous notes to ourselves and others.  We sorted dental tools (used for delicate weeding and root manipulation) from pollinating paintbrushes and other cutting, transplanting, and digging tools.  We found dried up seeds among to-do lists from years back and photographs that should have been destroyed before viewing!  We found pots of various sizes filled with paper clips, broken plant labels, and bits of unreadable paper.  There were shelves containing ancient knee pads hard as rocks, plastic containers that disintegrated before our eyes, and others meant for fertilizers but with mysterious contents and illegible labels.

Gardeners and would-be archeologists, we marveled at treasures that had been unearthed in the garden, then brought into the potting room and forgotten.  There were broken shards of beautiful crockery, bits of old children’s toys, part of an antique lock, and a tin that had once contained “Tube Rose Scotch Snuff” (which we learned by taking a graphite rubbing of the rusted lid).  There were also natural treasures: blue jay, cardinal, and woodpecker feathers; leathery blacksnake eggs that had been laid and hatched in a bag of potting mix; and a bird’s nest on a high shelf that may have been put there by a gardener or perhaps by the wren herself.  A small, sweet, early-blooming Primula vulgaris and a pot of Helleborus niger seedlings waited patiently by a window to be planted out in milder weather.

We sorted plastic bags of almost every size, some used but still usable and a few brand new ones.  On the opposite shelf were our reference books and notebooks.  Two shelves contained the personal notes belonging to each volunteer and employee.  We hung new shelves behind one of the potting benches and quickly filled them.  A few insect, snake, and other corpses puzzled us, as did decaying watering devices and a digital clock that read “12:70.” 

By the end of the day our noses were filled with dust and our minds were fuzzy with identifying and sorting objects.  But when we went out into the fresh air and came back in, we were in a new potting room.  This was NOT like opening presents on Christmas Day.  This was like moving day.