Still growing here: For winter, do as the plants do and rest

For most living creatures in the northern hemisphere, winter is a time for rest. If you are a human and you celebrate holidays, you are scampering around more frantically than a squirrel searching for her long-lost cache of acorns.

If you are a native perennial, you do as the bears do and hibernate. You have lost your leaves and your stems have dried up. Many humans might look at you and think you’re dead, but the energy from the past season is stored underground in your roots, while your species’ hope for the future is often perched on top of your desiccated stems. If you are a swamp rose mallow (Hibiscus moscheutos), your soft giant pink petals have long fallen and your flowers have given way to hardened capsules that, when opened, look like the beaks of some alien creature. If you are a common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca), you get to take a break from the insect masses that suck your sap and get protective toxic superpowers. A few of your enticing pink flowers, clustered in baseball sized orbs, have been fertilized and somehow transformed into large, green pods filled with milky white toxic sap. At the end of the growing season, the ooze turns into seeds outfitted in white tutus that allow them to dance in the wind. The fluff is the softest thing you’ll ever touch; the seeds are not.

Swamp rose mallow seeds are meant to be carried by water, the milkweed seeds by wind, but the seeds of trailing woolly beans (Strophostyles helvola) are meant to jump. When the seeds of this vining annual that likes to grow along the eastern coast, including at Bush Terminal, are mature, the beans, which resemble green beans, become dry and brown, but also seemingly wired like a spring trap. When touched, even slightly, they pop open, sending the seeds, which resemble green bean seeds, in all directions. After performing their duty of protecting and dispersing the seeds, the dried husk of the pods resemble curled ribbon.

If you are a gardener, it isn’t quite time to hibernate. This is actually the perfect time to sow seeds of native plants, which need to undergo a period of cold in order to germinate. If you have a patch of land with a perfect spot for some plants, then winter sowing in milk jugs is the way to go. Empty liter soda bottles also work. Whatever you are using should be plastic, pokable and have a hole at the top.

First stab the bottom of the jugs with a knife to create drainage, then cut the top half of the jug or bottle almost all the way around so that it can flap open, but not off. Dump some soil in the bottom half of the jug, and sow your seeds on top. A good rule of thumb is that the hole you bury the seeds in should not be deeper than the seed is thick, meaning some tiny seeds don’t need to be buried at all and others need just a thin layer of soil to tuck them in. Top them off with some water, and then close the jug and seal it with tape. Keep the hole at the top open so that when you place it outside, the seedlings can be watered by rain and snow. The jug is great because it protects against critters, seeds of plants you are not trying to grow, and it also stays moist inside. Once the seedlings are outside in their jug, keep them there until spring, when you’ll be glad that despite the short, cold days that begged you to just relax like a perennial, you mustered the energy to do this one thing.