Navigating the Uncertainties of Gardening in a Changing Climate

Freelance writer Daryln Brewer Hoffstot shares her personal experiences and contemplations on gardening as winter fades into spring. With thoughts on wildlife, gardening practices, and the impact of climate change, she questions the feasibility of cultivating a vibrant garden in ever-changing conditions.

The silent season is drawing to a close. All winter, there was little birdsong to lift my heart. The occasional caw of a crow, the chickadee-dee-dee of a chickadee, the big song of the little Carolina wren that now stays on our Pennsylvania farm all winter. But no courtship call of great horned owls, no wood thrush or Baltimore oriole. Still, I rejoiced in the music that remained.

I just heard the first notes of our first returning songbird, though, a red-winged blackbird, and the snowdrops have begun to poke out of the ground. The other day, I moved last fall’s potted tulips and hyacinth from the unheated side of the barn to the warmth of the garden room to force their blooms. But the vegetable garden is an icy mud puddle and the flower beds, still mulched with shredded leaves, show little signs of life. Boxwood is covered in burlap, and snow fence is draped around trees and shrubs to prevent deer from devouring them. Those deer, which have changed from the color of milk chocolate to dark, break through our makeshift deterrents anyway and eat the yew, euonymus, arborvitae, and this winter, even the holly. Squirrels race around adding to their larders, but the chipmunks are nowhere to be seen yet. They’re in their dens I suppose, as are the opossum, raccoons, and the bears, too.

Once I longed for a greenhouse, but now I, too, wish to hibernate in winter, to take time off from sowing, potting, and nurturing. To walk in snowy woods and observe animal tracks, study ice patterns on the pond, to be one with the season. I want to read by the fire and peruse garden catalogs, imagining what next year’s garden will be like, expecting, as all gardeners do, that next year will be better than the last. As Vita Sackville-West wrote in her poem “The Garden”: The gardener dreams of his special own alloy of possible and impossible. But what is possible anymore? As I reflect on last year’s abysmal season, I wonder how I will adapt to the changes I witness.