In the dark

Early dark, long dark nights – hours of dark, dark, dark! I find the dark time of year “challenging,” to use the current weasel word.
The early darkness shuts down on my brain, making it hard to concentrate. I stand up from my desk, because the window has turned distractingly into a puddle of black ice.
It looks like it’s been dark for hours. When I check the time, it’s about a quarter to five. Gee, in only fourteen more hours it will start to get light again.
I don’t mind the daytimes this time of year, and I adore the twilights; it’s what happens afterwards that gets to me. What is it though, exactly, that “gets to me.” I recognize its return every year – that little vampire moment when something awful has crawled up out of a tomb somewhere and sucked something out of me – and thankfully forget about it the rest of the year.
Sunday, a delightfully sunny day that wandered in from some other latitude to show us what we’re missing, I visited the remains of the garden and moved a rake around for a few hours. It was cold or rainy most of the week, so I hadn’t spent much time in presence of living things – or dead ones, for that matter – to speak of. Color is getting scarce in the late fall garden. The pink mums have grown wan and leggy and laid their heads down on the sundial, like offerings on a funerary monument. Nearby a tiny bright red English violet, which apparently failed to receive its North American schedule, has blossomed out of its bright, textured, chunky leaves. It’s a brilliant, miniscule impersonation of spring, surrounded by a sea of brown leaves. I let the leaves lie where the plants and the breezes have contrived to deposit them. A layer of brown leaves is like a winter sweater for the plants that grab hold of them; at least that’s the theory. They won’t break up into soil-enriching humus without a lot of help, so I rake them all off, delicately, in early spring. It takes weeks.
Sunday I removed them only from paved surfaces such as the patio and the driveway, where they don’t do anything any good, and raked them back from our brick and gravel walking paths (though the wind will soon spread some of them back there).
Out front we still have roses blooming on the all-season rose bush; and a few rose buds on an older rose bush on the side of the house are about to become December roses. Meanwhile, on the sidewalk strip the pansies I planted in September are now going great guns, with big floppy orange flowers. Don’t ask the pansies what to do in the dark season; they don’t recognize it.
But what about everything else? What do my perennial plants – the ones I expect to see again next spring, dancing up a storm with a red dress on – do when cold and dark have shut them down for the season? Maybe the can teach me something.
They go “dormant,” I am told. They hibernate, like animals sleeping away the dead-earth months inside trees or caves. They send “nutrients” only to systems vital to sustaining life. In short, our plants aren’t “dead.” They’re well-adjusted.
That sounds like the approach I’d like to take to the deep, dark arrival of darkest five o’clock if I knew how.
Looking for further explanations of what these nutrients are, what this dormant state consists of (is it sleep? do plants dream? we do in our dormant states), and other hidden matters, I come across the somewhat more detailed explanation that plants store lots of “sugar and salts” in preparation for winter, because these substances lower the freezing point of water and resist ice formation. This may tell us something about surviving winter, but not much about the nature of dormancy.
The real question: Is there something going on in winter’s depths, when the ground has frozen solid (far from where it is now) that is necessary for the plant’s health and longevity? Does dormancy revive them the way a “good” night’s sleep undeniably does something for us? (Even though to my knowledge science has never pinned down exactly what sleep does for our well being.)
It seems to me that dormancy – whether in daily sleep periods or the wintry hibernation – is a physical state with a metaphysical purpose. It allows something to happen in living beings that’s essential for change and growth. The perennial plant comes back again in spring but it’s never the “same” plant, not exactly. It’s grown anew. And somehow we wake up from even an adequate night’s sleep with a new outlook, even though it’s the same old us looking back from the mirror.
It seems clear the cold dark time of year serves some physical needs. Winter cold kills some of the bugs, microbes, and parasites that prey on us. The short days slow down our activity, encouraging us to give our bodies the prolonged rest certain kinds of healing require.
But darkness, lots of it, also tells us to go inside our heads. Short days and long nights have always put the story tellers in demand. We sit around the fire and dream with our eyes wide open.

Precious November

The days grow short. The light begins to fade in the mid-afternoon. Everywhere we look things we love are passing away, but they are almost more beautiful than ever because of the impending loss. It’s the psycho-dynamics of fading light. November light touches us someplace deep.
Declining light at day’s end makes the sky come alive all year round. But in November’s slow, climactic run-up to the shortest day of the year, the sun is so low in the sky it appears to crouch all day in a low, slow approach to its descent below the horizon – to falling off the end of the world. It sits there, like the last leaf hanging in the branch. November’s sun disappears earlier in the day, but takes a longer time doing it, lingering at the end, inviting us to share the moment. From midday’s zenith, when even at its highest point the sun leaves much of our built urban world in shadow, to afternoon’s early sunset is barely enough time to lose ourselves in daily indoor pursuits (“work,” to those of us still lucky enough to have it). When we look up next, the light is fading.
If we can afford a few moments to look at it, the picture is heart-breakingly beautiful. A halo of sky pinks over, then slowly darkens its tone. The color foregrounds by contrast to the brilliant black silhouettes of the newly bared trees.
Sunset is beautiful as well in May and July, but the ambience – everything in nature, that is, reflected in our minds – it wholly different. We aren’t hearing birds chattily busy at building their world these days. We probably aren’t hearing anything because our windows are closed. It’s cold.
In big office buildings, the glass is thick, and the windows are never opened. We wouldn’t hear the birds in these precincts ever, but in spring we imagine them; our brains import the vernal context. In November these big picture windows concentrate our attention on the visual. The spectacle of red-gold sky crowns our piece of the planet. We see the headline news of the day: it was beautiful, and short. Time and space are still in the driver’s seat. We’re just passing through.
That sort of news makes some people sad (or, as we now say, SAD). All things end, and our days end a lot sooner in this post-daylight saving time month when an act of state has sliced an hour of sunlight off the end of our afternoon. The end of days has been hurried up, fast-forwarded. We confront our endings when we are still awake; possibly on the move, outdoors. The workplace releases us, we head for the parking lot. If it’s five o’clock, chances are the sun has already drained from the sky – or maybe twilight is lingering. If we’re earlier sunset is in medias res or, if we are lucky, just about to begin.
Because in that case we get to see it.
Time passes inexorably from minute to minute, second to second, micron to micron. It is always now, but now is always disappearing on us before we can put our finger on it. When the sun sets, darkness advances, new colors coat the western sky – we can see time passing. We can see the difference. Something tangible is representing the passage of time. It’s time in color.
A part of our November self still thinks it’s summer. Some trees still have their leaves; some trees have half of them, or some of them. The weeping cherry outside my study window has only one-tenth as many leaves as a week ago, but each is an incredible bronzed color, a little darker in some spots, lighter than others. I can practically count them. Each one is precious now.
I still have flowers; not so many. Some snapdragons hold their candles in the wind. The back garden mums, a color somewhere south of lilac, have dropped their branches to the ground (or to the jumble of fallen leaves and foliage I leave on the ground to mulch it). The blossoms are there, but receding into the background. The green of the day lilies has been two-thirds replaced by yellow with brown overtones; some of the shrubs have denuded in the last week or two. The ornamental grasses are shades of brown. There is still green in the groundcovers and my few pointy evergreen bushes.
I still have color, variety, texture. But more gaps. November light shines through them. And the long November night is on its way, to darken things down an hour and more sooner than a month ago. It will get darker, yes, and much, much colder in the months to come. But these November days are filled with reflections, both forward and back.
April may be the cruelest month, but November is the most philosophical.

Postmortem on a Poor Harvest

If I kept an organized garden notebook, instead of the usual jumble of notes and reminders tossed into a manila folder, I would have an accurate record of which vegetables I planted, how many plants of each variety, and maybe some other useful information (added fertilizer? when? how often watered?). And I could now record how well each variety had produced. What a bummer that would be.
A season-long string of disasters. For months I blamed my veggie garden’s problems on the weather’s unaccustomed failure of solar energy in the crucial months of June and July. But there’s another reason: the human factor.
I tried to pack too much in. The crucial mistake was letting the wild pumpkins loose in the squash patch. The whole larger half of the garden quickly became the “squash patch,” or actually the uninvited pumpkin patch, to the detriment of everything else. The invader squash seedlings began appearing shortly after I mixed some compost from the compost bin into the soil of the oversized sandbox in which I play with the idea of growing edibles vegetables when I want a break from the perennials. I had decided to grow cucumbers and zucchini this year for my squash plantings, reminding myself that limiting the mounds to a couple of plants would reduce the mildew fungus this family of plants is prone to in my vegetable plot. Too much dampness, perhaps, not quite enough sun. And yet, as I have told myself in prior years, the tomatoes do fine.
But then the wild, unmannerly squashes began popping up, two or three here and there, and I greeted them like free food, or gifts of the gods, or simply a benevolent byproduct of composting (our first year of that). Then the twos and threes became half dozens and dozens. I had visions of an unholy abundance of “free” produce. I kept transplanting the seedlings, moving them around, “finding space” for them. Such are the wages of self-deception. I was taking space from other plants. Sticking everything too close together.
It turned out to be a bad year to try to tease too much production out of the earth. Given a cool, cloudy first half of summer, after I pinched off the sucker vines on the tomato plants, very few little in the way of tomato action took place on the branches which remained. Few flowers and fewer tomatoes resulted, the tomatoes staying green, waiting for the sun to shine. The green pepper plants looked in August just as they had in June. Is suspended animation possible in green plants? My “classic purple” eggplant plants are still waiting for summer.
The squash vines did, possibly, worse. Competing for space, sunlight, nutrients, whatever, with all those semi-wild cousins from the compost bin, the zucchini plants made two, count’em two, zucchinis and called it a season. The cucumbers delivered one small cuke and one delicately formed two-toned miniature, suitable for the knickknack shelf.
Basically, everything which grew miniaturized.
But, as I say, it wasn’t just the weather. The perennial flower and shrub plants took a look at the succession of cool rainy weeks and said “hey, this must be England,” and went about their business with their usual panache. I spent the season pulling weeds and trying to keep the overly enthusiastic perennials out of each other’s way, the groundcovers from overrunning the paths.
But in the vegetable garden, I had said yes to life too often. Sometimes life needs to hear no.
The invader plants turned out to be pumpkins. I wasn’t completely sure of that even as they leaved and flowered – pumpkins had been a strong contender from the start, but so were zuccs and winter squashes, all of which had contributed seeds to the bin. These anonymous squash plants grew big leaves and vines. They produced bright yellow flowers in abundance. And did those flowers turn into fruit? No, in almost all cases, they did not.
One certifiably small pumpkin formed amid a row of the tomato plants it had embraced and tangled with its vines, grew a thick green skin and matured into authentic orange. A few other mini-pumpkins formed, suitable for display as non-conformist gourds.
The lesson? Be less greedy next year and try to do a few things well.

The Kingdom Falls

The leaves drop from the trees and spread their wealth of color, shape, and texture on the ground. They fall on the sidewalks, the roads, the green-grass lawns, the little car park spots along the streets of close-packed houses where we don’t have garages. They fall on the front walks, on the unroofed porches and decks, on rose bushes and rhododendrons, and on the ships at sea. Well, maybe not that last, unless there’s a strong land breeze blowing. Rain brings the leaves down in a rush, and I’m sorry to lose the multi-colored canopies of the trees, just when the autumn show has reached its visual climax, but fallen leaves carpeting the ground have a special, all too brief season of their own.
It’s an annual “Cristo project,” wrapping a hard-edged manmade surfaces in the look and feel of living things. The colors carpeting the ground are warm and bright. We don’t have yellow, orange and red tones on the vast cantons of urban pavement at any other time. The effect of all these leaves riffling in the breezes, shifting with the gusts, blanketing lawns and sidewalks is a little chaotic, a little state of nature anarchy, turning city blocks into forest floors and woodland streams. The leaf fall covers the little sins of surface blemishes – most old sidewalks are nothing but blemishes, many side streets nothing but patches. It takes the organic wealth of the canopy and spreads it on the floor, matching the color of the ceiling and extending summer’s leafy days to autumn’s fleeting hours. It wraps us up in nature.
So, or course, we can’t wait to get rid of “the mess.”
We attack with rakes. We advance on the enemy with machines that burn unrenewable energy, producing artificial wind.
The city announces it will collect the leaves on a seasonal schedule up to a certain date – extended a few weeks this year, in a subtle bow to climate change – and so we rush to pile them up, put them into bags, and get them safely hauled away.
Why exactly?
It’s true that leaves on the ground won’t hold their color for long and stay as beautiful as they were in the trees, but they will soften the manmade landscape for a few weeks, or maybe a month or two, and why are we in such a rush to get down to our bare northern winter esthetic? Bare trees we can’t help; and they provide an interesting winter calligraphy against a twilight sky. But bare lawns and yards?
Leaves on pavement can be slippery when wet, and we do have to rake them away from drains; but the official and widely shared urgency to get rid of them suggests that the deeper, psychological motive is that fallen leaves on our streets and yards violate notions of “clean” streets, walks and lawns, and blur clear lines of human order. We behave as if our yards were extensions of our houses, our lawns carpets, and leaves some form of noxious “dirt.”
Personally, I am going with the let-it-be approach as much as practical circumstances permit. I let the shrubs and perennial plants wrap what leaves they can catch hold of around themselves. Leaves are nature’s free, all-purpose winter mulch. Many plants (clematis, crocosmia) need a protective mulch over their roots in winter’s down time to keep them warm. You can turn fallen leaves into a usable humus mulch for lawn grass by running your lawn mover over them. You don’t want last year’s leaves to layer and sit on a grass lawn permanently, depriving grass from light and water in the spring, but mincing them into little piece helps the soil digest them.
Since we don’t have a lawn mower – or a lawn, for that matter – I simply let the leaves cover garden spaces like a warm blanket for the cold days ahead.
After the wind blows for a few weeks and the rest of the street-lining trees finish de-leafing, I’ll make decisions about what has to be removed for the convenience of neighbors, mainly. I don’t want my leaf piles to blow continually onto the raked lawns of others. I’ll build up some piles so they get wet and pasted down quicker, bedding down for winter.
Last week after a rainy night, bright orange and yellow leaves from the maples filled our front-yard “cottage” garden, obscuring the shapes and small remaining patches of color on the low-growing plants. A few last red roses rise up above the sea of level. We enjoy the natural carpeting and enjoy the flowers (mostly red annuals this year: snapdragons, verbena, zinnias) that poke up above them.
In the back garden, the fallen leaves become a natural part of the autumn landscape, designed by forces too powerful to be quibbled with.
It’s an autumn-color land as it is, vividly seasonal when rare sunny hours light up the natural gold and yellow of shrubs and perennials, which are likelwise shutting down their leaf-energy factories for winter. Plants ranging from young rose of sharons, to a wide oversized hosta, PG hydrangea, wild grasses, spears of lilies and occasional last-gasp perennials are doing their harvest gold impressions.
The top leaves of the weeping cherry turn bronze as well. The other day a jay sat on top; he comes this time every year.
This is my study window view; I study it quite a lot.

October flowers

The ones we know: mums, asters, Montauk daisies, some late bloomers (like the roses out front), dahlias, a flame-up of hardy annuals such as snapdragons. And then, in a class of their own, the toad lilies.
It’s sixty-one degrees at midday today, but it’s been cold. Thursday’s 46 degree high was the lowest since 1884. Friday, christened a northeaster, rain overnight, some showers in the morning, then just cold, wet and windy for the rest of the day. Went to the farmer’s market, nobody there, a couple of farmer-marketers wearing coats, hoods, and two pairs of gloves. We discuss the weather. Saturday merely chill and dark. Sunday was a complete washout; retrieving the Sunday paper from the front porch was as far “outdoors” as I made it. It’s the talk; mid-October should be leaf-peeking time in glorious sunshine.
But the cold rain and chill winds bother me a whole lot more than it does the plants. It’s not yet cold enough to get into their bones. Morning glories are the exception, their leaves froze and flopped and wrinkled up, and that’s probably because we have them growing from pots on the patio. Perennials with their feet firmly in the ground can get blown around, lose blossoms and break few stalks, but remain oblivious to cold air. They sway in the autumn breeze, burnish their seed tips, turn colors in their foliage, and otherwise assume an attractively seasonal sang froid. The garden has fewer bright spots; more subtle shadings and textural effects. The leafy shrubs, wild grasses, lilies, daisies and ground covers make for a subtle complement to the stronger colors of the big trees above them. The garden is just wild enough to suggest a bronzed autumn meadow discovered between forested ravines on a woodland hike.
The back garden’s wild grasses – maiden grass and northern sea oats – wait until fall to send their seed tops up to the fence line. Against a bamboo fence the color tones, copper brown, yellow brown, tawny, resemble the marsh and beach grasses of the imaginary shoreline. (The idea, speaking grandly, is to do all the natural landscapes in miniature. We planted a “flower island” and I circled it in a slightly bluish gravel path to serve as inland sea. Now the challenge is to keep the weeds from overrunning my too shallow sea.)
And out of these autumn colors and textures the occasional, unexpected, half buried treasure. That’s one way to think of the Tricyrtis hirta – or “toad lily.” The leaves are green; or green and white striped (like hostas) and probably bear some relation to the more common lilies. The flower is white with lots of purple or pink markings; spotted, I suppose, like a toad. I bought one and put in the ground the first autumn we were here, about four years ago, knowing nothing about it, and was pleased when it blossomed. Any plant that blossoms in October gets a good rating from me.
This year I bought a couple more, finding them at a good price at a Home Depot. What does it say about our world that you can buy Tricyrtis hirta at Home Depot, a store I once swore I would never go into? Maybe it says we have a growing hunger for flowers, fascinating little creatures that make themselves at home in our real estate and smile, sometimes, on cue.
Toad lilies certainly don’t take their cues from me. I put them in the ground, fertilize the ground around their roots when I get to it or when something else puts me in their neighborhood. Certainly garden plants need some help; we can’t let weeds or neighboring species take over their piece of earth completely. But, in my view at least, they shouldn’t be a continual source of anxiety. I can’t stand the style of garden disciplinarian advice-writers who insist you have to do this or that right, at the right time, or terrible consequences will follow…
If you don’t pull up the “offsets,” or baby plants, that spread from some flowering species (for example), the special color tones of the blooms will decay into something normal. It sounds like a screed against racial impurity. You have to figure out which of three main kinds of clematis you have planted in order to know how and when to prune it, and since the time restrictions all three advisories have lapsed and I still haven’t been able to figure out which brand we have, I will simply do what feels right and endure the mediocre flowering season we’ve been threatened with.
As we endure some bad weather in autumn in order to enjoy the good. And I will try to remember which perennials to prune when I put the gloves on and get my head under the sunshine this afternoon, but I won’t worry too much about it. Taken as a whole, the plants appear to be finding their own way to harmonize and buddy up and stake out their space in the conditions allotted to them. And when we walk around admiring the waving wands of the maiden grass and the bright-eyed mums (wondering, on the side, what approach to take with the leaves this year), occasionally we come across an inexplicable little treasure like a toad lily.

We live in the trees

We spend four days in the Berkshires. We hike every day, deep in the woods – or
at least deep enough to put the thought of bears in your head – and stare deeply into wood fires at night.
It’s different being home again, but when I see the orange leaves on the maple tree just outside the door I’m aware of a deep continuity between country and city life. A little patch of orange is autumn. Columbus Day weekend in the woods, followed by Columbus Day week in Quincy, the week trees begin to show serious color here. Quincy, a state naturalist once told me, is the “asphalt jungle”; more pavement keeps temperatures a little higher. Our growing season starts earlier, probably lasts a little longer, than it would without all this heat-trapping, heat-emitting development. Global warming begins at home….
But so does autumn. If you can see the universe in grain of sand, you can see a forest in a patch of orange. The sun comes out this morning, after a rainy day, putting me face to face with the brilliant colors just beyond my kitchen window.
And while the asphalt jungle will keep some garden plants blooming longer – though not long enough to turn the tiny developmentally delayed white flowers on my pepper plants into table-pleasing green peppers – I realize another fine landscape-hopping term has an even greater claim our attention: the urban forest. It’s a habitat; our own. The trees live here, on our quiet residential streets; we gather around their roots. From an upper-story perspective ours is a planet of trees. At least New England is.
Get far enough out of town, any town, get some elevation, and when you look down at the world mostly what you see is trees. This is true, to a surprising extent, even in a place as densely built as Quincy, a city with only the foggiest notion of what is meant by “open space.” Most of the trees here elbow in beside us in the built environment. We have, regrettably, some single family houses without a tree out front or even in the back, but mostly the urban forest hangs on, and in many places flourishes.
The blocks in our urban neighborhoods where the tree coverage is thick, long fingers of oak and maple reaching toward one another over the roadway, are the blocks people want to live on. These are the places that look like “home.” For people born in this part of the world, who like what they’re used to (as most everyone does), living in a loosely grown woodland, a semi-natural environment, is what we expect. It feels “natural.”
We live almost within the classical notion of a wooded park – a place where the trees are spaced far enough apart so that people can easily walk between them, or ride in their carriages, on their horses, or run their dogs (or hunt, but let’s not go there); and are allowed to grow tall overhead.
It’s part planned, mostly accidental (or, we could say again, natural). The developer plots the shade tree in front of the house; everybody in my childhood home’s straight-line Long Island development got a sycamore tree in the front yard. Thirty years later, when the landscaping grew up, I was shocked to find my parents living in a lush green world where the locusts screamed in the summer night. In Quincy, the city plants trees along the roadways in the little strips of green space between the sidewalk and the road – if you ask for one. City planners know that trees are good for cities, even in dense commercial districts where they soften the look, cool the asphalt jungle, absorb the carbon dioxide, shade the sidewalks, and eat up some of the noise and over-stimulation simply by giving the senses something else to focus on. They exude calm. Persistence; endurance. Strength, fertility, acclimation.
They have a message for us. Do we want to survive, evolve, grow, thrive – live – in the world? Then be like the trees.
No wonder we still seek at times to live within their physical, and metaphysical, shelter. In the autumn we go to the forests, or the forested highways, to look at the leaves. We say we are going to take pretty pictures with our eyes, but we may also be paying an unconscious form of homage. We want to get close to the building blocks of our universe. The trees hold up our skies and shelter our lives beneath their roofs.
And each autumn they perform a glorious finale to the season of growth and then drop their leafy light-seeking lineaments to earth without complaint, in the annual sacrifice the climate demands. We thank them for preserving the world for another year.

Don’t give up the fight

October arrives and right on schedule, it’s cold. Under fifty when I get out of bed. Not too cold for the plants yet, which look the same as the day and the week before as I regard them from the other side of the window, but too cold for me to want to step outdoors before breakfast and take a closer look. That’s the difference. I miss my morning garden service. The freedom of just opening the door and (without “dressing for the weather”) taking the slow walk through the front and then the back gardens. A tour of inspection at some moments; but more fundamentally a physical, sense-based reconciliation to fleshly existence. Sealed in the book of life once more! The gift of life (or lucky accident: choose your metaphor) in a beautiful world! It’s still here, and we’re still in it. What luck!... Yet somehow I just don’t have the urge to go out and experience all that for the simple reason that I’ll be – cold. Forty-nine degrees is not my friend. It works for others, but not for me. I want all outdoors to love me. I want to feel the sun, the heat, the light. I want those molecules jumping.
The other day, when some at least of those conditions were obtaining, I was out front performing one of my little late-season maintenance chores, re-staking the zinnia for the third or fourth time. We had had wind and rain, and the top heavy, heavily-flowered, thick-stalked annual had pitched to the side at a forty-five degree angle, hanging on its supports. The plant is about four feet tall. Its flowers are red and round and very large. The remarkable thing about the size is that it is our only zinnia, grown from seed, under this year’s innovation, the cold frame. Of course I did not set out to grow one zinnia. I must have transplanted about thirty seedlings. But the weather was terrible in June, rain or clouds every day, not enough sun; I watched them all weaken, develop holes in their little leaves, fade away like – spilt milk, words writ on water. Some seedlings do not prosper; it is the way of things. I took about a half dozen of the most likely survivors and transplanted them to the front, where the sun is steadiest and, after a couple of weeks, only one remained. I don’t know why. Did it consume all the usable nutrients, suck the life out from underneath the others? As in some sort of fable, all the other seedlings sicken and die, and one boffo bonanza oversized flower grows tall and colorful and eats sun like air.
So, as everything slowly fades, even the perennials that held their banners high through the late declining season, our one zinnia continues to add biomass and flowers, and weight (evidently), and strains against the bamboo poles I use to hold it up and wants to come crashing down like a redwood under the ax.
I grab a few more bamboo stakes, thrust them in the ground, tie a few more bonds around the branches to lever up the main stalk, the mast of my autumn schooner, and tie the knot.
As I’m engaged in this struggle, the neighbor from across the street – whose own yard is filled with marigolds and mums, pretty good fall flowers – calls out, “Give it up! It’s all over!”
This is meant as companionable banter, a kind of cheerfully cynical New England-knowing piece of advice. But all I can do is shake my head.
No. Never. Never give up.
I will keep trimming, deadheading, watering, and otherwise manipulating plant material to see what I can keep alive, what sort of show I can maintain, for as long as I can. I remember annuals blooming in December some years; flowers under the snow: pansies. I think I’ll go get some pansies.
As for the red zinnia, the new support system has held. It’s tall and straight and blazing. And now the sun has come out. What a beautiful world!