Winter Down
The first chill in the air always gives me a sobering taste of solitude. It has an edge of sadness that comes when the season starts to fade away, when the light pulls away faster each evening, and the garden feels quieter and quieter. Every year, it makes me wonder how I’m going to do in the winter. If my mental health will hold up. If next year will be better. If I’ll be okay.
By the time winter settles over Detroit, my garden beds look terrible. Frost has collapsed the last surviving flowers, the dahlia tubers have been dug, and what remains are rows of leafy mulch, stitched together with the dead plants I leave for the critters, the decomposers, and the Earth. But hardy annuals show spots of green, and beneath it all, in the places I’ve tucked them, tulips, daffodils, fritillaria, and irises rest in their cold beds. They are tired, like I am. Sometimes, I wish I could be like them and disappear underground for a while, let the microbes and mycorrhizae work their magic, and come back in the spring with a greater verve for existence.
Winter shows me that it’s okay to be quiet, but that things are not always as quiet as they look. There is more happening under the soil than I sometimes give life (and myself?) credit for.
The cold season is never really a break for me, though it should be. My days just take on a different rhythm: sorting zinnia seeds I’ve saved for generations; coaxing along lisianthus; flopping again with forcing bulbs. Mornings are for seedlings, afternoons for mapping garden beds, evenings for wedding proposals, nights for wondering whether it’s all worth it. The work shifts indoors, but it hums along just the same. More and more, I wonder if this work runs counter to what winter is supposed to mean. Part of me wants to rest and hibernate, to not always be chasing the next task. But I guess capitalism has trained me to keep going even though Nature says, “slow down”.
But the reality is that winter gives me too much time to think, and as the work slows, the doldrums set in. Winter is the season of idle hands, and that’s when I find myself scrolling through digital catalogs, allured by the promise of next year. But that temptation comes with its own problems, as many of the varieties in those pages trace back to Israeli agricultural corporations or growers operating on occupied land. Danziger, one of the world’s largest flower breeders, was founded in 1953 in Mishmar HaShiv’a, a settlement established on the depopulated Palestinian village of Bayt Dajan. From those origins, it has built a global chain of patented varieties. Their echinacea, anemones, veronica, gypsophila, and hypericum appear everywhere, from trays shipped to U.S. farms to bouquets in grocery-store buckets.
The BDS movement calls on us to boycott Israeli agricultural products: to refuse participation in an industry that profits while Palestinian people face land seizure, water cuts, grove destruction, and blocked access to their own fields. Until those who were exiled, such as my nephews’ grandmother, can return to their homelands, my resistance goes on. With this understanding, I’ve changed how I buy from suppliers and where I get them.
Flowers have seasons, and in Michigan, winter simply is not one of them. That bouquet at the grocery store in January is not “fresh”. It has been flown in, refrigerated, treated, and pushed through a long cold chain designed to keep it alive just long enough to sell. Most imported stems are dipped in fungicides to prevent mold during transit, fumigated at the border to kill pests, and stabilized with chemicals that help them survive weeks in storage. It’s sad that in certain specialty food stores, the most noxious products in the building are probably the flowers, sitting right by the produce. The refrigeration process starts at the greenhouse and ends when the bouquet lands on the shelf, which means the environmental cost of getting that flower to you is several times higher than simply growing it. Your winter flowers are more of a processed industrial product than a true seasonal offering.
For those who love flowers, winter is one of the best times to support your local farming community, even if nothing is blooming. This is when to look up nearby farms, sign up for a CSA or subscription, or pre-book flowers with seasonally-focused florists for any moments that are coming. If you are planning a wedding or big event next year, winter is when many of us decide what to plant and what we can realistically grow, so hearing from people now is so helpful. If you have the capacity, you can easily broaden that circle of care: a few dollars sent to Palestinian farmers trying to keep their groves alive, or to Native organizers in Detroit working to return land to Indigenous stewardship. These small moves add up, and they help carry communities through the cold months. They also remind me that care often happens quietly, which is a lesson I’ve learned in Detroit, through the people who keep showing up year after year.
It’s a city that has lost whole neighborhoods to “progress,” but life here continues. Its strength has always come from the people who arrived to build new lives, and the working families who never left, even when the factories did. Whether it’s a patched-up hoop house, a backyard bed, or a few pots lined up on a porch, people here keep growing. My time cultivating flowers in Detroit has shown me that caring for the land and caring for people are the same work. We move forward by rebuilding together and tending to the ground under our feet.
Living here has also opened my eyes to how land carries history, and how our relationships to a place are never simple. Learning from Native-led LandBack efforts has deepened that understanding. Michigan’s land and water are not just resources; they are sacred Anishinaabe homelands. Mary Siisip Geniūz writes that “plants have so much to give us, all we have to do is ask,” and those words constantly ring in my head. They remind me that tending to the land is not just labor, it is a relationship. And that gardening, even in small ways, is a way to show respect.
Flower farming has changed how I see the world. I’ve been pulled deeper into Korean Natural Farming, which teaches that everything we need is already around us; that microbes are our friends, not enemies; and that fertility comes from working with the existing life in the soil rather than trying to control it. KNF tells me to step back and trust that the land already knows what to do, if I let it.
These lessons circle back even further into my lineage. All four of my grandparents are Korean, but three were born and raised in Japan — one in Hiroshima, two in Osaka — and one was raised in Shenyang, China. Their lives were shaped by the Japanese occupation and U.S. decisions that allowed it to happen. When they eventually returned to Korea, it was a nation that was later split by foreign agendas. When they immigrated to the U.S. in the 70s, they grounded themselves in one of the few constants they knew: growing things.
For them, gardening and foraging were ways to survive, but also acts of joy. My earliest memories are of their gardens in the suburbs: rows of perilla, squash spilling onto the lawn, peppers turning slowly from green to red, a pair of Korean pear trees sparking disputes with the neighbors. My mom’s mom could spot purslane in an empty field; my dad’s mom could make jelly out of acorns. Tending to the land is partly about the flowers, but it is also how I stay close to my family. My grandparents knew how to dig, gather, and get by, and I learned from them. Working the land helps me remember my roots.
And those roots shape the choices I make now. I think a lot about what kind of world my nephews will inherit, and what it might mean for them to feel at home in lands their grandparents once had to leave. I want them to walk freely in the land of their ancestors: a unified Korea and a free Palestine.
When I plant flowers, I remind myself that trying to do good creates its own special kind of warmth during the cold months. I struggle a lot, but I keep going, trusting that something is growing even when it stays hidden under the frost. Winter teaches me that. And I hope that by the time my nephews are grown, some of what I am tending to now — on this land and in this life — has taken root for them, too.
