March 22, 2010
 
MANN TALK: A Garden Veteran Returns to One Winter Wasted
 
By Perry Mann
 
The garden I learned in was rocky. I seldom hit a hoe lick that I didn’t strike a rock. The day came when I bought some bottom land where I would have to search to find a pebble. The former garden was on a hillside and latter was flat and bounded on its northside by the Greenbrier River and on the southside by a steep hill that lay east to west. In summer the sun flooded my garden, but in winter the sun moved so far south that the hill blocked out the sun’s light and warmth, sunrise to sunset, from nearly the whole of my garden. Winter has had his way with her and this winter she left a war-wasted area of bottom land.
 
Before that big snow in December, I went to the garden regularly to get turnips from a patch that had so many turnip leaves that I had to search for the turnips. The asparagus patch stood thick and tall. The strawberry patch was crowded with plants old and new, a green forest of them. There stood a dozen or more okra plants, some more than six feet tall. There were weedy places along the river. Even in December it was a place of life. But then came the twenty-inch snow in December, the cold and snow of January and the apocalyptic month of February. Day after day, I sat and watched the flakes fall and shoveled and swept the walks and watched them fall and shoveled and swept some more. On and on it went. The garden was out of mind.
 
On March the 9th the sun came out and the temperature rose to 60 degrees. I couldn’t resist the invitation. I drove my truck to the garden. I hesitated at the entrance because there was still a foot of snow in the driveway and water standing in the parking area. But I decided to try it and I got over the snow and through the water to higher ground. When I got out of the truck and surveyed the garden, the word that flashed in my mind was “flattened.” Nothing was standing or even kneeling or lying. Everything was flattened and covered with a gray film of dust. The thirty inches or so of snow that had come in December and January and February had weighed flat everything. The only exceptions were the turnips. Now the greens were flat but the white turnip bellies look like so many pregnancies lying on a beach.
 
The asparagus plants lay like a miniature forest hit with a meteor. The strawberry plants lay flat as if they had been hit by the same astronomical monster. The evidence of rhubarb required some scrutiny: it was etched in the soil. The okra plants were gone except for a splintered stump. The deer, driven to eat anything by the snow cover, had eaten the okra plants from their six-foot tops to near the surface of the garden. What was left look like an old fashioned shaving brush with its handle down in the ground and the bristles up.
 
The garden was a network of channels that were the work of mice seeking under the snow for some sustenance. The channels were everywhere. The sight was an Armageddon or a nuclear disaster. The only life was the pink of rhubarb emerging from a cover of death and a strawberry plant or two exhibiting the green of life. Also, even though crushed with a ton of snow, the parsley was still identifiable.
 
The snow and rain that came in February cause the Greenbrier River to flood. As always, the debris upriver in a flood becomes the debris downriver. And I found the gifts from upriver everywhere. One big gift was the tops of a tree that had been cut, the trunk taken, and the top left lying in what became the river bed. It was deposited on part of the garden. So I saw exercise in the warm sunshine of that day. I got axe and saw from the tool chest. And I began to do what I used to do as youth on the farm. I have converted many a tree top to a brush pile while saving whatever was suitable for the fire places.
 
There is a difference between 19 and 89, a difference of 70 years. But there I was doing at 89 what I had done at 19, but with a much more measured and careful pace. I had to be careful not to stumble and fall. So with deliberation and calculation, I picked up my axe and waded into the thicket of a tree top. I selected out the obvious limbs and pulled them from the mass and tossed them where I planned to pile what was brush and to save what was firewood. Then I took my axe and began to cut the small limbs from the larger limbs. I piled the smaller stuff and I cut the larger limbs into lengths I could handle and deposited them for future hauling to the house. My accuracy with an axe had deteriorated since I was 19 but it was accurate enough to cut away the larger limbs and to finally succeed in having a brush pile and some wood for the stove.
 
I then turned my attention to my blackberry patch. It had withstood the snow onslaught but was in need of having last year’s dead canes cut and removed and this year’s canes tied to metal posts for support. In my tool chest I had pruning shears to cut the old canes and other extraneous growth that competed with blackberry canes. I worked methodically from one patch to another, cutting out the old canes and tying up the new. After a while the blackberry patch was cleaned of the extraneous and was set for the season and the production of gallons of berries.
 
I was tiring. I hadn’t had so much exercise in months. I decided to try to pull up the okra stumps as a last chore. I had trouble with many of them. I couldn’t pull them out. I did succeed in pulling out a number of them and I tossed them on the compost pile.
 
I took a few minutes to look at the garden and the condition it was in after I had spent the afternoon trying to rescue it from winter’s devastation. I felt a physical gladness and relief and an esthetic joy. I had begun another year of gardening. I would have, if all goes well, another chance to dance with nature, to plant seeds, cultivate them and nurture them. And realize the goals of such works: to be able to table the foodstuffs that sustain life, to be able to do physical work in the open and under sky and sun, and to be able to feel the blessedness of rest after work’s fatigue.