You Grow Girl™

Living in Toronto, we need to head northwest to Stratford. It's a beautiful drive. You go along the 401 by the start of the Bruce Trail, a huge escarpment that rises out of nowhere. It's covered with trees and carves out its own space through Ontario all the way to Niagara Falls.

I'm from Scotland originally, and for years I lamented the lack of majestic scenery in Ontario. I thought it was boring, and I envied those souls in Glasgow and Edinburgh who are a mere minutes drive away from some of the most spectacular natural scenes in Europe.

But about three years ago, my mind was changed. I'd gotten a part in a student film that was shooting at a farm over an entire weekend in early June. Summer had seemed to sneak up on us and everything had budded and bloomed early that year.

As we drove North and then East of Toronto, the first thing that hit me was how sweet the air smelled. Through the eastern part of the province, the land undulates and rolls incessantly, revealing little nooks and crannies filled with farmhouses and ponds. Cows, sheep and horses go about their business, oblivious to the cars infiltrating their world.

What struck me the most were the seemingly endless shades of green. In fact, everyone in the car noticed it. A member of the camera crew said that he had a friend in Ireland, who had remarked that there was only place in the world besides his homeland that he had seen more shades of green: Ontario.

Something clicked in me that day, and I've never looked at the landscape of Ontario the same way since. It was like I was truly seeing it for the first time.

I was thinking about this moment as Bruce and I drove to Stratford. We'd just missed the autumn spectacle and most of the leaves were gone, leaving patches of timbered skeletons along the highway. And yet, it was still so beautiful. It's good to see what lies underneath, not just the flash and pizzazz that Nature usually offers. It was heartening to think that despite their apparent delicacy, these trees will withstand the ravages of winter as they have year after year and in the spring, their leaves will return, seemingly no worse for wear.

This is what amazes me about my own garden. It never disappoints. I don't really hate winter, but the cold and the wind and snow get mighty tedious after a while. By February I've had enough. By March, I'm losing the will to live. Then I'll come out of the house one day, and there will be tulip shoots sticking up out of the still half frozen soil. Then I know for sure that winter's gotten its official "last orders" notice, and will soon be on the way out. I marvel at how such seemingly delicate creatures as flowers and bushes always come back from such a harsh season. But perhaps for them, it's not hard to bounce back after such a long enforced rest.

So with this philosophy and my drive to Stratford as inspiration, I've decided to take winter a little more in stride this year. Perhaps it's Natures way of enforcing rest on us too, of making us slow down and spend a little more time with ourselves. I'm not afraid to feel a little more resigned to a good snowstorm. I'm not going to spend energy fighting the inevitable because I don't need to. The flowers and the leaves will come back. They always come back.