Here we go, we are now in December and Winter is knocking at the windows asking to get started. We have had a few frosts now and the pond has started to ice over. Yes the cold is coming and next week is set to be really quite cold, there is talk of pre-Christmas snow.
I was having one of those flippant, glib twitter conversations the other day that started out talking about tiny trolls and turned into a comparison of my garden and Mordor (by me I hasten to add). The conversation wandered into hobbit houses and Tolkien-gardening and trailed away; but the thought stayed with me, a seed had been set. I think many people know I am a bit of a a Doctor Who fan, in fact quite nerdy in general, I was going to say that before Doctor Who there was Tolkien, but actually I started watching Doctor Who from before I can remember, but I do remember reading the Hobbit when I was about seven years old. I then moved on to The Lord of the Rings a couple of years later and then reading just about anything else I could find by him including Leaf by Niggle a short but beautifully crafted story and one I still love. I am not going to go into the plot as it is a short story so any plot hints would be pretty much the whole tale, needless to say it involves a leaf, trees and a love of nature.
Back to the point though, in Winter my garden loses much of its colour, it freezes solid for days on end and becomes pretty inhospitable. Well, compared to how it is in the summer it does anyway. This is largely (no, totally) my choice. I do not have a large amount of evergreens in my garden. Very few in fact, in fact as I think about it I can think of one deliberate shrub and one refusing to be killed laurel. Oh and the garrya, I keep forgetting about the garrya, and the mahonia, I forgot about that too, so actually more evergreens than I realize but still not that many. I rely very much on the Spring flowers to bring the color back to the garden and I rather like this deliberate die-back and rebirth of the garden every year. I know we are all supposed to aim for all-round colour, but I like the change. It does mean I embrace every tiny bit of color I have though, I treasure it like it is going out of style (which, in Winter, it is). On good days I skip around the garden pretending it is Lothlorien or Rivendell and on less good days I stomp around doing a fair impression of an Orc. Though even on the less good days after initial Orc-impressions I quickly settle down to Lothlorien skipping as the garden can calm the worst of moods.
Quite frequently I can be found standing in the middle of the garden doing the pocket-patting dance as I search for which pocket I put my garden-knife in often muttering 'what has she got in her pocketsesss'. Yet strangely the one bit of the garden named from a book is not from Tolkien at all, but from C S Lewis and the Narnia books, my beloved Dancing Lawn. Maybe I should have Tolkien-themed area, I shall have to give this some thought. It will not be a hobbit-hole I promise you that, it is more likely to be a Tom Bombadil reference. I shall ponder this, names always follow the place as the place happens first and tells me its name. Well, unless I| think of a good name first of course.....
