Cycles of Sheltering In Place

Early spring is the perfect time to move many of the perennials in the Temple Garden.   In garden-speak, a perennial is a relative term that describes any plant that survives the winter where it happens to be. The trees and woody shrubs are perennials that shelter in place. With the autumn freezes, they carefully drop their leaves and their bare branches hold tightly bound buds through the winter cold. Even more amazing are the plants that fully die back each year. In autumn, the leaves fully fall away. The plant gives up any intention of gathering light and retreats to the safety of subterranean dark and cold. Walking through a winter garden, these perennials are perfectly invisible.

I suppose we humans enact this cycle of dying back and rising every day. Each night we fall unconsciousness and lie mostly motionless, only to wake and rise when the light comes back. It’s like we too are dependent on the messages of light. We’re all energizer bunnies that run out of our charge when the sun goes down. We all stop and collapse, only to rise in the morning as if nothing had happened. The plants, who don’t make such a big fuss about this daily alternation of light and dark, must wonder about our frailty. Do my houseplants worry about my daily periods of lifeless behavior—afraid there will be no one to water them? Are they relieved each morning to sense me stirring and eventually walking again?

But yesterday morning, before the torrential rains of the afternoon, I moved some hay-scented fern from beside the walkway to the big pile of dirt and sticks which is my entry into the non-existent sculpture show ‘Buddhas Over Worcester.’ (More about this at another time.) Hay-scented fern is a wonderful perennial in New England that spreads by its roots. Ten years ago, I brought a few plants from our old house and planted them between the brick pathway and the western perimeter fence.

I imagined one day they would spread into a carpet of tender ferns along the pathway. Most of what I imagine for the garden does not come to pass or if it does, it is significantly different from my original plan. But, over the years, these dependable ferns have spread just as I had hoped. By June, they will be a blanket of finely cut leaves that move in the slights breeze, beautifying twenty or thirty feet along the walkway into the garden.

But right now, the ferns are small bent green wires just beginning to poke out of the ground—of no particular notice unless you remember their magic act from previous seasons. They have been sheltering in the frozen ground all winter and are have just received the message of warmth and light that signals them to re-emerge.

All of us too are waiting. We too may be feeling a little green and a little wired from so much time in our houses and apartments. We’ve been sheltering in place now for over a month.   We’re told that the virus infection rate is plateauing here in Massachusetts, but yesterday we learned that public schools will not reopen again before next fall. It’s too early to come out of our protective bubbles. But when will it be safe again? Can we continue our subterranean lives long enough for the danger to pass and the proverbial spring to appear?

Perhaps tuning into the multitude of cycles of rising and falling around and within us will give us confidence that, in time, this too shall pass.