There it was: One of those nagging questions that so often arose between the bedroom radiator’s first 5:00 am clanks and gurgles and the gray dawn at the tail end of a deeply discontented winter.

The name of the plant with that azure flower: C’mon, you know it. The paler, humbler relative of the more blue-blooded bluebell. What the colonists called “knit bone” in praise of its anti-arthritic properties. That nutrient-rich staple of the fall compost bin.

Comfrey – right! And with that, one more mental cobweb fell away in anticipation of a new gardening season at Brooklyn’s reconstructed colonial-era Old Stone House (pictured below) in Washington Park.

During the 1776 Battle of Brooklyn, a brave, doomed rearguard action fought around the original Old Stone House covered the desperate retreat of George Washington’s badly beaten troops. Each August at the OSH, re-enactors salute the battle’s anniversary with musket volleys fired in the air. Year-round, OSH plays host to a steady of school class trips, as well as events ranging from craft fairs to Sunday afternoon piano recitals. During warm weather months, jump-around musical jamborees for the stroller set take place on an Astroturf apron in front of the house, which is also where the annual Park Slope Halloween parade ends. Students from neighboring MS 51 use the park’s playing fields for gym classes, and to blow off steam after school. Families celebrate birthdays at picnic tables in the gardens lining the park perimeter; bicycle deliveristas catch rare moments of relaxation there, too.

The park’s outdoor life hibernates at winter, when December’s final round of trimming, grooming, and bulb-planting there becomes a cold, faint memory. But as the garden’s hardy perennials put out new buds, other signs of renewed life stir, too, sometimes synchronized with flowering signs of the season. As water temperatures rise, the herring-like shad, once fabulously abundant, now with only a saving remnant surviving, will soon leave the ocean to spawn in the Northeast’s streams and inlets. Fish markets will have them when white-flowered shadbushes bloom in parks and dooryard gardens. And in May, when dogwoods flower across the city, migrating blackfish should be biting in Long Island Sound.

Gardeners answer our spring summons, too. On our recent first morning back, OSH Executive Director Kim Maier greeted returning volunteers with bagels and coffee. Then: down to first tasks. Some of us sunk new posts and strung new guidelines to protect flowerbeds from wandering toddlers. Others of us shoveled, aerated, and consolidated the compost that’s lain in its bins through the winter months, slowly metamorphizing to soil.

Since then, it’s been on to resetting the fence posts and Belgian blocks that border the garden walkways, raking leaves and tree litter from flower beds, and cutting back last year’s dead and frostbitten leaves on the newly flowering hellebores. When the threat of any final frost at last safely passes, under the direction of the OSH gardening pros Sam Lewis and Angel Martinez we’ll help reseed the lawn and make new plantings, or trans-plantings, throughout the park. All the while, the garden’s tulips and alliums will have joined the already flowering daffodils and azaleas, and be followed, in their time, by lilacs, shadbushes, dogwoods, and, yes, comfreys.

In this cycle of renewal, garden volunteers are finding personal renewal too. In the months ahead, we’ll celebrate graduations, birthdays, and retirements, in the process enjoying – dare I say it – our diversity and inclusion. Hours of hard and meaningful communal outdoor labor will stretch muscles and refresh spirits, nourishing healthy psychic spaces where the bombast, venom, lies, and evasions of our shamefully degraded public life cannot intrude. It’s a respite that will shelter, strengthen, and refresh us.

There is, after all, something essentially hopeful in cultivating a garden. And in a mysterious, subterranean fashion, that hope chimes with the patient, dogged nurturing and strengthening of our imperfect and imperiled democracy. The poet Langston Hughes, who felt so deeply both the heartbreak and inspiration of our nation’s unfulfilled promise, captured that link in one of his clear and direct couplets:

Freedom is a strong seed

Planted in a great need.

Back on a December day, as we put some final tulip bulbs in the nearly frozen ground, a fellow OSH volunteers stood and stretched, and said: “Just look. All around us, it’s brown and dead – and four months from now it will all be green and growing. It’s actually kind of a miracle, isn’t it?”

Bruce Cory is editorial advisor at the Center for New York City Affairs at The New School. Weather permitting, he’ll spend quite a few mornings at the Old Stone House between now and December.

Photos by: Bruce Cory

Strong Seeds, Great Needs: Spring Renewal in a Troubling Time