Nearly every mail delivery from January through March presents me with yet another glossy, tantalizing, full-color catalogue from a seed or nursery company. Having lived nearly thirty winters as a gardener, I know exactly what to do when I retrieve a new catalogue from my mailbox: without a glance beyond that necessary for identification, I scurry up the driveway and into the house; I shove the catalogue quickly into a drawer, and slam the drawer shut!

I have read gardening columns about "whiling away the winter planning next year's garden," but the fact is, that just makes winter seem twice as long. It took me several winters to figure out that January is much too early to think about vernal delights. As surely as the snow doth fall and the wind doth howl, it will be a very long time before the soil will warm sufficiently to nurture a seed, and no amount of wishful thinking will change that fact.

Those first few winters of my passion were agony. I eagerly rushed to the mailbox every day and hauled in stacks of offerings. Flying to my cozy quarters, I devoured the promises of bigger, better, new, improved, healthier, hardier, stronger, brilliant, dazzling, and rare. I made lists. I filled out order blanks totalling hundreds of dollars' worth of seeds, bulbs, tubers, corms, roots, and saplings. I reconsidered. I trimmed until I arrived at a reasonable list of items I couldn't live without.

The process took most of the winter. When I wasn't poring, glassy-eyed, through catalogues and making absurd lists, I was gloomily watching the snow pile up along the roadways and anguishing over weather forecasts of continued cold. I began a daily check for hints of spring: swollen buds on the trees, a peep of green from the snow overlying a flower bed, a bluer sky, a zephyr with a fragrance of the south. I strained my ears for the honk of returning geese. I was morose and miserable in my impatient longing for the sweet breath of spring upon the frozen earth. My attitude was a trial and a burden to my family. As I was secretly contemplating a winter home somewhere in Virginia or the Carolinas where gardening does not cease, my family was calculating the length of rope needed to hang me from the nearest tree.

The weather finally broke and the gloom was dispelled. When my orders began to arrive, I threw the catalogues away, along with several dozens of starveling plants sown in desperation during the early days of February. Winter was quickly forgotten.

I eventually learned the error of my ways. Now I put the catalogues away when they arrive, and concentrate instead on the grace and beauty that inhabit my winter garden. I have planted such things as autumn olive (Eleagnus umbellatum), highbush cranberry (Viburnum trilobum), and box elder (Acer negundo) to attract the birds for winter cheer. There is a ready supply of staghorn sumac fruit and a variety of weed seeds available to them, and I always make sure the bird feeders are filled with even finer fare.

The clannish finches and gossipy sparrows decorate the bare branches of trees and shrubs around the house through most of the day. Pairs of scarlet and dun cardinals are the first to arrive in the morning and the last to leave at twilight. The daunting blue jays, obnoxious to some, are an endless amusement to me, with their varied squeaks, whistles, and screams; they dive to the feeder from aloft the tallest branches of the poplar tree, alighting with saucy aplomb. The red-bellied woodpecker, a flying tank of a bird with a bayonet beak, is a frequent visitor; he is the only songbird who intimidates the belligerent jays. We occasionally have a passing flock of evening grosbeaks that drops by for brunch. While the other birds are like family, the grosbeaks are feathered royalty. Like well-mannered houseguests, they visit awhile but take their leave before the larder is bare.

I have seen a dozen hen pheasants leap and flutter in the wild rosebush, relishing the small orange hips. For two consecutive winters we had an opossum - we called him "Dewey", short for "Do He Bite" - who came to visit the feeders during the day and was not bothered by my attentions with a camera. On many moonlit nights I witnessed a family of fat rabbits dining on cracked corn at the base of the feeders, their meal followed by a post-prandial game of leapfrog. And, of course, we have a dozen cheeky squirrels. Their marauding ways add many dollars to my birdseed budget, but it's worth it to me to be able to watch them every day. Their tails resemble billowing plumes of smoke as they chase each other around the yard and up and down the feeders. Every year they build their nests a little bit closer to the smorgasbord.

These, then, are the winter "flowers" of my garden. I have not selected them from a catalogue, nor chosen the positions they occupy, but I am no less their benefactor and guardian. I take my stewardship seriously, for I depend upon their presence for my good mental health, as much as they depend upon me for sanctuary and handouts!