By the way, that title is not mine. I scribbled the line in a notebook last fall when I heard fellow Ranter Scott Beuerlein speak at the Bellevue Botanical Garden fall symposium.

‘Daub’s Frost’ juniper color study

Gold stems of ‘Daub’s Frost’ juniper glow in winter light while frost blue green needles hint at snow.

I’ll let you in on a secret, sometimes telling conventional garden stories can get repetitive: plant this now … watch out for this pest/disease … look for this cool new plant (that you don’t already have but desperately need). At times I feel like a baseball announcer calling a game over and over in long losing season. Or maybe I’m the 8-track tape in the old Chevy I had in high school playing Earth Wind and Fire on repeat. Everything is more of the same, comfortably familiar but teetering on ho hum.

Then someone says something that makes me sit up and pay attention, something I would never do should you find me at a baseball game — which you won’t. Something that broadens my perspective and deepens my understanding of nothing less than Life. On. Earth.

Gardens have a way of returning us to our soft animal selves.

Cornus sanguinea ‘Midwinter Fire’ on a New Years Day in Washington Park Arboretum

Our gardens are grounding

They tell us where we are on the planet as well as where we are in the year. A quick stroll around my winter garden tells me I’m in a (very) damp northern region. Throughout spring and summer, my plants swallow the sun. Right now when the days are short and nights are long, I’m especially grateful for the glowing twig dogwood (Cornus sanguinea ‘Midwinter Fire’) that carries its own light during these dark months.

When the winter Solstice arrives next weekend, all of us here in the Northern Hemisphere will tip over into more light and lengthening days that prompt collective stirrings in the natural world and rev up another growing season.

We gardeners are faithful

It takes discipline to show up for routine maintenance again and again, monitoring pests, watering, and putting away the hose — I hate putting away the hose. When an unexpected deep freeze or a bizarre heat dome lays waste to our favorite plants, we learn to be nimble.

Last fall, my husband and I spent some very long days emptying a couple of agricultural troughs in the back garden whose drainage holes had clogged turning my productive raised beds into a swamp of anerobic goo. There must be an equation to figure out the volume of a cylinder that’s 4-feet in diameter and 2-feet deep — all I know is, it’s a lot. And heavy.

What drives a gardener to work so hard, to face failure, dig in and start over?

Every growing season teaches us a bit more about all that we still don’t know. There will be rewards and riches, flavors and fragrance, and yes, probably defeat and loss. Some years, cultivating humility and resilience is my greatest takeaway — tomatoes and zinnias, not so much.

Happy New Year. Let’s take another trip around the sun in the garden.