[I sent this email yesterday but it ended up as spam for most subscribers. I figured out why and it should be stable now. If you did get it, just delete this one.]
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On Monday I was at my son’s school when a kid approached me with a riddle.
“Imagine you’re in a room with no doors and no windows. How do you escape?”
These type of jokey riddles from kids seem so solvable. But there’s never enough time because they’re looking right at you, dying to say the answer. Hold on…
And then she shouts, “Stop imagining things!”
A yard can be like that room. Get invested enough—trapped—and you can spend endless hours imagining what to add, subtract, and move. Imagining how it will look in a decade. Picturing a warmer season, when you’ll be in a t-shirt taking photos of a bee at sunset. For me, the yard riddle takes over about now, at the end of winter. I visit nurseries, read catalogs, stare out the window (at single plants, willing them to grow), and I make a lot of sketches, searching for answers.
Then a little voice says, stop imagining things. And you have to get to work. Luckily, that’s something we can do in the Northwest in February. I’m already building a new wall, transplanting, and about to scatter seed. I know that in a lot of places that’s impossible, and I don’t take for granted our temperate climate.
I introduced Useful Yard one year ago, to share what I was thinking and doing outside. I have many more projects to show, plant profiles to post, and book reviews to write. There’s a few things I’m especially looking forward to this year, and I’ll write about them in the coming weeks. For now, thank you for subscribing.
—André