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By Donna LaPre
Rappahannock News Writer
When bulb planting, cutting back, dividing and cleaning is done for the season, there’s little direct garden work left to do. Even with a winter vegetable garden, not much maintenance is needed. What a perfect opportunity to engage in another sort of winter gardening, which is full of “R’s”: resting, reading, reviewing •and re-visioning. 1 Over the course of the next few months, this column will inspire you, hopefully, with some different ideas and resources, intended to expand your gardening boundaries and leave you with a fresh perspective to begin the garden cycle again next year.
When in need of inspiration, I love books and magazines full of wonderful pictures, but the first place I turn for “how to” is nature. Here, if I can open my mind and eyes, a whole living book of information and solutions is spread open before me. All it takes is patient, careful observation, time and willingness to read the book.
Consider that much gardening is based upon the premise of control and order, rules and beliefs contrived by humans. Not less than few people would probably define their gardens as “natural”, yet these cultivated areas hardly resemble in appearance and arrangement nature’s own masterful and fecund way with the earth.
It’s not quite possible to garden without changing nature’s arrangements in some degree, because to garden is to cultivate. My favorite definition of “natural” is: faithfully representing nature or life, which implies working with nature and learning from it as a guiding principle.
Recently it’s been discovered that indigenous peoples from Indonesia and South America anthropologists supposed to have been hunter-jr.atherers were actually agriculturists!
Their agricultural systems so resembled the surrounding forests as to be nearly indistinguishable from them. Ethnobotanists, have discovered evidence of intentional plantings of food crops which mimicked growth habits and patterns of native forests.
The Papago Indians of Arizona live in arid land, yet
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