I've always been a four-season gardener, only the four seasons used to be planting, enjoying, clearing up and dreaming. And the dreaming time - winter - was the best gardening season of all. My patch in Gallowy use to go from this, in high summer:

to this in the coldest days of winter:

and that blanket of snow was like one of these clever, ruched dresses with the gathers in the middle. It looked pretty and covered only I knew what. (It wasn't a season that every member of the family appreciated to the same extent, mind you.)

But it all went horribly wrong for me as a gardener when I moved to Calfornia. Jobs for December in Galloway: curl up, drink tea, flip through gardening books, dream. Jobs for December in Northen California (from the Yolo County Master Gardeners' Alamanack: Plant tulips, daffodils, cyclamen, asparagus, strawberries, artichokes, potatoes and rhubarb; sow seeds of cauliflower, broccoli, onions, cabbage, lettuce, beetroot, spinach, carrots and rocket; prune roses, shade trees and dormant shrubs; cut grass.
Cut grass! In December? And plant potatoes?! Potatoes are planted on Good Friday - everyone knows that - by old men in tweed jackets and cricket-club ties, smoking pipes and whistling hymns.
However, even though twenty years of hard-won gardening wisdom has been rendered irrelevant by the move west, there are still some laws that hold. Or one anyway. Sod's Law: nothing will go right if it can possibly go wrong instead.
A few examples of Sod's Law as it applies to the concept of the four-season garden . . .
1. Beautiful OR visible (choose only one).
Here is the rose furthest away from the house that I only see if I go out to visit it:

Here, in contrast, is the rose right outside my bedroom window:

2. Delicious OR abundant (choose only one)
I love aubergines. Unctuous, velvety, and smoky, they're equally fabulous fried crisp and dredged with salt, or fried soft and mixed with cream. They're the doughnuts of the vegetable kindom. Here are mine:

Yep, that's them - both of them. Now I understand why they're called eggplants. Quail's eggplants in this case. But turn your eyes away from the 6oz harvest of aubergines and behold instead:

The Mighty Forest of Kale, just waiting to be steamed, boiled, eaten as an iron-rich salad or even, for a treat, rubbed with olive oil and baked until it turns into kale chips - a pathetic treat-like joke to play on anyone who has never tasted a proper fried snack.
3. Useful OR prolific (choose only one)
Here's the parsley, of which I might want lavish handfuls every day:

Here, on the other hand, is the salad burnett.

And we all know how many dinner parties have been ruined by a shortage of salad burnett. None.
To be fair, salad burnett is a harmless addition to any mixture of fresh green leaves. Cos, rocket, spinach and butterhead, for example. But there's a problem with that recipe. Here they all are as of today:

I'm deep in the dreaming season. It's harder to imagine a glorious summer of blooms, bulbs and bulging trugs when the reality isn't covered in snow, but I'm trying.