Cranberry Orange Scones
Snow as a blank canvas for ideas. Making peace with ground hogs. Recipe for Cranberry Scones.
Light snow is falling outside the window, covering a thick crust of ice beneath. Filling the bird feeder requires ice grips and ski poles for balance. My pencil hovers over a large piece of graph paper, preparing to draw out my kitchen garden design scheme. It’s been almost 20 years with this same garden, but where do I start?
Creating an artful design on paper during mid-winter with a white canvas of snow differs from a wide-open window with a fresh spring breeze. I need inspiration. I turn to my garden books. Five shelves of well-worn books began with my first book, Making Things Grow by Thalassa Cruso. A gift from my mother for my sixteenth birthday, when she noticed I was tending a newly acquired Jade plant.
That Jade plant (Crassula ovata) came with me to college, accompanied me to Vermont as a newlywed, and many decades later, its offspring have passed along to friends and family from tiny cuttings from the original. That one small plant, (and that first gifted book) along with the dozens of gardening books acquired along the way, have influenced my lifelong passion as a gardener and a designer.
Gazing thru my frosted windows, I return to the basics: my four-square parterre. It is fairly easy to sketch out on paper and I'll use tracing paper to overlay variations of edible plants. While change is never easy, moving things around in the garden gives me a new perspective. It is time spent dreaming, without forcing a decision about what to plant and where. Quite honestly, winter is when I feel most creative.
“Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.”
— May Sarton
Perspective is everything. Yesterday was Ground Hog Day, and I read an article in the New York Times about the social habits of the popular but often misunderstood, animal. Learning to share my garden with a groundhog required taking this closer look at the habits and habitat to shift my perspective from annoyance to beauty. Who could not love an animal with fur so meticulously groomed and glossy, with eyes that meet yours directly when facing danger, and moves with grace and defiance slowly away from its favorite source of food?
I am reminded that reading and learning more deeply about things I find annoying in my garden (i.e. deer, rabbits, groundhogs) or prefer not to get too near ( i.e. spiders, bats, and stink bugs) opens me up to appreciation. As knowledge builds, so do curiosity and generosity. Why not welcome groundhogs to graze in my garden? Like inviting friends for an impromptu dinner, I’ll just plant extra and hope that there is enough to go around.
Recipe:
If it’s snowing where you are, bake a batch of my Cranberry Orange Scones along with a pot of Earl Gray tea. Then settle back into the sofa with your seed catalogs.
