by Peter W. Gribble

REMEMBER NOVEMBER
Some Novembers are More Novemberish Than Others

A notebook is a great addition to your gardening toolkit.

The balcony’s sliding door doesn’t get opened much these days. The little garden pots outside are done for the year unless you’ve dug in spring bulbs and overplanted them with violets and pansies. Viewed from the warmer side of the door, November’s wet and grey emphasizes the dioramic nature of the balcony, patio, or backyard – and the outside altogether.

It’s dispiriting, all the other dioramas you can see from yours, floors and floors of them – our tall-towered existence where we are slotted into stacked terrariums of anonymity.

A rum toddy or hot cocoa can comfort the mood . . . too early in the day? Maybe; maybe not.

It is certainly too early to consider Christmas – rather: the Festive Season, despite retail displays to the contrary. Yet recalling the Spirit of Festives Past, one thinks of the Novembers preceding them – a distinctly non-festive period.

Some Novembers are more Novemberish than others and are reminiscent of Thomas Hood’s poem “No!“ where each line and phrase starts with a “No-“ to enumerate the lacks and absences. The last lines say it all:

No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds! —
November!

As for no gardening – No way!

November isn’t quite the drear beginning of the shut-in, lock-down season – at least not in our part of the world.

Novembers are busy in my garden. I move plants around, prune, dig in everything from bulbs to shrubs and perennials, edge beds, weed, mulch this that or the other, and – dangerous to my plant addiction – find bargains in the discount sections of the nursery perennials department.

When I started writing garden columns nearly twelve years ago I discovered keeping a gardening journal was a necessity as a reference for my own backyard evolutions as well as fodder and compost for columns.

But I never thought to compare all the Novembers in one go.

Every morning around 5 a.m. (when it updates), I cut and paste the Government of Canada’s weather for Vancouver: the Today and Tonight including sunrise and sunset times. This opens the day’s entry.

Sundials have tracked the hours and the seasons for generations.

November 1st’s sunrise and sunset are 8:00 and 17:52 unless it is the first Sunday in November (as it was in 2015 and 2020) and the clocks fall back to 7:00 and 16:52. November 30th‘s sunrise and sunset are 7:45 and 16:18 respectively. We lose 1 hour and 9 minutes of sunlight over this period but surprisingly it divides unevenly between sunrise and sunset. Forty-five minutes are shaved off the sunrise while only thirty-four minutes from the sunset. The asymmetry develops as the winter Solstice approaches, usually December 21. Everything slows, but on December 7 or so the sunsets go stationary at 16:14 – neither increasing nor decreasing. They stay there for a week, then around December 15 begin to increase a week before the Solstice! All the while the sunrises continue to arrive later by about a minute a day. The days are growing shorter at the sunrise part of the day while growing longer at the sunset part. Then about a week after the Solstice, the sunrises go stationary at 8:08, and only around January 4 do they start coming a minute earlier. From this point onwards, both sides of the day grow longer.

I would’ve never noticed this messy solstice but for the journal.

Novembers are also messy if you work at a large garden center, which I’ve done part-time for twenty-five years. The nursery is being cleared of old stock in preparation for the arrival of the Christmas trees. You get used to working in the wind, rain, and dimming days, but you dress for it! Wet weather gear, water-proof footwear, and layers for warmth are mandatory – and at least two pairs of gloves as one will get soaked during the course of a day.

As the temperatures fall during the month, perennials and broadleaf shrubs are moved into the cool greenhouse to overwinter in a zone 9 environment (20 - 30F or -6.7 to -1.1C) and where customers can still shop them. Christmas trees arrive from multiple sources over several weeks: Fraser firs from Ontario; Nobles from Oregon; others from up-valley and other parts of BC and Washington. As well as Christmas trees, come the early blooming camellias (sasanquas), skimmias, azaleas, sarcococca, hellebores, and other winter-blooming plants.

The garden center puts up the Christmas lights after November 11. Mid-month, the Wreaths and Greens Department has fresh cut garlands, swags, mantle, or dining table centerpieces and wreaths of various sizes as well as materials to make your own. Around the last Sunday in November, Christmas music starts playing.

In the warm and dry Tropical Department, poinsettias can arrive the first week of November, as well as Christmas cacti. Fragrant narcissi and hyacinths in glass bulb vases begin to appear on shelves as do Amaryllis (Hippeastrum) bulbs. Spring-blooming bulbs (if any are left) are deeply discounted by this time and can be planted if the ground isn’t frozen.

Journal entries highlight events such as Nov. 17, 2015: “Wind warnings and the power goes out. Trees fallen. North Shore is in complete darkness including much of the lower mainland and up-valley.” A similar entry (Friday, Nov. 30, 2018) reads, “Monsoon deluge, Skytrain down due to lightning strike. Hail or snow pellets accumulate in the backyard.”

November can be exciting – if you like that kind of thing.

Reading through ten Novembers exposed their repetitive nature but some items stood out – not all of them garden related.

Notable: the mild earthquake on Friday, November 18, 2011, around 3 p.m. A week later Friday, November 25, while wrapping the banana tree for the winter, a constant clicking and fluttering made me look up. More than fifty robins were feasting on the hawthorn tree fruit (drupes.) I had never seen so many robins congregate in one place like that before or since.

It is revealing, what does and does not get included in a daily journal. In mine, current affairs are reduced to short-form points such as November 13, 2015: Disaster in Paris; or November 8, 2016: the American election Dow Jones down 600 points. A daily BC COVID count didn’t last long.

The first volume of Peter Gribble’s fantasy series, “The City of the Magicians” was published last November.

Gardening barely featured through much of 2019. Daily entries never flagged but by November are filled with detailed medical emergencies as my partner Robert’s long cardiovascular decline accelerated. I was also hurrying the editing of my fantasy novel so he could see it in time. Sadly, he passed away on March 9, 2020. We were together 43 years.

Eight months later and dedicated to Robert, Threat, book 1 in my fantasy series, The City of the Magicians was published November 18th, 2020. Monica, the publisher’s marketing manager designed a beautiful website for it at www.petergribble.com.

Four days later, Friday, November 22, BC COVID numbers spiked at 911, prompting me to take a leave of absence from the garden center. Other staff members were doing the same. Yet the gardening resumed that week as I planted up several varieties of evergreen ferns in pots – lovely, vibrant signs of renewal.

November is fraught with firsts: the first frost, the first time the thermostat gets truly bumped up and stays there, the first snowflake, the first hard freeze, the first flurries, or a record-breaking rainfall. All these nestle amid the predictable: “rain, heavy at times,” wind warnings, falling temperatures, the darkening days, back to back rainfall dumps, weather bombs, trees down, power outages, landslides, cyclonic storms hurling themselves at the coast . . . meanwhile this November we have a La Niňa building in the Pacific . . .

. . . time to add marshmallows to the cocoa and an extra shot of rum to the toddy.