an excerpt from the Second Nature by Michael Pollan (1991)

Winter in the garden is the season of speculation, a time when the snow on the ground is an empty canvas that invites the idle planting and replanting of countless hypothetical gardens between now and spring thaw. A season of speculation in the Wall Street sense too, for now is when large wagers of gardening time and space are made on the basis of mere scrap of informa-tion - a hankering, a picture in a catalog, a seed. We gardeners have always had trouble heeding Henry Ward Beecher’s sound nineteenth-century advice, that we not be "made wild by pompous catalogs from florists and seedsmen".

In a few months, summer will pass judgment on the merit, or folly, od our January schemes, but right now anything is possible. The winter garden is an abstract, earthless place where only representations bloom - the season’s lists and sketches and catalogs and seeds (which are of course nature’s own representations). Insubstantial as these seem, they are in fact as vital to the summer garden as water and humus and sunlight. For it’s the gardener’s traffic in such signifiers that, not unlike the traffic of bumblebees in summer, rejuvenates the garden, importing the fresh genes and novel combinations that each year make it new.