Her hardest hue to hold
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
When I was little I thought the last line said; “Nothing green can stay.” It made so much more sense that way, growing up with New England autumns. I heard many poems and hymns before I happened to read them and got a lot of lyrics wrong – either through an error on the part of the speaker or being half asleep myself, in a warm corner, after dinner. There was Gladly, the Cross-eyed Bear (a classic) but also The Bomb in Gilead. We wondered why the Gilites were not more panicked by this. on the other hand, I take full responsibility for singing about “birds bursting in air” midway through the Star Spangled Banner. I had obviously been daydreaming when my first grade class learned the words. The Folk Process at Work, as U. Utah Phillips used to say.
But this post was going to be about lettuce. The raised bed by the house is always the first to be planted, thawed by the spring sun and the last to freeze come winter. We’ve had lettuce and Bulls Blood Beet Greens since April and I’m going to miss them next week, when the nighttime temperatures dip into the 20’s and stay there.
Nothing green can stay.
They also mitigate our harsh climate, parceling out the change from 10 degrees to 40 over the course of a January afternoon into smaller, gentler increments.
Some of the rocks are spectacular specimens all on their own. . .
. . . and some are simply a sturdy, not unattractive place to put your foot while weeding.
I found this beautiful pale upright while digging a carrot bed. It has taken a few years of wind and weather to expose its true colors.
Heath and heather require top-notch drainage. In this climate it’s not even the cold that kills these plants, it is wet roots and layers of clay. I dig a fairly deep hole (2′ for a 4″ pot) and fill it with large rocks and sand before planting a member of this family in a peaty hollow at the surface. My oldest plants have survived 15 winters here and thrived.
This rock isn’t really visible in the summer, hedged in by daylilies and Bouncing Bet. In this season it’s sculpture.