Winter is the best time to garden. Everything seems possible. A snow-covered landscape makes it even better — every artist wants a blank canvas. I page through the garden books and catalogs, study the pictures, make notes, look up names, and make sketches for gardens I no longer have. But the catalogs have always been wish books, so it doesn’t matter. The reality was never as important as the imagining.

Some of my gardening adventures are legend. This is because I convinced a small group of women to join me in adventures only a green-thumbed Don Quixote would pursue. There was the year I planted broom corn and talked my friends into making brooms for the community. The mature plant was lovely; who knew that much, much more material was needed to make even one ineffectual broom? The following season I planted hops. I wanted the hops for a particular recipe of herbs in a dream pillow, but it was also at the beginning of the craft beer-brewing movement. The fence — covered with pale green lantern-shaped hops — was the wonder of the community, and a number of people took cuttings. Nowhere was there any warning that hops is a bully and will take over any garden and strangle any plant in its path. Loofah plants took up another season. I envisioned the pergola covered with vines and giant loofahs hanging down, waiting for me to harvest and dry them. The grand plan was to dry them, fill them with home-made soap and give them as Christmas presents. It came to nothing. Details are boring; I should have done some research. I had, after all, just cleared the garden of horseradish. Briefly: the loofah growing cycle of 200 days is too long for our climate and soap-making is a messy business.

These are the dreams of winter — the possibilities, the wonder. The perfectly ripe tomato that you will pick, sun-warm, and munch on like candy; the basil or mint or thyme that you will crush between your fingers; the tender asparagus that you will snap and eat raw. The scent, the taste, the idea of it all is the reward.

The weatherman says that a storm is coming. I look forward to seeing the land covered in the white poverty of winter; I know that beneath the ascetic line of snow, there is a lush earth preparing to blossom. I rarely have a problem with summer failures because I have winter dreams.