MotherTown - Two bright-plumaged blue jays and a very corpulent squirrel are rummaging in the dusting of snow under the bird feeder this morning. As I watch them, I realize that one corner of my sundial bed may very well be bereft of plants this summer. Sunflower seeds contain a chemical that is toxic to the growth of other plants, and the area under the feeder, including the corner of that bed, is strewn with discarded hulls. Carrying this thought process to its logical (for me) conclusion, I realize yet again that, despite winter’s curse of allowing no gardening, winter’s blessing is the gift of time to ponder and observe.

So I sit down with a cup of coffee and my notebook to ponder more concretely how to best utilize my gardening time this summer, when there will be no time to ponder or reflect as I run from planting to watering to dividing and transplanting to harvesting. The demands on my time will in theory be less this summer: no garden tour to plan or be part of, and no “Gardens of Shirley” program to prepare for the Historical Society. Perhaps this can be a year of organizing, retrenching and rebuilding.

In the organizing vein, being a “collector” style gardener, I definitely need to review what I have in the garden and where each plant is located, then determine and schedule the care each plant requires to thrive. Large scale planting occurred prior to the garden tour with precious little record keeping. It will serve no purpose to have the latest yellow magnolia or umbrella pine if I put them in the wrong environment or forget to keep them well watered and mulched while they are settling in — or next year I will have no yellow magnolia or umbrella pine. Nor is it useful or frugal to mail order a daylily “Daring Deception” and a crane’s bill “Johnson’s Blue,” when I have the former in my nursery and the latter in the shade bed but neither in my current inventory.

In the retrenchment mode, I need to cut back on my plant purchases this year, both the carefully planned ones by mail order and especially the impulse purchases at local nurseries. (“But I’m helping keep them in business,” she says defensively.) The number of plants in my nursery has increased to the point of embarrassment whenever a visitor walks past. Even if this relatively open winter kills some of them, the rest will be piteously waving their sprouts at me in the spring, whining “plant me first!” And — one of the unsung rewards of gardening — a number of the newer flower beds, having been better prepared with fresh loam and compost, now have plants in need of division. Lift, divide, put back a portion, then share the rest: with another location, a friend, or a plant swap. Time consuming, but economical, satisfying and a very concrete reminder of which types of plants do well in my soil and microclimates (so I can buy their aunts, uncles and cousins).

Then rebuilding. It has come to my attention (because I can’t see into the bed or nothing bloomed in it last year), that some of my (innumerable) beds need a lot of work. In one case the bed was in the sun, but is now in the shade of a maple, so it needs different plants. The herb beds were planted years ago on a gravel bank adjacent to a trumpet vine. The initially poor soil, now invaded by hungry trumpet vine roots, means that the herbs have either vanished or are starving. In most cases, the surviving plants will need to be dug out and kept moist in the shade. Then the bed will be dug over and compost and peat moss added. Next, either the original, possibly divided, plants will be put back, or new ones, better suited to the location, added. Finally, the bed will be edged, so that neighboring grass can’t creep in and the residents of the bed can’t make a run for the lawn.

But the fourth goal for this summer is far more important than the others. It is to simply keep in mind the passion. Gardening is, as Dan Hinkley writes in his Heronswood Nursery 2004 catalog, “to be sure, supremely more than just perfect culture and precise color, extraordinary position and startling contrast. Much more than the passionate grooming or superlative collecting, or a perpetual line of dirt beneath the nails.” Even if we achieve any of that, gardening is so much more the awareness of the delights of the moment: the unfurling of a fern frond, a color that evokes a gasp as we round a corner, a scent that awakens old memories or creates new ones. My fourth and primary goal is to take the time for these fleeting bubbles of excitement, and not let them burst against the mere mechanics of the gardening process.