Just a week ago I finally finished cleaning up, cutting back and pruning. In the next week or so I will be busy spreading compost and mulch. Sweetpeas, snapdragons, lettuce and kale are germinating under grow lights. And for this brief moment, there is nothing to do but wait and watch.
    This past weekend I was standing out in the garden under the full moon. Very peaceful, and at the same time very exciting. That waiting time that any woman who has been pregnant knows about.    Winter rosettes of rudbeckia and daisies glittered with frost. All cleaned up of brush and blackened stems, the "bones" of the garden, spare and structured, were easily observed. Still a good 6 weeks from bloom, the tips of daffodils and wood hyacinths poked up from the bare ground, and where I pulled back last year's mulch, there appeared the tiny seedings of self-sowing larkspur, ammi, and phlox drummondii. Very soon the crested and reticulated irises will be blooming, and here and there in what passes for lawn, the wild veronica, creeping speedwell, is showing off a few early sky-blue blooms. Soon the neighborhood lawns will blanketed in clouds of blue veronica, and we will all let our yards get too high and weedy because we are loathe to interrupt the show. (What wonderful neighbors I have, who let this happen.)
    I sang to my garden, there under the full moon. Sang as the earth and the plants laid dreaming, under the moonlight.

    Tell me about your winter garden.

Janie