My Perfect January Garden

I can tell it’s January because . . . the garden catalogs are appearing in my mailbox! They begin arriving in December, but I don’t allow myself to look at them until New Year’s Day. Then I settle in with a glass of eggnog, a highlighter, and the newest catalogs.

How beautiful they are! Page after page of flowers in every color, gorgeous plants grown to perfection and blooming profusely, breathtaking vistas of color and form. Here there is no drought, no insect damage, no lack of sun or shade, no fungus or viral disease, no wind or hail damage . . . here the garden is perfection.

And this year my garden will look like that!!!

I’ll grow buddleia . . . great purple bush-sized masses of them, the summer lilacs I gaped at in Washington DC last July. Never mind that they die back to the ground each winter here in zone 5b. I’ll find a way around that.

I’ll grow roses . . . glorious, sweetly scented old roses and delicate tea roses. Never mind that they require full sun, and I live on the edge of a forest. Never mind that roses are subject to fungus problems, and I live on a very accurately named Marsh Road. I’ll get around that.

I’ll grow blue hydrangea . . . huge bushes of them, as tall as my front door, like the ones I admire so much in England. Never mind that they bloom on old wood and aren’t really bud-hardy here. Never mind that they require acidic soil, and mine is stubbornly neutral. I’ll deal with that.

And besides all that, I’ll have no difficulty with garden pests. Deer, groundhogs, and squirrels will not enter my garden. I won’t have insect problems. Bumblebees will visit my garden, and Japanese beetles and grubs will avoid it. No invasive weeds will sprout here. It will be an oasis of calm beauty.

My garden is always at its best in January.