Author: Will Balk, Jr.

  This old farmhouse, nestled among still-working farm fields and great swaths of hardwoods and pines, brought with it a disheveled collection of farm structures, tumbling fences with missing unpainted pickets, and two centuries of accumulated rusty nails, corroded plowshares, and assorted bottles of questionable medicinal origin.

  Everywhere you turn, there’s another sign of Spring’s impending arrival: sneaky peeks at emerging new foliage; buds on trees and shrubs; even some flowers have started to blow.

  Winter is only one-third gone, and the past assures us that its most dramatic weather likely won’t hit us until February or March.

Newcomers to the Lowcountry are sometimes astounded at the beauty to be found in our gardens and woodlands in the depth of winter. We binyahs* sometimes forget just how lucky we are to have such a rich variety of winter-flowering garden plants at our disposal for use in the garden.

If you have any sense at all (as my mother used to say), you would never take a good long look at Spanish Moss, that great ghostly symbol of the Deep South, and have images of sweet Hawaiian fruit or brilliant-flowered house plants pop into your mind. That’s just crazy.  

  Who would have thought that we nice, quiet gardening folks would get worked up to such a furious tizzy about terribly esoteric subjects like “natives” vs “exotics?” Why, we even fight over the definitions! But get us started on whether we are threatening the earth when Lowcountry gardeners plant Lilium auratum instead of Lilium superbum (left), and you’d better be ready to choose sides.

A Crazed Rant It’s an internet meme that keeps popping up in my Facebook feed, one which clearly touches a nerve with lots of people. It is accompanied by a dramatically beautiful photograph of the tree in rampant bloom, all forty varieties of fruit in stunning pinks and reds and purples and whites blooming wildly on a single large tree.

It’s hard to imagine now, but when I was a kid just about the only people to encounter a wild turkey were lucky hunters in some South Carolina national forests. The first time I saw a real live wild turkey was in my twenties as I looked out my window on a train speeding through the Salkehatchie swamp.

During one of my periodic compulsive explorations, searching out every bit of information I can track down about some new area of horticulture I don’t know enough about, I expended many gallons of gasoline and trekked many miles of asphalt and dirt roads around the southeastern U.S. coastal states in search of the then-elusive crinum.

Like many another scion of Celtic forebears, I celebrate the arrival of the Winter Solstice; like many another gardener, I rejoice in the coming of the coldest, darkest days of the year. To be sure, I complain about the cold, lament the lack of sunlight, and crave the warm sunny days of summer still to come.