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, 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 little more verve for existence.
The cold season is never really a break for me, though it probably 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. A proposal still needs to go out, and plants intended for spring have to be started before it feels remotely like spring. The garden can look finished for the year while there is still quite a lot of work attached to it.
Winter also gives me too much time to think, and as the work slows, the doldrums set in. I find myself scrolling through digital catalogs, tempted by the promise of next year. Looking up a plant now often means looking past the company selling it. The grower who supplies a plug, the breeder who developed it, and the company licensed to produce the starting material may be three different businesses.
Danziger, founded in 1953, breeds flowers and licenses propagation material to growers internationally. Its gypsophila varieties include Million Stars and XLence. It also produces material bred by other companies: its 2019 agreement with Terra Nova Nurseries made Danziger a licensee and producer of Terra Nova cuttings for Europe, Asia, and Africa. Terra Nova’s current unrooted-cutting program still names Danziger as its production partner and identifies a mother-stock facility in Guatemala. These are Terra Nova genetics. The program doesn’t establish a Danziger route for every Terra Nova plant sold in the United States, and its published assortment does not include echinacea. It does mean that a catalogue can contain several different kinds of commercial relationship, even when all I first see is the flower.
Danziger is based in Mishmar HaShiv’a, on lands of Bayt Dajan, the Palestinian village near Jaffa depopulated in 1948. The history concerns the Nakba and the continued denial of refugee return; it is distinct from a claim that this headquarters is in territory occupied in 1967. I’ve written more about the company and its commercial network in the Danziger article.
My refusal to buy Danziger is part of my support for Palestinian-led BDS: ending occupation and colonization and dismantling the Wall, full equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel, and Palestinian refugees’ return to their homes and properties under UN Resolution 194. The movement uses organized economic pressure and selects corporate campaigns strategically. My horticultural exclusions extend beyond its named priority campaigns. Until those who were exiled, including my nephews’ grandmother, can return to their homelands, my resistance goes on. Knowing what I know now has changed what I buy, which suppliers I support, and where I source my plants.
Winter changes those decisions again. My outdoor beds aren’t producing the flowers I can cut in summer. A January bouquet may come from a farm in a warmer climate or from protected production, and its condition depends on when it was harvested and how it was handled. Refrigeration is used to preserve cut-flower quality. Storage conditions and vase life vary by crop; importing a flower doesn’t, on its own, tell me how fresh it is. Neither an import label nor a Michigan address tells me which treatments were used. I need the grower, the crop, and the production information before I can make that comparison.
For people planning a wedding next year, winter is a useful time to talk with a florist about the date and the flowers. It gives the grower time to consider what might be planted and what will have to be bought elsewhere. There is work to pay for before anything blooms. I can want a quieter winter and still need to plan for that work.
Living here has also made me think harder about the land itself and who gets to make decisions about it. In Detroit, a backyard bed or a patched-up hoop house sits within a much longer history of land ownership. The 1807 Treaty of Detroit transferred land in Southeast Michigan and Northwest Ohio from Anishinaabeg nations to the United States. Talking about what people manage to grow here can leave that history out entirely.
LandBack organizing concerns Indigenous sovereignty, land return, and authority over land and water. Its demands concern who can govern, inhabit, and make a living from a place. Mary Siisip Geniusz’s Plants Have So Much to Give Us, All We Have to Do Is Ask: Anishinaabe Botanical Teachings draws on her years learning from Keewaydinoquay, an Anishinaabe medicine woman from Michigan’s Leelanau Peninsula. The title stays with me, alongside the particular people and teachings behind it.
I’ve also been pulled deeper into Korean Natural Farming. Its methods include culturing local microorganisms for agricultural use, with the aim of reducing dependence on purchased inputs. I’m interested in what those methods can do in my own beds and what I would need to change to use them here. There is a process to learn, with preparation, timing, and results to observe. That work has its own history in Korean agriculture, separate from the Anishinaabe teachings Geniusz records.
All four of my grandparents are Korean, but three were born and raised in Japan, one in Hiroshima and two in Osaka, while one was raised in Shenyang, China. Their lives were shaped by Japanese colonial rule. Korea was under Japanese rule from 1910 to 1945; after Japan’s surrender, the United States and Soviet Union divided it into occupation zones. My grandparents eventually returned to Korea and later immigrated to the U.S. in the 70s, where they grounded themselves in one of the few constants they knew: growing things.
For them, gardening and foraging were ways to survive, but they were joyful too. 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 land is partly about the flowers for me, but it’s also one of the ways I stay close to my family.
My grandparents knew how to dig, gather, and get by, and I learned from them.
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.
