Lillys Garden

About Lillys Garden

In winter the Riverfront Park terraces go bare and beautiful — stone steps dropping toward the water, the beds cut back to nothing, the current sliding slow and gray past the wall. Lillys Garden knows that same ground once snow closes it in, and does the work that keeps places open through it: plowing driveways and lots, shoveling walks and steps, and putting salt where shade lets ice hang on all day long. A garden under snow is still a garden — you clear around it rather than through it, and you keep the salt off whatever is meant to come back in spring. That kind of restraint shows up in April, when the beds beside a cleared walk wake up unbruised and the border is exactly where it was in October. Winter work done gently is its own form of gardening.