Green thoughts in a gray landscape

During a Christmas week visit to New York, I noticed some ways city dwellers bring greenery into their surroundings. People crave vegetation. There were shrubs toughing it out in pots in the front areaways of brownstones, big planters in front of skyscrapers, window boxes, even fake vegetation, such as this plastic sheet printed to make a Brooklyn chain link fence look like a wall of ivy, 

Nice try

and this blanket of artificial turf masking a utility area on Roosevelt Island.

Something must be really unsightly

    I sure miss greenery during the shortest days. House plants help. In addition to cleaning the air and converting the carbon dioxide we exhale into extra oxygen in the house, indoor plants have many demonstrated psychological benefits. They reportedly promote calm, attentiveness and creativity and increase productivity. I’d just say they make winter less depressing and bring life to sterile man-made environments. We weren’t made to live without plants.

Houseplants remind us of greenery to come

    There’s an often-mentioned theory that the reason we surround our houses with lawns is that early humans felt safer in grasslands where they could spot approaching predators before they pounced. This strikes me as possible but completely unproveable, as are many products of the school of thought that attributes the behavior and psychology of modern-day human beings to hunter-gatherer culture earlier in our evolution.

If only he'd had a lawn!-Reconstruction by Mauricio Anton

    Now that the sabre-toothed tigers are gone, we can skip a lot of that lawn and replace it with a more diverse landscape. Even video game designers have gotten past the ubiquitous veldt, endowing their imagined landscapes with lush, region-specific vegetation. That’s what I’m hoping for in my yard. In winter, I’m glad that I planted lots of evergreen shrubs and trees that offer splashes of color in the otherwise drab view from the back of the house. They also provide shelter for wildlife, confirmed as birds pop in and out of the branches.

At least there's something in the yard that's not brown or gray

    As I survey the scene from the back windows, I’m hoping that in addition to the conifers, the thick layer of fall leaves I piled on the beds this fall is also doing good for creatures in the yard. I picture insects burrowed into the leaf litter and sleeping in the flower stalks I left standing. The theory is that lots of beneficial insects will emerge in spring ready to start their work as predators keeping leaf-eating insect populations in balance.

Beneficial lacewing prepares for winter

    Last year in late winter we went south to New Orleans, Memphis and Nashville seeking an earlier spring. We did see some green leaves, 

New Orleans has ferns that don't grow in New England

but I learned what I was really yearning for was the day-by-day unfolding of spring at home. 

     One of the pleasures of tending the same garden space over the years is adding to your store of observations about how it changes through the seasons. I know that winter doesn’t mean an end to all natural processes, they’re just happening where I can’t see them. Roots are still storing nutrients, ready to send them up into new growth in spring. Until then, I’ll crave green things.

Come back soon!