Advent Week

I've got to admit, there is not a whole lot of garden joy at the end of November, when you are being lashed with chill rain, the fallen leaves have turned to mush and only the berries - the extraordinary winter cherry and the snow berries of Symphoricarpos - and the crazy Chrysanthemum indicum are left to remind you of past glories. It is week 2008/48 and it is bleak. It is also the final week of the calendar of the western Christian churches, when expired books of Sunday readings can be packed away and next year's missals opened for use. The Celts and the Kurds and many other peoples treated the first glimmer of spring as "New Year," but there is a certain charm about seeing the onset of bleakness as the true start.

That gives us a reason to use electricity to put a little brightness back into the garden at the end of this week in the form of Advent lighting. Other people call it Christmas lighting, but Christmas does not come till December 25 and we are a garden, not a retail business. In Christianity, the four Sundays preceding Christmas are the Advent Sundays, a time of fasting, calm and preparation, not a time for drunken Christmas celebrations or riotous outdoor light displays in all the colours of the rainbow. It is best to keep the lighting low-key, a modest symbol of resistance against the gloom, just the beginning in a slow build-up to the 12 months ahead. In Germany, we do not put up Christmas trees till December 24, and we keep them steadfastly in place through the Twelve Days of Christmas till January 6. In February we'll celebrate carnival and by early March we should have a few early blossoms in the garden. Ending week 2008/48 by putting a net of little white lights on the Prunus laurocerasus as snow falls on Saturday is a way of keeping faith that summer will return.

Here where we live, the community has developed another custom to reclaim Advent from Xmas Hucksterism: the giant advent calendar. Each family is allocated a day to decorate a window of their home as if it were the flap of an advent calendar: they fix a big number (the date) on the pane, decorate it with window-pane paint and surround it with lights. They invite their neighbours to the front yard in the evening and serve mulled wine and finger food.

In their December newsletter, Staudengärtnerei Bornhöved, a leading local perennials collector and vendor, suggests a couple of other antidotes to winter in these latitudes: one is to follow a German tradition of cutting twigs on St. Barbara's Day, December 4, and bringing them into a cold potting shed for a couple of days, then moving these Barbarazweige to a centrally heated indoor room so that they come into blossom by Christmas. Staudengärtnerei tells me that cherry branches are usually used here in the north of Germany, but other regions use hazel, forsythia, birch, chestnut, Crataegus or Cornus mas.

The Staudengärtnerei also recommends planting Lonicera x purpusii as a source of cheer in a grey garden in northern Germany. This hardy honeysuckle shrub is one of those jump-the-gun plant on the lines of Prunus autumnalis. It sometimes blooms with fragrant white flowers in December, though mine usually waits till March. It is a cross between Lonicera frangrantissima and Lonicera standishii and never grows bigger than 2 metres in height.