A garden which grows true to its own laws is not a wilderness, yet not entirely artificial either.

— From A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander.

Here it is the end of another snow-bound weekend. I’m happy to report that I have never experienced “cabin fever.” It was such a relief to be prohibited from going out. For starters, my car door was frozen shut and the main road looked a bit treacherous anyway. Hurray! I spent an entire day puttering around and throwing away useless stuff. Honestly, how can a person acquire so many belongings?

I listen to A Prairie Home Companion every week. Garrison Keillor cracks me up. This past weekend he gave some advice concerning the snow storm. He cautioned against taking photographs in case one needs to adjust the story for retelling.

Dirty Joe was a crow and a friend of my father’s when he was a child. When my father was nine years old he took an egg from a crow’s nest, hatched it, then raised Dirty Joe to be his pet. My dad would feed him cereal to give him strength when young, and kept him inside a cardboard box until Dirty Joe could fly and fend for himself. When that day came Dirty Joe would sleep outside in a tree while my father left his window open on the second floor of his family’s farmhouse in Chilmark. My father had no alarm clock then.

As soon as we pass the first of February I am into a new garden year. The light has noticeably changed and the sun is getting stronger every day.

As promised last week, I did some reading about Heavenly Bamboo. For starters, there is no relationship with what we know as bamboo. It is from an entirely different family, Nandina domestica. It is very common in the Pacific northwest. The semi-evergreen mid-sized shrub is pink in the spring, light green in the summer with large clusters of white blossoms and a lovely bronze purple with red berries in the fall and early winter.