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practical approach, basing their yarn gardens on a foundation of hearty perennials that have the potential to bloom year after year. They pack their stashes with the stalwart tried-and-true yarns, the Brown Sheeps and Cascade 220s that we hope will be available, in some form, forever.
    Stashes, like gardens, can hold surprises. My grandma’s certainly did. As the resident knitter of the family, I inherited all her yarn, which she’d stored in a steamer trunk bearing her maiden initials, RL, painted in red on the side.
    You could track her life through these yarns. There were inexpensive baby yarns used to clothe my mother. A bundle of light-blue cashmere dumplings bought in London after the war was over and things were looking up. A paper bag of rustic, deep blue wool labeled in pencil scrawl, “Brooksville wool,” bought in my very town years ago when it had a yarn store. There are several cakes of lopi procured in Iceland during an early trip that marked a pivotal change in her knitting output, and after which she clothed me and my brothers in lopi sweaters. Finally, there were the annuals, several nameless, label-less, utterly extraordinary skeins of loosely twisted three-ply yarn in varying shades of browns and tans. I’m guessing it’s some kind of alpaca blend purchased on a trip with my grandfather to South America in the 1950s to see a solar eclipse, during which their airplane lost its engine while flying over the Amazon.
    So, too, can gardens tell stories and hold secrets that lay dormant for years, popping up when we least expect them. Some vigorous pruning to the family farmhouse rugosas this spring revealed not one but two peonies and a shocking red poppy, none of which I, my brothers, or even my mother remembers seeing before. They were likely planted by my great-grandmother more than seventy years ago. She died soon after I was born, but her garden still gives me gifts and surprises.
    As hard as it is to say, I should point out that a healthy stash requires frequent and prudent weeding. It can easily get overrun before we notice what’s happening—like the hearty white phlox that suddenly overtook my bright purple physostesia and, eventually, the entire garden path. One trip to Northampton,Massachusetts, to the back room of WEBS, where overstocks and closeouts are piled high on warehouse shelves, and suddenly my stash is off-kilter with far too much dark purple angora, two bags of which I was morally obligated to buy because each skein had been marked down from $18 to $4. (Good, I see you agree.)
    Weeding is not easy. How agonizing to yank a healthy seedling from its home and toss it on a compost pile to die a slow and painful death. I’m a bad weeder, and my garden suffers for it. As I try to find homes for the seedlings I cannot host anymore, so too do I try to find homes for the yarns that have overstayed their welcome. One person’s excess is another’s treasure, and we all take part in the game. We have stash swaps, we list our extra yarns online, the electronic version of setting them out in the proverbial wheelbarrows by the road, filled with daylilies marked “Free.” We’ll do anything rather than throw them away. Nature’s improbable (and unpredictable) survival rate encourages us to buy more plants than we need, knowing that some will not make it. The same goes for yarn. In order for us to have what we need, we must stock more than we can actually use.
    And then, when we least expect it, disaster strikes. We harvest a skein and notice the crumbly translucent shell of an emergent larva. Moths. Like aphids in a greenhouse, once the moths arrive, the prudent yarn gardener will spring into action. Each skein must be pulled out into the sunshine, aired, and inspected for damage.
    Yarn gardens can also be plagued by bigger pests, like my toddler niece who discovered scissors and yarn at the sametime. She had the same effect on that Noro Kureyon as