Winter Essay 2026

What Winter Knows

As a child, winter often felt magical. Christmas and dark, cold mornings, frozen windows, dark afternoons arriving just after walking home from school. I also remember the spectacular beauty of frost spreading itself across car windscreens overnight in delicate fern-like patterns. Ordinary glass transformed temporarily into something intricate and luminous before warmth slowly dissolved it again.

I remember sitting looking at those patterns while the car heater slowly cleared small ovals through the ice. Hot breath clouding the passenger windows. Drawing lines and shapes through the steam with my fingertips like an Etch A Sketch.

Winter feels different to me now in a pared back way, somehow. The leaves fall and suddenly the underlying shapes of things become easier to see. Branches previously hidden by summer abundance. Old birds’ nests woven amongst bare hedgerows. Walls and pathways reappearing beneath overgrown gardens. The shape of the landscape returning more clearly once the year’s growth dies back.

Spring had felt full of emergence. Summer full of flourishing and overwhelming abundance. Autumn of gathering, preserving and carrying forward.

Winter seems to ask questions, too. What matters enough to tend again? What deserves carrying forward? What remains alive beneath apparent stillness?

I have found myself thinking about this while standing in my inherited-from-another-gardener garden in the north east of Scotland, trying to negotiate with ground elder, raspberry canes and an apparently limitless cucumber harvest. A garden I arrived at without really intending to become a gardener at all.

When I first moved here, I didn’t yet know what would pop up through the soil. I didn’t know where, or if, snowdrops or hellebores would appear, which fruit trees would blossom, or how quickly thirty one cucumber plants could become psychologically overwhelming. I am still discovering what previous generations planted here, still learning the rhythms of the place. Still finding ways to manage abundance without becoming consumed by it.

And maybe winter asks something similar of us too. Not “How much can I produce?” But “What can I realistically and meaningfully tend?”

The older I become, the more I notice inheritance everywhere. Not only in photographs, jewellery or in family histories, but in gestures, habits, recipes, humour and in ways of moving through the world. The way my mother folded bed sheets with someone. The way my dad still approaches winter practically and without fuss. The instinct to preserve food before challenging seasons arrive. The tendency to keep useful jars. The feeling that soup should simmer when the weather worsens.

I suspect much of what shapes us most arrives this way, repeatedly, through ordinary participation in other people’s lives.

My grandmother’s life was written partly through gardens too. Modest Victorian terrace gardens in the south of England. Flowers in her youth during the 1930s and then wartime arrived and beauty gave way to food production. Vegetables replacing prettiness through necessity. After marriage she moved only a few streets away and planted another garden of her own, growing food for her small son. Later, as rationing eased and life softened slightly, flowers returned, the garden changing shape alongside the conditions of a life.

My father’s garden is older and wilder these days. Apple trees, greengages and blackberries still carry on largely untended. There is still a rhubarb crown. Still a few beans growing in a small side patch. But in his eighties, he has scaled things down to something more manageable.

I find something deeply moving in that. In the adaptation. Choosing what still matters enough to tend. Maybe all gardens eventually become negotiations between hope, energy, time and acceptance.

I can see my own life reflected through gardens too. Spring Paula needed a garden that was safe for toddlers but generous enough to teach them where food came from and how to make it. We took wheat grain from my father’s garden and ground it into flour between stones. We picked apples and baked them into pies. My children may not consciously remember those moments, but I suspect memory is not always entirely verbal or fully accessible to us. I wonder whether ordinary experiences settle into the body too in rhythms, aromas, in familiarity. The feeling of adults making time to show you things.

Summer Paula barely managed to keep a few salad leaves alive on a patio while surviving competing pressures elsewhere in life. There are seasons where simply staying afloat consumes most available energy. Gardens shrink accordingly. And now autumn Paula finds herself gratefully exploring inherited planting and trying to discover what kind of abundance can be managed joyfully rather than frantically.

Because there does seem to be a point where abundance tips into overwhelm. The fantasy version of gardening rarely includes advancing yarrow, caterpillars, collapsing stalks or the existential quantity of cucumbers. But real gardens do. Real gardens constantly remind us that life itself is not fully controllable. The ground elder returns. The weather shifts unexpectedly. Things flourish where we did not plan for them and fail where we invested great hope.

Yet perhaps this is partly why gardens feel so emotionally significant to people. They ask us to remain in relationship with uncertainty while continuing to plant anyway.

I think winter reveals inheritance differently too. Across Scotland there are cairns everywhere. Sometimes ancient. Sometimes recent. Often simple piles of carefully placed stones marking a life, a loss, a crossing point or the memory of someone who did not return home.

I have always been moved by the humility of them. The way they ask very little. Just the human instinct to mark that someone existed and mattered. No grand explanation.

I think of other memorial landscapes too. Rose bushes planted for anniversaries, births and deaths. Trees bought after funerals. Orchards slowly growing around family histories. Gardens becoming emotional maps of entire lives.

A rose flowering each summer long after the person it commemorated has died. An apple tree still producing fruit for grandchildren who barely remember who planted it. Places where grief and flourishing seem to coexist rather than cancel one another out.

Yet when people move into sheltered housing or care homes, so much of this can be abruptly left behind. The practical necessity of smaller, safer living often leaves little room for the emotional architecture people have built around themselves across a lifetime.

I sometimes wonder whether we fully recognise what is being grieved in these transitions. Never just a house, but an entire ecosystem of memory. The rose planted after a miscarriage fifty years ago. The tree chosen when a husband returned safely from war. The bulbs emerging exactly as they always had. The familiar view from a kitchen window. The corner of the garden where someone sat every morning with tea.

In professional language, we may speak of relocation, support needs, accessibility or housing transitions. But underneath these practical realities are often quieter emotional dislocations which remain largely invisible.

I think winter asks us to notice these kinds of losses more carefully. Not all grief announces itself dramatically. Sometimes it appears in the absence of a garden someone no longer has the strength to maintain. Sometimes it lives in the knowledge that the rose planted for a long-dead child will bloom next spring without you there to see it.

And yet perhaps there is something hopeful here too. Cairns remain, trees continue growing. Roses return each year. Meaning composts into the landscape long after individual lives have altered shape.

I remember hearing an end-of-life doula speak about taking people outside during the final stages of life. To feel cold air, to watch leaves moving and sit beneath trees. I think often too of a friend who has written into her care plan that, when she is dying, she wants to be taken outdoors. She has spent much of her life gardening. I do not think these wishes are trivial.

I find myself wondering whether, towards the edges of life, people may become not less embodied, but more aware of embodiment. More drawn towards weather And light and familiar sensory worlds. The continuity of seasons continuing around them. Perhaps this is a form of communication beyond language.

I planted descendants of some extraordinary beans this year. Ancient 1500 year old cave beans discovered dormant inside a sealed jar and later successfully germinated after centuries unseen.

I found myself suddenly moved while pressing them into Scottish soil. The person who sealed those beans away could never have imagined where their descendants would eventually grow. They could not have known another woman, generations later, would stand in another landscape entirely thinking about continuity, memory and care while planting them. And yet something remained alive although not visibly flourishing all that time. Not actively growing. But still containing the essentials components of life and viability.

Winter increasingly makes me wonder how often people mistake dormancy for disappearance.

I think often about people living with dementia who generously gave their time, humour, stories, creativity and participation to projects which may continue benefiting people they will never meet. About older generations carrying recipes, songs, practical knowledge and emotional steadiness forward into younger lives.

Maybe people keep leaving nourishment for one another across time in ways we barely recognise while living through them. Like seeds and stories. Like jars of jam preserved for winter selves we have not yet become.

I sometimes think contemporary culture struggles with winter because it resists narratives of endless growth and productivity. Winter asks different questions.

What should be preserved? What can be let go? What deserves tending even when energy becomes more precious?

Nature appears to offer a different model from contemporary productivity culture. Trees do not apologise for losing leaves. Fields do not apologise for becoming fallow. Seeds disappear underground for long periods before growth becomes visible again.

Maybe humans aren’t meant to remain permanently in bloom, either. Spring often says, “Everything is possible.” Summer says, “Everything is happening simultaneously.” Autumn says, “What shall I keep, preserve and carry forward?” And winter asks, “What actually matters enough to tend again?”

I find myself thinking about this question not only in gardens, but in relationships, work, possessions, commitments and ways of living. My dad once told me that he always breaks in a new pair of steel toe cap shoes when there is a funeral, so they still look smart and unworn for the service.

At first it sounded like one of those family comments which passes quickly in conversation. But afterwards I found myself wondering, when I looked down at his feet, whether he was wearing Nan’s shoes or Mum’s shoes. And suddenly the shoes no longer felt like shoes. They became part of the continuing material life of the family. There have been many fortunate years when nobody passed and at times, there has been a flurry of people close to us, leaving this earth around the same time. I wonder if Dad’s shoe rack expanded with a few fairly new, shiny pairs of shoes at once and whether he contemplated buying a new pair anyway, simply because a pair were wearing out?

I think sometimes, now, about the ways families continue carrying one another through ordinary possessions. Gardening gloves. Recipe books. Knitting needles. Tools. Mugs. Plants divided from older plants. A jug from my mother-in-law’s kitchen. Salt and pepper pots from my grandmother’s house.

These things do not feel entirely inanimate to me. They seem to carry atmospheres. Fragments of kitchens, conversations, humour, grief and ordinary routines. And yet I am also increasingly aware that one day they may simply become objects requiring decisions from somebody else.

And I wonder whether part of ageing is slowly learning the difference between carrying memory and storing matter. Sometimes love appears not only in what we preserve, but in what we gently release. Wintering might not mean disappearance at all. Perhaps it is discernment.

I think often too about technologies and systems during winter. About AI, memory prompts, reminders, calendars and conversational systems. About people living with dementia using technologies in genuinely meaningful ways. About humour and poetry and companionship continuing through altered forms.

I remember a woman in a care home once saying to me, “I’ve always gotten along with you. I don’t know why exactly, but you’ll bring a peat for the fire and we’ll sit and talk and talk until the fire burns down.” I have always remembered it.
I don’t think it was because it was dramatic or poetic in any deliberate way, but because it seemed to contain such a complete understanding of companionship. Not in the way of achievement or productivity, or even in the conversation, itself. Just warmth, time, presence and togetherness.

The thought stayed with me for years and before she died, somebody in the care home created a small imitation fireplace in a quiet corner. A wooden mantelpiece. Coloured paper flames. A suggestion of hearth and warmth rather than the thing itself.

I remember finding it quite moving. I don’t think that anybody believed it was a real fire, but somebody had understood that people were missing more than heat. They were missing atmosphere, familiarity. The experience of gathering. Somewhere to sit together while conversation drifted slowly through the room.

I remember once reading an old newspaper clipping worrying that television would destroy the culture of people dropping in to visit older neighbours and relatives through the long evenings. The article stayed with me partly because every generation seems to fear that newer technologies may loosen older forms of togetherness. And maybe sometimes they do.

Yet humans also seem remarkably persistent in finding new ways to gather, talk, remember, comfort and accompany one another through changing times.

I often think now about the forms of communication that exist beneath words. The countless small relational acts through which people try to make one another feel safe, recognised, comforted or less alone. Someone must have imagined leading people gently towards the chair beside the fire. Inviting them to sit together in warmth and memory for a while.

Maybe people have always needed one another and the fire this way during darker seasons. Not only practically, but emotionally too.

I think that people might have always relied upon scaffolding. Songs carrying memory, recipes carried through hands. Diaries. Calendars. Knitting patterns. Neighbours reminding one another of appointments and weather warnings.

Perhaps technologies sometimes become extensions of these older human systems of distributed remembering. And yet the tensions remain too.

I keep returning to questions.

What counts as companionship? What forms of communication do societies allow themselves to recognise? What remains recognisable in one another as systems change?

I don’t think that I am trying to resolve these tensions. I think I am trying to notice what kinds of human experience contemporary culture encourages us to move past too quickly.

What happens when slowing becomes meaningful rather than shameful? What forms of continuity remain within change? What forms of labour sustain human life beneath visibility? What remains alive beneath apparent dormancy?

These questions have been composting for many years. Through caregiving, gardens, grief, humour, recipes, preserving, community arts, changing technologies, sensory memories, conversations and witnessing ordinary moments that stayed with me long after I understood why.

Only gradually have I begun recognising that many of the fragments I was carrying were not disconnected experiences at all, but recurring questions about care, communication, embodiment, inheritance, flourishing and what it means to remain human relationally through change.

Maybe winter isn’t absence after all. It might be the season where more hidden forms of continuation become visible. Like bulbs dormant beneath frozen ground. Like soup carried carefully into dark evenings. Like hands continuing familiar movements beside lamplight long after night has fallen outside. Like ancient seeds waiting silently for conditions that allow growth to return. Like people continuing to nourish lives they may never fully see unfold.