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.
Winter reminds me that it’s okay to be quiet, and also that things are rarely as quiet as they look. There is more happening under the soil than I sometimes give life, or myself, credit for.
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. The work shifts indoors, but it hums along just the same. More and more, I wonder if that runs counter to what winter is supposed to mean. Part of me wants to rest and hibernate, to stop always chasing the next task. But I guess capitalism has trained me to keep going even when nature says, “slow down.”
The reality is that winter also gives me too much time to think, and as the work slows, the doldrums set in. It’s the season of idle hands, which is when I find myself scrolling through digital catalogs, tempted by the promise of next year. But that temptation comes with its own problems. 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 there, it built a global chain of patented varieties. Its echinacea, anemones, veronica, gypsophila, and hypericum appear everywhere, from trays shipped to U.S. farms to bouquets sitting in grocery-store buckets.
The BDS movement calls on us to boycott Israeli agricultural products, refusing 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, 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.
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 to think that in some specialty food stores, the most noxious products in the building may be the flowers sitting right next to the produce. Refrigeration can begin at the greenhouse and continue until the bouquet lands on the shelf. By the time it reaches you, a winter bouquet has more in common with an industrially processed product than with something seasonal.
For those who love flowers, winter is actually one of the best times to support the local farming community, even if nothing is blooming. Look up nearby farms, sign up for a CSA or subscription, or pre-book flowers with seasonally focused florists for whatever you have coming up. 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 genuinely helpful. And if you have the capacity, that circle of care can widen: 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. None of these things are enormous on their own, but they help people get through the months when money, work, and growing all slow down.
I think about that a lot in Detroit. This is a city that has lost whole neighborhoods to “progress,” and yet people continue to make lives here. Its strength has always come from the people who arrived to build something new and the working families who stayed even when the factories didn’t. Whether it’s a patched-up hoop house, a backyard bed, or a few pots lined up on a porch, people here keep growing things. Cultivating flowers here has made it difficult for me to separate care for land from care for the people living on it. Both require attention. Both require showing up.
Living here has also made me think harder about the history carried by land and how complicated our relationships to a place can be. Learning from Native-led LandBack efforts has deepened that understanding. Michigan’s land and water are not simply 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 land is a relationship, not simply labor, and that even a small garden asks something of us beyond productivity.
I’ve also been pulled deeper into Korean Natural Farming, which teaches that so much of what 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 constantly trying to control it. The more I learn, the more I find myself stepping back. Sometimes the land already knows what to do if I give it the chance.
That way of thinking reaches further back into my own family. 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 the Japanese occupation and U.S. decisions that allowed it to happen. When they eventually returned to Korea, it was to a nation that would later be 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 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.
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 some good creates its own kind of warmth during the cold months. I struggle a lot, but I keep going, trusting that something can still be growing even when I can’t see it under the frost. Winter teaches me that. And I hope that by the time my nephews are grown, some of what I am tending now, on this land and in this life, has taken root for them too.
