Ice, Onions, and Odd Truths from the Garden of Wit

December 3, 2019

On this day, as the last golden asters bow their heads to frost and the dahlias surrender to the shortening light, I find myself thinking about balance—how nature, ever the great equalizer, deals its hand without preference or prejudice.

The garden is no respecter of titles or fortunes; it gives and takes in equal measure. It is, in truth, a mirror of the world itself.

“There are many in this old world of ours who hold that things break about even for all of us.

I have observed, for example, that we all get the same amount of ice.

The rich get it in the summertime, and the poor get it in the winter.”

Bat Masterson, whose own name blooms eternally upon a handsome daylily, understood this equilibrium long before meteorologists and meteorites concerned themselves with predicting the whims of the weather.

How right he was!

A gardener knows the truth of it deeply: we are all recipients of some form of ice. Whether it comes as the cruel frost that bites tender leaves or the glittering crystals that turn a dreary winter into a jeweled wonderland, ice visits us all.

The question, as always, is not whether but how we greet it.

There is a peculiar democracy to gardening—roses do not defer to riches, nor weeds shrink from poverty.

Soil accepts every hand that tills it, every seed entrusted to its care.

And yet, how differently we each meet its challenges. Some complain of excessive heat; others mourn frost-killed buds.

But taken together, it all comes to even—summer or winter, fortune or frost, ice comes for everyone, and grace lies in learning to take our turn at the chill as well as the bloom.

"An onion can make people cry, but there's never been a vegetable that can make people laugh.”

Ah, dear Will Rogers—ever the humorist, and yet his words ring true in the compost of reflection.

For isn’t that the gardener’s plight as well?

We tear up over the failures of a crop, the rot of a root, or the vanishing of a beloved bloom—but laughter, like the onion’s perfume, proves elusive in the vegetable plot.

Still, I think if he had stood among the sweet peas or watched a squirrel abscond with a tulip bulb, he might have amended his thinking.

Gardens, in their chaos and resilience, do make us laugh—eventually—when the sting of frost and onion-tears is past.

So let us brave both ice and onion with equal elegance. After all, the frost’s fair dealings remind us that beauty and hardship are fellow travelers in every gardener’s life.

And if laughter is rare among vegetables, perhaps it is we gardeners—mud-streaked, stooping, and stubborn—who must supply it.

From frost to fragrance, all things break about even in the end.