In northern climates, there are many months when it's impossible to garden outside. How do gardeners cope? What do they do?

Many gardeners exhale mightily at the end of the outdoor season and are perfectly content to store watering cans and trowels until spring.

Others, perhaps, ignore the frozen landscape outside and instead indulge in a fanciful world of possibilities. For in January, catalogues from mail-order nurseries begin filling the mailbox.

For gardeners, this is the season of lists and callow hopefulness; hundreds of thousands of bewitched readers are poring over their catalogues, making lists for their seed and plant orders, and dreaming their dreams.
~ Katherine S. White, Onward and Upward in the Garden

In addition to studying catalogues, gardeners can work through a stack of beguiling books.

I'm quite certain that Tasha spends every winter evening huddled close to the toasty fireplace with her reading spectacles perched on the edge of her nose, poring over every seed catalogue and gardening book she can lay hands on.
~ Tovah Martin, Tasha Tudor's Garden

Some gardeners have inclinations similar to the wonderfully cranky Henry Mitchell, a former columnist for The Washington Post.

The days are now at their shortest and the gardener should keep it in mind that his ill-humor and (as it may be) gloominess is directly linked to the nadir of the year…Whenever there are ice storms, pull the window shades down.
~ Henry Mitchell, The Essential Earthman

Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd are serious gardeners who have built an extremely successful, nationally renowned business around their five-acre, Vermont garden–but even they complain.

January is, quite simply, the year's low point for gardeners. For though one may take brisk walks, weather permitting, or hit the ski slopes, or the treadmill in the bedroom, though there may be a fragrant fire of birch logs on the hearth or a savory pot on the back of the stove…still, January is, as far as gardening goes, not a whole lot of fun.
~ Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd, A Year at North Hill

All are fine ways for a gardener to pass time in winter. I have another idea. With a subtle shift in focus, let me introduce an entirely new coping mechanism.

The Indoor Garden.

My notion of the Indoor Garden examines indoor spaces with the same critical eye as outside spaces. It takes into account architectural features and interior design styles of the house. It examines the amount of light available, whether natural or artificial. It borrows aspects of outdoor gardening and applies them inside including the use of container gardens, window boxes and hanging baskets of mixed plants. It tackles cultural needs of plants. Further, it incorporates design principles and elements which ensure that the Indoor Garden is a visual success.

Finally, and this is the best part for a gardener, the Indoor Garden banishes the notion of "houseplants" and opens the floodgates to new plant possibilities–everything from bulbs to tropicals to tender perennials.

Not all aspects of gardening outdoors are possible, of course, in an Indoor Garden. There can be no shrub border of azaleas and hydrangeas and, alas, no room for a perennial border or a vegetable garden. But there could be space for woody plants in containers, impressive hanging baskets and a tiny kitchen garden of sturdy herbs.

In future entries I'll explore this new approach and, hopefully, move winter from the "nadir of the year" to a season of lush green growth, fragrant flowers and beauty.

This also appears in the Askov American, Askov, Minnesota.