Excerpt from The Rural Life by Verlyn Klinkenborg, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

On the way back to the house, I stopped to clean out the winter entrance to the beehive with my pocketknife. The beehive stands beside a white steppe that will be a vegetable garden one of these days, when April comes and the soil is black and fragrant once more. Yet there's no better day to plan a garden than this one. The landscape has a purity it will lose when the snow melts. The geometry of each bed is perfect at this moment, if hidden.

One mail-order plant catalog is folded open to its pulmonarias. I've dog-eared another where the hostas begin, and in another, from North Carolina, I've marked every plant that could grow in this zone, while lamenting the crinums and kniphofias that won't. Dirr's Hardy Trees and Shrubs lies open on the desk beside The National Arboretum Book of Outstanding Garden Plants, sources of inspiration and depression. Latin names skim across my thoughts like water boatmen on a summer pond— Tradescantia, Helleborus, Cryptomeria, Epimedium. But by afternoon, designs have begun to tangle, and the list of plants is far too long. The only sensible plan I can think of is this one: I'll walk outside with a stick and draw my gardens in the whiteness, echinops here, ligularia over there, a Japanese pieris by this corner. Then I'll sit by the fire while the snow falls, watch them all disappear, and start over again in the morning.


Last year it rained all summer. Most of the garden languished, but not the potatoes, which love water. I hilled them twice with compost, and by late August each of the potato beds was a tangle of vegetative sprawl, a mass of deeply dissected leaves and contorted stems. No harvest is quite as satisfying as a good potato harvest. The tubers always come as a surprise, patroonlike and globular in their tight jackets. The vines make a substantial heap, and when harvest is over the ground is suddenly bare and freshly dug, open to almost anything next spring except tomatoes or more potatoes, which might pick up diseases from last year's crop. When I carried the baskets to the house I tried to guess their weight, but the only measure that came to mind was a ton.

I took a potato out of the storage closet this past week and noticed that many of the spuds on the rack had begun to sprout in the cool darkness. On the purple fingerlings there were only small buds, barely noticeable, but on some of the russets and plain white boiling potatoes whose exact variety I can no longer recall, the sprouts had truly begun to rise — about an inch long, pale as potato flesh, already weakly chitted, to use that strange old word.

If the ground had been soft, I could have cut them into sections, an eye apiece, and planted them. And if I had been counting on those potatoes to see me through the winter, the sprouts would have been a dismal sight, a sign that the potatoes would wilt before long and that hunger wasn't far away. It seems like such an insistent gesture, to throw up sprouts in the darkness of a ventilated closet that once held a small oil furnace, with thawed ground so far off in the calendar. Most gardeners are trying to temper just that insistence in themselves right about now, to honor the heart of winter for not being the shank of spring. I know I'm ready to sprout in the cool midwinter darkness. Snow is still falling on the garden, blanching the uppermost leaves of the leeks still in the ground. I look at the cherry tree I planted last spring in a corner of the garden and the memory seems very distant.

The ruins of the garden are still just visible above the snow — the tomato cages I forgot to pick up, a single stake from the pea trellis, the bare rose spines, the denuded Japanese maple, and, under the hemlocks, a surprisingly stout spire of Cimicifuga. I wake up in the middle of the night and begin to take inventory of the things I plan to do once the snow melts away and the ground begins to soften. Then I remember it's January, a month when only the potatoes are optimistic about warmer weather.

This is a complete excerpt of the chapter entitled 'January' from The Rural Life by Verlyn Klinkenborg. Copyright 2003 © by Verlyn Klinkenborg. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission from the publisher, Little, Brown & Co.