Winter's North Fork Landscape: A Living Inspiration

The winter garden may seem barren to some. Personally, I’ve come to appreciate this fallow season as a feast for the senses in its own right—an opportunity to experience and celebrate the structure and texture at work in the natural landscape around us. Beauty from a gardening point of view is not just about flowering plants or lush foliage.  A hike through any North Fork nature preserve at this time of year can be a revelation. Subtleness of palette, for one thing, can have a powerful emotional pull.  Gray is anything but monochrome or boring. Winter’s stems and branches pull our gaze upward toward sullen or powder-blue skies. There is a clarity about the winter landscape. The earth is resting and we with it, waiting for the call to grow and bloom where we are planted.