It often helps to have photos when you’re planning borders for the next year. If it can work for holidays, why not the garden? I take lots of pictures throughout spring and summer to chart the progress of my garden. Research has suggested that people who look at photos and actively reminisce about their holidays, can extend that holiday feeling “glow”. So, how can the gardener beat cabin fever in the winter months? What can we do until spring arrives? Here’s a few things to keep you distracted. I do love my garden, but I draw the line at gardening by headlamp. Up here in Scotland, where I live, the nights don’t properly lengthen out until March. However, if you’re like me, you leave for work in the darkness and arrive home in the darkness. The cure to the problem is, literally, right outside your front door. There’s only one cure for cabin fever – get outside. Dorothy Scarborough wrote a fictional novel based on her life on the American plans and its hardships – the title of the novel, The Wind (1925), is a good indication about how important the climate is to the story. While isolation was its primary cause, the long cold winters are cited as adding to the farmers’ depressed state. Prairie madness was a kind of breakdown caused the strains of the harsh living conditions. Farming families faced a harsh life trying to subsist in the vast wilderness of the American west. Settlers on the American plains often suffered from a condition known as prairie madness. I’d probably dress up as a baby seal and offer myself to the nearest polar bear.Īnd it’s not just the Inuit who dislike isolation and long winters. I know that, with my temperament, living in subzero temperatures in total darkness would send me mad within a season. There is a condition known as piblokto, or Arctic hysteria, where Inuit women scream, act bizarrely and sometimes remove clothing. We need space and light and activity humans don’t thrive in a confined environment. But gardeners, with our connection to the outdoors and love of wildlife, seem to suffer more than most. It’s over the winter months that many people experience cabin fever – that irritable restless feeling which comes from being stuck inside for too long. Even with spring in sight, we’re still stuck in the long dark tunnel of winter. Of course there is a colloquialism for that claustrophobic feeling which many of us experience in winter: cabin fever.įebruary is an odd month. It’s at times like these that I do anything to get out of the house: swimming, shopping, a trip to a museum, an oversized mug of tea at a café, the library, or, if the weather permits, a walk. After days of grey and winter gloom, I often feel my mind becomes foggy. I’d been awake for several hours, but I realised, I did not really feel awake. There was something about the sun, the sky, the air – my mind began to clear. The sky was a sharp winter blue and above me, the contrails of transatlantic flights drew chalk marks through the stratosphere. I rolled my shoulders back and inhaled deeply. I felt a strange buzzing around my head, as if my skull was charged with static and at any moment I might experience an electric shock. L ast weekend I emerged from my house and stood, squinting into the February sun.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |