Christmas wishes in red, white and green...

Today is my birthday, and it's been a very pleasant one, with phone calls and cards, emails and visits with friends and family. Having enjoyed the awesome tourtiere made by my Long Suffering Spouse, I decided to digest it and wind out the day with one more pre-Christmas post.

Green and red have long been colours associated with Christmas, although if you're into cultural anthropology, you know that colours can mean very different things in different cultures, faiths, countries. I don't propose to delve into those various meanings, but just offer up my own interpretation as a kind of benevolent wish to all my blogging friends and non-blogging readers around the gardening world.

Green is my favourite of the three colours most used at this time of year, because it means green growing things: or as poet e. e. cummings wrote so exquisitely in one of my favourite poems, "for the leaping greenly spirits of trees." Yes.


White means tranquility to me, even when winter winds blast gales of snow in off the irritable Bay of Fundy. The purity of white flowers calms and sooths, and snow falling gently on dogwoods and willows, stone and wood, just erases the blemishes and mistakes (humanmade, not of nature). We have a blank palette on which to dream and create for the future.


And then there's red. I used to not like red, for a whole lot of reasons, but I've embraced it as a colour of brilliance and life and good fortune. There's a lot of exuberant energy in the colour red, and of course it's used in the flags of many countries, including mine, our good neighbours to the south the USA, Britain and France and Italy and many more, around the world. So I like to think these three colours tie us all together as one great big gardening family, no matter where we live, no matter what hardiness zone we garden in.

So as we move into the season of Christmas, of Solstice, of celebrating family and friends and joy and hope (whatever your faith or reason for celebrating), I hope that each of you will have moments of introspection and thankfulness, giddiness and peacefulness. The coming months (for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere) will be time of rest and rejuvenating for gardens and gardeners alike. May you never lose that sense of excitement that comes with watching tiny seeds sprout into baby plants and grow steadily into "leaping greenly spirits" of trees, vegetables, flowers and fruit.

Happy Christmas, friends.