January Is the Gardener’s Best Month

January is the gardener’s best month, because every garden in it is still perfect.

The case for January

The ground has closed. In the North it is sealed under snow; in the middle of the country it is frozen into a hard pan; in the milder corners it has gone quiet, too cold to sprout and too wet to work. Nothing is bolting. Nothing is being eaten. The tomato plants are not rotting on the vine, because there are no tomato plants. The Japanese beetles have gone wherever Japanese beetles go, and the crabgrass has set its seed and stopped pretending to be a lawn. The garden has stopped being an argument between a plan and the weather’s answer. It is a finished object, and a finished object does not need anything.

The shape of the place comes back in January. A birch stands pale as a candle where phlox had hidden it all summer. The stone path emerges between the beds, and the reason it bends the way it does becomes plain. Rose canes are dark red and straight, holding snow in the crotches of their thorns. Asparagus ferns have turned the color of straw and stand in even rows, each one a little winter tree. Hydrangea heads hang brown and papery over the border. Goldenrod stems make a summary of the meadow, each a small tower of seed cases. None of this is dying. It has been fixed in place, the way a pressed flower is fixed, and the low January light draws a line under every stem.

The gardener’s work in January is the only work of the year that is done without interference. Fill the feeder. Knock the snow from the arborvitae. Walk the paths slowly with hands in pockets and look at the lean of the trellis, the crack in the fence, the bare bough that will want a saw before spring. None of it has to be done today. The days are short. Where the ground is frozen it is too hard to dig; where it is not, there is still no hurry. January is the one month when a garden can be seen without a list. The weeding can wait, and for once the waiting damages nothing.

Even the plans for next year are still plans. The seed catalogs arrive, and the gardener reads them by the kitchen window, liking the idea of a dry year and a long one, a sweet cherry and a blue tomato. No seed is in the ground. No hole is dug. The future has not yet put a dent in the present. The January garden does not need to be improved. It is already complete, as far as it goes, and what it lacks is the very thing that makes it beautiful: it lacks the mess of having tried.

The case against January

Except that a garden is not a still life. A garden is a doing, and January does not allow it. The best gardener’s months have always been the ones with dirt under the nails—April, when the soil crumbles and the first peas go in; June, when the lettuce is thick and the roses are out; October, when the frost is coming and the root cellar is not ready. Those months are not perfect. They are fight months. The squash vine borer finds the squash, the rain comes the day after planting, the weeds win every argument until July. But any gardener will say that the work is the point, and January has no work in it. Filling a bird feeder is not gardening. Reading a catalog is shopping. Walking the paths with cold fingers is a walk, not a season.

The case against January can be put more cruelly. Snow is a good liar. It smooths over the dead lawn, the rut the deer made, the place where the dog dug a hole and the rain filled it. Frost makes a bad design look deliberate. Under that cold white cover, a garden that was falling apart in November can pass for settled. January’s perfection is the perfection of a photograph, not of a place—the gardener cannot touch it, cannot test it, cannot pull one weed from the ground to prove the ground is alive. It is perfect the way a museum diorama is perfect. That is not the same as being a garden.

The strongest case against January is that it makes the gardener a spectator. No one became a gardener by looking. The hands learn the soil; the knees know the rows; the back remembers the wheelbarrow. A January garden gives no feedback. It does not turn toward the sun, or sag under too much rain, or surprise with a volunteer tomato in the compost. It just sits there, beautiful and silent, and silence is not the same as health. In spring a garden can break a heart. In January it cannot break anything, because it is not trying.

But the argument holds only if a month must be useful. January has never been useful. It is the month when the country holds still, when the ground sleeps and the gardener’s calendar is empty. The question is whether that is a desert or a rest. The seed catalog promises a summer that has not arrived. The rose canes do not promise anything. They stand in the snow and ask nothing, and in a life that spends all year answering the garden’s demands, one month of asking nothing is not the least of the year. It is the best of it.

That is the kind of perfection January has: not a finished beauty but a held breath. Out by the fence, a single dried stem of goldenrod has bent under the snow until its tip touches the crust. The seed heads have not fallen. When the wind shifts, they rattle, and the chickadee that lands on them is the only thing in the garden in a hurry.