Out in the cold, damp garden, I have been holding my nerve and not cutting things back. Just this week, I’ve snipped a few old stems above the primroses getting ready to flower – and indeed flowering already. I am seeing how long I can sit on my hands and wait as things flop under frost and rain, thinking of the life held in piles of leaves, and the hollow stems of perennials.

Where I have cut back, I have left things in piles near where they grew, giving time for the things that live there to move before I compost them.

As I have left this old growth, and quietened the voice in my head reproving me for untidiness, I’ve noticed real beauty in these seedheads, and fading leaves and flowers, and an increase in the hum of aliveness I’m noticing in the garden.

Even moving a few leaves to clear space for primroses has revealed fat caterpillars, and many tiny creatures unknown to me. There is beauty here, too. All this decay from last year is full of life, full of what will be needed by the bluetits investigating the nest box, the blackbirds turning over leaves.

Winter seedheads

I’ve left it wild – left seedheads
and leaves – and the leaves
lie piled up in heaps in borders,
against fences, swept from paths.

And I find I love the colours of
the fading aster leaves,
colours I have not seen before,
new to my eyes, uncut as they are.
And the pale seedheads – like stars –
of the alliums, and the dark eyes of
rudbeckia, how they sway together
as the wind whips round, mingling,
full, and darkly shimmering.

I watch the birds as they eat
red berries  – dark holly,
the vivid bright cotoneaster,
as the squirrels lope inquiringly
over the lawn, looking for what
they buried.

There is so much life in
the few brief hours of daylight,
while the night lingers in the
sharp musk of fox,
the delicate deer paths
deepening in the soft earth.
And I feel how precious this space is,

How, now it is cold, the garden is
sanctuary to many more than me.
And I love to be host to such guests.
There is much joy in noticing
their need, and in opening my hand
to offer what they lack, quietly,
invisibly.

Even now, in the darkest days
life stirs, life comes through
the slick dripping trees,
through frost and fog,
and finds shelter here,
and makes a home.