A New Year in the Garden of Good and Weevil

The term winter gardening sounds like an oxymoron. A garden's usually a dismal sight in winter, with its exburant greens, yellows and reds all withered to fetid brown or funereal grey. It's the cadaver of summer left uninterred.

At least that's how a gardener in southern Michigan feels until the January thaw seeps in. It brings a tantalizing respite, a fool's gold glimpse of spring even if it only lasts a day or two. This year it jumped the gun and showed up on New Year's Eve. By 8 a.m. the next day, the thermometer outside our kitchen window read 42 degrees Fahrenheit -- and would climb to a sunny 53 by day's end.

Most spring-like of all was the wind: fresh, bright, clean and alive with all the unsullied hopes of a new year. It drove away my early winter doldrums, not to mention the scrum line of minor litter (school papers, junk mail/junk food wrappers) that emanate from our van's driveway parking space.

A few bits of trash blew downwind to the garden, which is where I noticed an oasis-like patch of true green. It wasn't a complete surprise. I'd planted a row of turnip and carrot seeds in late August and planned to harvest them by Thanksgiving. It had simply turned too cold, too fast in December for me to do that. Since I neglected to cover them with leaf mulch, I assumed they'd be turned to mush.

Yet with the snow melted, the hearty turnips came eagerly from the soft soil. And what a cheery sight they were: softball-sized globes of firm flesh, with purple flanks and baseball-white undersides. Even so, I'm a recent turnip convert. As root crops, they've got a Russian babushka with chin-whisker image that took me awhile to overcome. Now, I'm hooked. Turnips are a zesty substitute for potatoes when diced for soup and make great "carrot sticks" when sliced lengthwise.

As for the carrots, they were still babies: three inches long, not much bigger around than a fat pencil. But they weren't the bogus "baby carrots" sold in stores. Those are simply big (and tasteless) clunkers that some machine has whittled down to finger size. No, these little fellas were crisp, sweet, tangy -- a delicacy almost too pretty to eat. Almost.

The wind died down later and there was just enough daylight for a late afternoon walk. And, for another incantation of January-thaw mojo. Halfway into my walk, I spotted a rather curious onion by the road, where a snowbank had been. Then another and another until I realized ... they weren't onions. They were flower bulbs. Dozens and dozens of them. Gladiolus, to be precise. I stuffed my windbreaker's pockets until I looked a squirrel with his mouth full of acorns.

It's a mystery that's easily enough explained. There's a gladiolus mail-order house nearby and last summer they farmed a 60-acre field just south of our place. In July, it was awash in a pastel tide of salmon, lavender, raging pink and purple. Then for two weeks in October, an endless convoy of tractors and farm wagons heaped with bulbs rumbled past. Enough excess bounty must have fallen off to turn my garden-variety walk into a cheapskate's treasure hunt.

The next day being Sunday, the church celebrated the Feast of the Epiphany. It's an old Greek word that means manifestation, as in when the gods and godesses made their fearful presence known to mortals. Of course it's presents that we know Epiphany for today, to recall those brought by three Iranian astrologers to a God-child Bethlehem.

Alas that observance has become a forgotten footnote to the cash-register Christmas, which rings in not the holy days but a feast of the marketplace that ends -- instead of begins -- on December 25. By time the seers' dusty camels arrive, we've already stashed our decorations in the attic and hauled the shiny paper to a landfill.

During the priest's homily on Epiphany, my mind wandered (sorry, padre) back to my unexpected gifts from the day before. The carrots, little flowers to be enjoyed at once, orange slivers of instant happiness. The turnips, honest and enduring, could last until real spring if stored in a root cellar or refrigerator. And the gladiolus? The gardening books say my gleaned bulbs won't make it; they should've been dug, dried and stored in a dry place after Halloween.

We'll see. I've seen the pulse of life turn-up where we least expect it. If a dormant garden can still share its gifts in January, why couldn't an orphaned flower bulb find a reason to resurrect in April? Epiphanies aren't just for guys in pointy hats.