January 23: Untidy winter garden

At least once a day, I look out on my balcony and think, "I should clean that up." There are a lot of fallen pine needles, but mostly what I mean by cleaning up is all the skeletons of last summer's plants. The grey-brown tomato branches are still lashed to the balcony rails, finally faded since they stopped blooming in December. My coleus are just fragile stalks now, and the dense, velvety scarlet heads of the cockscomb look like something that might be found in an Egyptian tomb.

But then I see a sparrow light on the cockscomb and a chickadee flit over to the tomato plant, and I remember why I'm not making things tidy. It's like my dad's big garden at the farm with all of its sunflower stalks and flower heads, tall trunks of okra and thickets of dead pole bean vines: cover and perching places for the little birds. They love it. It's worth keeping for them until the new plants start to grow.