Jan 1st. Bleak midwinter.
No one told the plants….
And here’s a poem from my upcoming anthology…
Gardening
My garden is peeping out, unsure if it’s welcome yet,
Testing the atmosphere, checking on the timing.
Is there a warmth to our greetings, or a frost?
The plants, the ones we love, they are coy and shy.
The weeds are the gatecrashers to our horticultural party.
They are brazen, muscling past our forks and trowels,
Pushing the daffs and primroses to one side.
White skin-budded thugs, shaven headed,
Lying in wait in the dark loam, muggers in alcoves.
When we pull back the leaves, they thrust past, creating mayhem.
They crave the best soil, the blackest tilth
As their play area.
What irony.
Black is good in the garden.
Pale chalk or sickly clay are the feeble, despised bases,
Lacking fibre, elements and nourishment.
They seek out the rich dark friable peaty earth,
The blackest , the brownest.
Like coal and oil, peat is fuel, a source of wealth, heat and power,
All contained in the ground.
We can’t do without this dark hued matter
Yet we still underplay the importance of its blackness,
We still give it a negative connotation,
Still we see the light, the pale, the white as somehow better.
The garden knows best, even the bleachy-headed weeds.
They know the yin and yang of gardening:
Nothing much grows without the sun and the light.
But nothing is nurtured, preserved and nourished without the soil and the black.
Why didn’t we see this all those years ago?
Why are we still blind?
TanGental 
We’re seeing shoots in gardens too.
Happy New Year Geoff in case I haven’t said before.
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Lovely. Funny, I’m in the mind of planting things, too. I was just working on a scene where “no nukes” protesters (of the nuclear power variety) plant white spiderworts outside the gates of a nuclear power plant. They said the flowers turn pink when exposed to radiation. This really happened–at an Ohio power plant in the 80s. Don’t know if the flowers ever turned pink, before they were removed, no doubt. Great poem, post, great start to 2019!
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That’s intriguing. Brings to mind the Three Mile Island scandal doesn’t it. That takes me back to my old dad chuntering away, about no one learning lessons. We had a crisis in the 1950s at Windscale in Cumbria that could have been our Chernobyl. They could have done with some spiderworts. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire
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January flowers? What a marvelous surprise, Geoff! They’re lovely — and so is the well thought poem. Happy New Year hugs.
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Thanks Teagan you too. I guess you’ll have flowering everything’s once ensconced in NM
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Ah! An ode to flowers of small petal you found in your garden one midwinter’s morning. How lovely!
Is this because your area is temperate? We hit 16°F yesterday.
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It never used to be but we were in double figures (centigrade) yesterday. A more seasonal 5 today and some cold coming but we don’t get the weather we used to, that’s certain. Some plants really need to be knocked back and hibernate or they exhaust themselves. Poor dears. 16F sounds pretty parky to me. Wrap up warm.
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Sounds unusual. Wrapping up is on the schedule!
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In the nursery garden, we’ve got primroses in flower, the tulips are up and bulbs are starting to shoot !
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Madness. When the next beast appears we will all be saddened.
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True….
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Most intriguing. I love these words “Lying in wait in the dark loam, muggers in alcoves.
When we pull back the leaves, they thrust past, creating mayhem.”
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Thanks Robbie. An odd little metaphor, that.
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The last few lines create a fine metaphor
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How’s yours btw. Still ridiculously full of colour.
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It is, but I think yours may be more advanced in some respects – we have no snowdrops yet
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That is a most intriguing poem – your musings on soil colour cover many human foibles and prejudices. Brought to mind the vague sense of discomfort I feel when our US friends refer to ‘soil’ as ‘dirt’…… Our flowers here were rather discombobulated last winter, as we all were. The daffs were up two months ahead of time and new leaves were budding before the last had fallen from some trees. It was extremely mild – and wet. Lets not forget the wet. But with no frosts to speak of, the pests have multiplied.
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Yes we need some decent cold or the poor things exhaust themselves.
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A lovely poem and timely. Because of the lack of rain for so long our primroses and snowdrops have yet to appear.
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The bulbs are coming up already in Middle Tennessee and the Dogwood trees have buds. I’ve never seen either happen before latish February or early March. If we don’t get a freeze the bugs will over run us, but if we get a deep freeze or long one, nothing will probably bloom.Bummer.
Lovely photos. And delightful muscled weeds.
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Looks like it’s a world issue. Climate change anyone!?
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I love the weeds being likened to bald headed white skinned thugs… nature’s bully boys. 💜
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That’s how we see it. Stereotyping everywhere…
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So pretty. And there is always life and rebirth.
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Always thank heavens
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Indeed!
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