“Welcome be thou, faire fresshe May!” — Geoffrey Chaucer knew what he was about. You throw open the curtains and feels instantly that something awe-inspiring is happening, and you can’t wait to get out and be part of it all.

I’m so happy to be writing this, not least because this Substack may finally become the garden journal I threaten to keep every year and then abandon sometime around peony season. It is useful, I think, to note triumphs, disappointments, and vague future ambitions (“more pale pink, less chaos”)—otherwise it all dissolves into a sort of pastoral amnesia.

If you’d like the receipts (and I recommend keeping them), you can find the spring bulbs I planted in the autumn here:

Time To Buy Your Spring Bulbs

I like to think our garden as a series of rooms or zones with their own identity and feeling, even within a not very large footprint. Around our Amagansett house we have:

• the herbaceous perennial border (bulbs tucked between the dependable returnees) in front of the barn.

• the small but overachieving kitchen garden,

• the pool beds, which allows me to get to know my flowers from below,

• the magnolia corner, beneath which the ferns multiply,

• the back stone path, lined with daffodils acting as a sort of floral receiving line,

• four raised beds (future herb garden; currently filled with Spring flowers),

• the deck bed (formerly lavender, now given over entirely to Sweet Peas),

• and, beyond the rose covered fence, there is a side lawn with its hedge, and a boxwood path

• The front yard, with it’s formerly sparse Privet Hedge, which I’m nursing back to health, lilac bushes and a cheery daffodil welcoming committee.

Let’s begin with the daffodils, some of whom are now taking their leave. I have employed my most enthusiastic deadheader—Jack. There is, admittedly, something very satisfying about that little snap.

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February is the month when gardening is conducted almost entirely in the mind. All vision, no mud.

I look out over snow, bare beds, wind-bent grasses—the garden reduced to bones— and feel confident that I now understand everything. This feeling will pass by June.

One of my very favorite things to do in the world is to plop down on the sofa on a Saturday morning, coffee steaming nearby, a pile of gardening books. When I’m craving inspiration beyond the Instagram scroll, these are where I go.

Below is a selection of books I return to year after year—guides, companions, transporters, and comforters. I hope you find a spark in their pages. And if you haven’t renewed your library card lately, consider this your gentle nudge.

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I spent the morning on my knees in the garden, tucking cloves of garlic into the cold soil. The air smelled of leaf rot and the sea. Around me, the kitchen garden bed was mostly bare apart from a row of cabbages and kale, the herbaceous border browning, dotted by a few lone dahlias. It’s the season for faith — you bury things and trust they’ll remember you come spring.

Garlic and Spring bulb planting (Julio, my garden guru, insists we shouldn’t take on the Spring bulbs until he cuts back the border), is the last big event in a gardener’s calendar. You dig in November, in the wind, with numb fingers, while most of the plants around you have given up. You plant precisely when social life is amping up for the holidays, Instagram is telling you to shop, and the expensive tickets to the Nutcracker are waiting in you cart. You press pause on it all for garlic, which rewards only patience and cold earth. It’s the perfect counterpoint to modern life.

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I’ve been posting a lot this week, maybe too much, but so many of my ideas won’t keep. And one can’t be expected to ration enthusiasm when the garden is bursting. So here, before it fades, is our peak autumn garden—my favorite new phase, I think. The boarders have gone from polite and tidy to a kind of golden bacchanal. The yellow Swamp Sunflowers have gone slightly mad, yellow faces everywhere, elbowing their way past the purples, pinks, and browns (telling me to get serious.) It’s wild and windswept, growing in all directions, tangling and toppling, reminding me that perfection is best left to catalogues.

Everything feels on the verge of collapse in the best possible way—the plants, and my self-control when it comes to taking pictures.

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Pierre-Joseph Redouté, Tulips and roses, 1811, watercolor on vellum

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