December
The old woman sat silently by the window. She peered with tired eyes at the remains of her dry-husk garden in the fading light, then on to the shadowy silhouettes of trees and shrubs at the far reaches of her yard, into the narrow strip of woods and beyond, where the distant windows of another house glimmered warmly, illuminated from within. Looming above it all was the dark bluish-gray mass of the ridge, covered in bare trees that stood like bristling hair on the back of an enormous animal. The old woman had not yet turned on the lights in the room, and as she sat motionless in the old wooden rocker she was half lit by the waning light coming through the window from the evening sky. The sun had only recently set and the horizon glowed faintly orange. A few purple-gray clouds were suspended low in the sky, long floating pillows of smoke edged on the bottom in dusky red. Her hands were folded on her lap, bony knuckles and the undulating traces of prominent veins cast in soft relief by the last pale twilight at the end of the day.
She thought of autumn and how quickly it had passed. The brilliant colors of the leaves were there one day and seemingly gone the next. She thought then of her husband, how he would be out in the yard raking up the last of the fallen leaves on a day like this, even as the light faded and the night came on, and she would be calling him in to supper right about now. She thought of all the years they spent together and of the children they raised and then it was summertime again in her mind. She saw her husband young and handsome again and the family was at the lake, and he had their son out in the boat and he was showing the boy how to fish. She was on the shore with their little daughter who was very young, barely able to walk on her own. She and the girl were playing in the fresh green grass and picking clover flowers for a tiny bouquet and on one of the flowers a little black ball of a beetle scurried along a petal's edge. She showed it to the girl whose eyes widened in childish wonder. So long ago. Then it was springtime in the old woman's mind and she was a little girl again herself. She was walking with her mother down Satterlee Street to her grandmother's house to visit on Easter morning and she was looking down the narrow lane with the blush of spring green lining either side. Just then a cottontail rabbit hopped across the road and her mother stopped and put out a gentle hand to hold her daughter still and said, "Well isn't that the perfect thing to see on Easter morning!" The young girl watched the rabbit until it disappeared, and then she turned her smiling child face up to look at her mother. Her mother was looking down at her, beaming with all the love there ever was in the world.
It was nearly dark now. Movement out in the yard caught the old woman's eye and she watched as three deer, a doe with two young ones, glided past the darkened window and disappeared into the darkness beyond her sight. The old woman called herself back from the past and left behind the spring and summer and autumn memories, returning to the reality of a chilly December evening that had just given itself over to the fall of night. "So it goes," she thought. "Round and round and round. It gets wearisome after a while. How nice it would be to be one of those creatures that crawls off to sleep when the winter cold comes, and doesn’t wake up again until springtime! The winter lasts so long, and the rest of it goes by so fast." She sighed, then noticed the first star blinking in the sky beyond the blackened ridge.
As December begins the viewing season in the bonsai garden is officially over. The last of the display trees were taken off the benches the final week of November, and the sense of emptiness that prevails in that place now is hard to deny. That feeling of bittersweet ending is part and parcel of December. The twelfth month is the last stop on the line, the final scene of the movie after the climax is over and just before the closing credits roll across the screen. We enjoyed a wonderful autumn color season in the bonsai garden this year but now that is behind us. Most of the bonsai that spent the growing season being admired out in the garden are currently tucked away in the walk-in refrigerator, down in the pavilion basement. They are chilling out at a steady 38 degrees Fahrenheit and the public will not see them again until next May. Those temperate plants that are not stored in the cooler will spend winter in the hoop house, which is now covered in a protective layer of white polypropylene. For people who want to view green and growing bonsai in the next five or six months, a small display of tropical specimens can be seen in the Baker Exhibit Center greenhouse.
December used to be the beginning of a slower time in our bonsai operation, but no more. As the collection has grown, and particularly as the specimens in the collection have grown in quality, the workload has increased to the point where there is always more to do than there is time to do it. More labor is involved in the upkeep of well developed bonsai than is needed in maintaining younger, less developed trees. The bonsai in the Arboretum's collection are better now than they were ten or twenty years ago, so just keeping up with them from a maintenance standpoint takes more time.
Additionally there are tasks, many clerical in nature, that are out of necessity put aside during the growing season, and during winter months we try catch up with these. We no longer need to spend hours every day watering, but that time will be taken up instead with other stimulating work. For example, it will be good to clean and organize our various work and storage spaces, take inventory and order the supplies we've needed since August.
Most importantly, winter is when refinement work takes place on specimen trees and major developmental work is done with those in training. To do a complete wiring job on a large bonsai might take twenty hours or more, and giving any one tree that much time during the growing season is impossible for us. We have dozens of trees that need wiring and as December begins that work is already underway. We also have numerous trees that are in some stage of training to become bonsai, and for the last half year they have been getting little attention beyond watering and an occasional coarse pruning to keep them under control. Now they get their turn in the spotlight that is attached to the workbench. The transformations are sometimes dramatic, and I hope to share a few of them with you in the months ahead.
Just as there is plenty to do with the collection at this time of year, there is no shortage of work in the bonsai garden. The display trees are gone and the benches are empty, the flowers are done and the deciduous trees and shrubs are bare, but the garden is still open and the work to maintain and improve it goes on. First comes cleanup; cutting down the remains of herbaceous growth and gathering up piles of spent leaves. December's toil sets the stage for all that must be done in the next few months to prepare for another year of beauty and abundance. During the growing season no effort is spared to keep the garden looking lovely, and during the dormant season the goal is just the same. It is a different sort of lovely than you might find in May or July, but those of us who appreciate living in a temperate zone find serenity in its structural simplicity.
We are now on the last page of the calendar; December is the end. The end is prologue to the beginning.
For your viewing pleasure, a gallery of images from the last month of the viewing season, in chronological order (click on any image for full view):
