To look at the garden now you would think it was dead and lifeless. We are accustomed to thinking of plants as if their being was embodied in their green and growing leaves. But it isn’t so, not really. The life of plants is in the root, not in the flesh.
In perennial plants, like the asparagus in the Cedar Ridge garden, the green flesh that we see (that we eat!) dies away every year. Every leaf will wither, dry up, and fall away in autumn. If you go looking for green life now in our asparagus patch – or anywhere else in the garden – you will be tricked into thinking you are looking at dead ground, because there is nothing but bare soil and brown woody stems. But bare ground means death only if green flesh is the definition of life. The true life in a garden is the hidden kind, the muddy kind, the deep and digging kind: the living root of a perennial plant. The green stuff we see is expendable, seasonal, and fragile.
In April, green will leap out everywhere. Every tree and bush will cover itself in leaf. But the truth will still hold – the real life, the real business of being a plant, remains at the root, hidden, dark and mysterious. This sort of life does not die, it merely goes underground, only to arise again in the warmth and light of an April morning.