Anyway, I invoked this particular passage as a segue into the seasonal subject I’ve chosen for Theresa’s column this month – dormancy. Yes, the time in the garden that comes after “a time to plant and a time to reap.” However, I’m going to give it a bit of a twist and talk about the dormancy of the gardener, rather than the garden.

This subject came to me as I sat at the keyboard to help get Theresa’s column out this month – not because she’s out in the garden digging or deadheading or even getting dirty – but because she is inside, lying here, very dormant-looking on the couch. Now, let me remind those of you who, like me, are not gardeners that dormant does not mean dead, even though it may look like that to the untrained eye. No, dormant things, according to Webster’s Ninth, are “asleep, inactive, in a state of suspended animation,” or “not actively growing but protected from the environment, as by bud scales.”

I look over at Theresa on the couch covered with an afghan and some magazines. “Yup, that about sums it up,” I say out loud.

Theresa raises an eyebrow and then opens one eye a crack in response. “What?” she mumbles.

“Dormant, dear,” I reply, “you are definitely looking dormant.”

Theresa takes this kind of talk as a personal challenge, so she gets more vertical on the couch in order to deliver her best defense. “I am not dormant,” she says. “I happen to be planning next year’s garden. ” And then she points to the towering pile of seed catalogs precariously balanced on the coffee table, while half a dozen more cascade off the afghan and onto the floor.

“Okay, I’m sorry – so tell me what you’d like me to say in this column.”

She then proceeds to educate me on what’s going on behind her eyelids while she just looks like she’s dormant. Apparently, visions of seedlings are dancing in her head. She’s absorbing information from those catalogs and it’s being processed in the garden center of her brain while she appears to be sleeping. She’s gleaning information on what new plant cultivars she might like to grow, seeing what they’ll look like, and learning about their growing conditions. She’s been making seed lists. I see the scraps of paper on the floor alongside the pen the dog has chewed.

“Furthermore,” she tells me,” January is just around the corner and that’s a great time in this area to start artichoke seeds.” She orders the seeds early in the month and starts them in her little nursery room (complete with warming mat and grow lights) in 2” or 4” pots, because they grow pretty fast. This way, they get a healthy head start and gaining good strength and size by May, when she’ll transplant them outside to grow during the usual gardening season and become edible by August. So that’s how she manages the prickly problem of getting those warm-weather flower buds (the part of the artichoke we eat) to maturity in our cold clime! It’s not rocket science – its timing.

“All in good time, dear,” our grandmas used to say about anything and everything we were ever anxious about – like when winter would be over and summer would come, or when summer would end and school would start, or when Christmas would come, and so on. And now, in the white of winter the gardener waits for spring and patiently makes plans behind her eyes.

And in those words from Ecclesiastes, we have a remaining reminder from long before our grandmothers or any of us were around, that there is a time for everything “under heaven,” including a time between times to wait and dream.

Theresa Beaver and Rebecca Rod live on an acre of garden and mud outside of Moscow.