Dear Friends,

Minnesotans consider themselvers hardy Northern types, experts on autumn’s cold rains and winter’s pains and pleasures. We like to recall the severity of our childhood treks to school in the harsh winds of January and the drifts of February. We can be rhapsodic describing the glories of the last crimson leaves and the exquisite beauty in snowscapes and ice crystals.

We cope well, by and large, and we are proud of our ability to function and even thrive during these darker, colder seasons. But what do we really know about their role in the lives of other species? Our tomatoes and petunias are surely dead at first frost, but many plants survive the winter and come back with more vigor as years pass. The play of our cycle of seasons upon the lives of plants has long fascinated students of nature. One hundred fifty-six years ago, when Eloise Butler was a toddler, Henry David Thoreau wrote this in his journal:

"Consider what a vast crop is thus annually shed upon the earth. This, more than any mere grain or seed, is the great harvest of the year. This annual decay and death, this dying by inches, before the whole tree at last lies down and turns to soil. As trees shed their leaves, so deer their horns, and men their hair or nails. The year’s great crop. I am more interested in it than in the English grass alone or in the corn. It prepares the virgin mould for future cornfields on which the earth fattens. They teach us how to die."

Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and a generation of their educated young followers in the second half of the 19^th century believed strongly in the creative powers of nature and the clear spiritual essence of the natural world. Eloise Butler is said to have modeled her Garden shed on the cabin at Thoreau’s Walden Pond. Other writers and thinkers have had similar sensibilities.

Last fall I attended a course taught by Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul and other books about psychology and theology. He described the soul as a living rhizome that is always present but never seen. Sometimes it produces the flowers and fruits of life as we know it and sometimes not. He advised us to cultivate our rhizomes with a search for meaningful relationships and a hearty appetite for healthy pleasures. Good advice!

Paying attention to nature teaches us that the processes of life and death coexist in organisms, ecosystems and habitats. This issue of The Fringed Gentian™ delves into these processes and their importance for the Garden. If we were there today we would see a quiet winter scene behind the gates. With some effort we might see the woodchucks, the raptors and even the pileated woodpecker. In the wetland, frogs are sleeping under the mud until early spring. On dead-looking plants we could find fully developed buds awaiting their time to open into new leaves and flowers. Although it may be harder to see, the winter Garden is full of life and the promise of new life. We may not be able to walk the paths right now, but this issue of the Gentian will help bring us there in spirit.

Sincerely,
J. Pam Weiner
President