September Breezes

Every new page of the calendar puts us through changes, but September’s winds of change blow especially hard. The weather turns cool in the evening. I’m closing windows. No more sitting by an open window to catch a delicious breeze after a hot day; listening for the wind in the trees, for the hot, tense voice of summer crickets. Looking for different clothes in the morning: Where have I put my socks? Long pants; long sleeves. Slippers, instead of barefoot. What provisions have I left in my closet for the day I knew would come? It’s come, and I don’t feel like rummaging around in the upstairs for my cold weather clothes yet. Instead of slipping out of bed to step outdoors to feel the sun on my skin and see if the morning glory is blooming, I drag myself out of bed to close a window.
September is a psychological transition. Old changes tug at us. The once familiar start of a new year of school, the bitter-sweet end of summer vacation. The culmination of the harvest season. These old stirrings wake within us.
This year August concluded with a heat wave, which climaxed on the first two days of September with the hottest weather since the week of July 4th. So as the last month of summer (and first month of autumn) begins, I’m back to my hot season routine of watering first thing every morning and wondering why I bought late season annuals to plant in the sunny vulnerable places (the answer: a crying need for more color). Not only do our annuals, potted and groundlings, need constant water, one hot, dry day is all it takes for some of our sensitive perennials to wilt; so I am taking out the sprinkler too to make the artificial showers for back garden plantings I’m tired of watering by hand.
We’re promised a hurricane to douse the heat wave, but Earl fizzles like a country fiddler with too much to drink and no sense of direction. The mists and sprinkles of diminished, hungover Earl give way to a run of clear, dry, sunny days, perfect late summer weather for the Labor Day weekend – that official, game-changing end-of-summer holiday. One last party, and then the party’s over – that’s the societal message.
In the garden it’s time for an end-of-season reckoning too. If I’m going to make any changes this year, now’s the time. If I want to transplant, clear some space, try something pack in some new, showy high-colored perennials – without of course any assurance whether they’ll be happy where I’m putting them – this is the last chance at good planting weather. I put this case to myself, but I can’t gear up for a big push.
I’m caught in the changes. The days grow shorter. Midday is hot when the sun is high, but cools quickly when the sun gets close to setting. Tomato plants are climaxing, but I learn I have to my tomatoes in as soon as they show red, so the veggie-sampling squirrel, this year’s new young demon, doesn’t have a chance to sample them. Teeth marks on the pumpkins; spoiled tomato scattered on the Adirondack chair. One morning I look out the window and see a squirrel climbing up the taller sunflower plant which has made it this far with multiple yellow heads. Disaster! The weight of the squirrel’s effort snaps the stalk up around neck level and whatever happens after that to the seedheads doesn’t leave a trace of evidence behind.
I look away from the carnage. This, too, I think, shall pass. I am in an odd senescent state, my energies fading away with the final blossoms on the summer bloomers. The tall phloxes are quitting too soon. The Rose of Sharon bushes, which started too early, keep up a strange tattoo of one or two new blossoms every few days. The roses out front have revived with a second course of happy pink flowers after taking most of August off, but the morning glory seems to have given up long before its allotted span.
Even the honey bees are slowing down, some falling asleep (or collapsing) on the blossoms, having lugged themselves to a final beckoning bloom and lacking the strength, apparently, to set their course for a new destination. Is there a new destination?
The bees and I have long had a common interest: flowers. But it appears to be time for us to part company. Whatever may be next for nature’s humdingers, I’m being told by September breezes to move on.

9.5 Garden Party

First we move the furniture around.
I decide to use some potted cosmos to cover bare spots in the back garden, clearing more space on the patio for chairs. I will not move the potted Mandeville rose off the patio, because that is the one plant that absolutely belongs there, with its tropical red flowers and thick green vines climbing up a trellis. Anne cleans up the barbeque grill and breaks out some more of the all-purpose plastic chairs. She pushes the metal picnic table against the house to use as a sideboard. She makes a crop of weeds pushing their way up through the cracks between the patio blocks go away.
I busy myself giving the garden foliage a company trim, brush, and shampoo. I cut off the tops of a lot of spent flower stems. I pull out a lot of volunteers. I sweep up pieces of fallen, broken acorns. I get close to the green mats of low steppable groundcovers, each colony in its own frame, more or less, some significantly less. Maybe because it’s September now, and cool this weekend, they seem revived and healthy and victorious in the battle over the persistent intruders which would break up their formations and obscure their uniformity. I cut off a lot of faded black-eyed susans. I trim some tall phlox, which are also, sadly, in their in the sunset of their pink florescence.
Even the purple loosestrife have declared an end of bloom-time, and we are now awaiting the garden mums and purple asters, tall and leggy as they are, and the Montauk daisies, ditto, to make a brilliant appearance. Of the designated fall bloomers, only the anemone – deep reddish-lavender buttons – have unveiled themselves with surprising promptitude. Other years they are the last of this group.
The guests arrive, the party begins, and various plant lovers take little walks around our curving brick paths. This gives me the opportunity to remember what everything is called – the dense, grassy northern sea oats, the pink Chablis sedum (typically an August bloomer, but looking good now), the cat mint (a little second growth), ditto for the spirea (tall and thick and rust-reddish on its dusk blooms, which no one notices), the long-gone red bee balm (monarda), the last pincushion blossoms (looking like tasty purple candies), the yellowish faded achillea (yarrow) standing up beside baby-blue balloon flowers…
“Do you have an herb garden?”
I walk her over: the spears of garlic-chive have pretty little white flowers, the oregano has tiny white flowers, the parsley is dark green, and the rosemary is decent, but I forget to point out the mint to anyone, though it is growing wild everywhere
In the end it is not about the garden. All sorts of people are perfectly happy to crowd together on the patio in our plastic chairs and some of our neighbor’s, and sample each other’s dishes and figure out who all lives in which house. Darkness falls, the twilight is beautiful and then swiftly gone. A crisp brilliant afternoon yields a cool evening, and we have no more light to see by, and no artificial light to shine on the public square when it’s time to break up and many guests volunteer to carry our countless odds and ends back to the kitchen. But people have brought their own light, their own better angels, and make of our dark hour their own pluralistic, peaceable kingdom.
Well, who knows, we can’t see them in the dark any more, but maybe the plants had something to do with it.

8.25 Rainy Season

The rains came. The rains went. Two poems pop up in their wake, the first a haiku, the second a somewhat longer effort.


Downpour (haiku)

Three days in an ark
Turn the barrel upside down
Send it to July


Three Days’ Rain, but No Monsoon

Rain in the interstices.
I can’t see through the screen,
The garden misted to a greeny blur.
Surely this is some message from
The folks who teach us primal events
Catastrophes, floods, creation stories, death and resurrection
We are the aging cohort
The rain will clear… and grow us back.
Some of us.


I wonder if this rain will fill up the garden. And the answer is yes, for three days. On the fourth, a Sunday, I am back to watching the top layer of soil stiffen and gray.
Since I cannot go gracefully into that good night of no more flowers, I have acquired at season-end prices some flats of annuals and plugged them in, here and thee. That gives me something new to worry about, something new to worry about. I decide the season is late enough to dig up and transplant some perennials, I put a shovel to a colony of evening primrose which are bright and happy yellow in June but increasingly gray and skeletal as the weeks pass, especially this dry year. I decide to clear a row of them out, transplanting them to a shadier spot, and put in a flat of petunias as a temporary fix.
This means I now have transplants to worry about keeping moist in their early vulnerable days just as the weather turns dry and hot again. Four days of ninety degree weather forecast for the last days of August? It would be an anomaly except that now, increasingly, everything is.
So go back to hand watering, once again, with new seedlings to worry about. Also red salvia, portulaca and coleus in the front garden. I’m not sure how well any of these will do.
At the very lest, it’s a way to toss a few more ingredients into the mix of earth, stone and cellulose, and stir the pot. What we get is pot luck. As always, larger forces are at work.

8.26 The Hum of the Workers

A murmur in the flowers.
It rained for four days in all, including a calamitous downpour Wednesday morning that soaked commuters walking to the train station. I was housebound, short on exercise, sunshine, fresh air. Though also liberated from a six-week ritual of watering first thing in the morning, tut-tutting over how dry the hydrangea looked, or the potted morning glory, or the struggling eggplant in the vegetable garden (which insists on producing bonsai fruit the size and shape of an elongated seedless grape) even though I had watered them all the previous evening.
Freed from watering for at least for a day or two longer, cheered by the silence of the morning-after (what, no rain?) and the hints of sunlight through the windows, I got myself outdoors for the anticipated pleasure of seeing how different things looked after their first good dousing in months. Foliage had the shine and fleeting glamour of truly moist things. The air smelled sweet, but retained the tang of the ocean which had offered its waters to the northeast winds. Tall stalks of phlox and Queen Anne’s lace swayed and hung down. Oak leaves scattered amid the sedum. A few stems broken. Some still open flowers lolling at shoe-top level.
I bent to the task, cutting things back to the shape of the season. Blown flowers, broken stems, tall waving stems whose day on the parade ground of the seasonal march was over. I pulled a few weeds, and the ease with which they gave up their rooted hold on the earth reminded me that wet days (not that we’d had any) were the best for weeding. I knelt to pull up crabgrass from between the bricks in the circular walk. I heard a hum.
A deep, steady mutter. Sort of an engine noise, a constant tickling of the ears that almost assumed the character of white noise. But once you tuned in, it was unmistakable.
Bees. There must be some bees around here. I lifted my head to look around.
It was not immediately obvious where they were. I started to rise and my eye level crossed the pink blossoms of a tall, eccentrically flowering Meadow Rue. There they were. Pretty much on top of me.
Three or four of these slender-stemmed plants had continued to blossom, producing new blossoms too, through the rain. They were all open for visits today from the local collectors of the honey bee sorority. How many bees? Maybe a dozen. Together, they made a hum.
One of things we miss when we don’t get outdoors is the sounds. The crickets. (Where did the crickets go when the rains came? The dry little whirr of the leaping, leaf-brown grasshopper. Late August is a quiet time for birds, but other animals grow more active. The bees are still gathering nectar, whatever they get from the flowers, to build up their winter nutrition reserves back in the hive.
We have a common interest, the bees and I. Flowers.
I back away from the tall stalks of the Meadow Rue, less out of caution than to give the bees room to maneuver. Pardon me; you were here first. They have a right to make a living. Besides, I like that hum; it’s life.
I get snippy somewhere else, and a monarch butterfly skips into view and darts from plant to plant. They move too fast for me to have a fix on what they’re looking for where.
I keep reminding myself that I won’t have this all winter. Not just the long flowering season as each perennial species takes its turn in the parade. But the whole sensory bath of the outdoors. I won’t have open windows. I had closed them when the rains fell and the temperature dropped; the days felt like winter. Today I am sitting in an indoor space that is partly an outdoor space as well simply because sights and sounds and fresh air are stimulating the sense organs and massaging my brain.
Green things keep us growing. The bees are keeping busy. I’m not sure what I’ll do when I close those windows for good.

8.16 Busy Thoughts

Mostly, it doesn’t matter what I’m doing.
It’s just being there. And some busyness of the hands frees the mind.
I sit on the brick pavement and pick weeds out of our “steppable” groundcover.
It will not survive without me, not indefinitely. The weeds make their ceaseless inroads. They are stronger, wilder, more native, less needy. They survive on nothing. Grow on dust or sand, between rocks and bricks, the slightest gaps. They push their way up, stem, leaf, the occasional flower, the inevitable seed – next year’s expansion policy.
Violets find some millimeter of dirt between the roots and stems of our various species of thyme groundcovers. They mar the esthetic uniformity, driving particular gardeners wild. I can stand a few of them. I am no totalitarian prince. But the more allowed, the more appear, breeding on their own success – well, what can you expect of these people? One violet this week means a half dozen next week, or two weeks at the outside, but surely they will come.
Not just violets, of course. Clover. Clover I like because, as I have read, it is good for the soil. But our clover, with its purple-tinged leaves and tiny bright yellow flowers – what variety this is I don’t know – will soon overrun the acaena, the steppable (Microsoft insists this must be “stoppable,” but no, it means you can step on it) groundcover with the overtly ruby-purple foliage, which I have babied through the years. And which is fading as it is.
And then come the Labrador violets, those lovers of winter, pushing in from the side. They multiply faster than I can remember how many used to be there, and before I can determine a clear immigration policy for Labrador intruders they have colonized Arizona. The acaena originate from New Zealand, I am told, and appear to want to go back there.
Perhaps I should allow only native species to flourish. Then we will have only local variety violets, clover, crabgrass, dandelions, and the familiar-to-the-eye but nameless-to-the-mind host of local tenants who were here before I was, fighting their own survivalist wars beneath a knee-high forest of coarse and mostly ugly – there is no other term for them – weeds.
These are the things, or some of the things, one thinks about, sitting, or squatting, on the brick pavements between the planting beds – the clock circle, the flower island, the tree circle, the “graves,” the “back forty” – and pulling out weeds. Deciding, that is, often on the fly, which green creatures before me truly are the intruders.
Things generally look a little better when I am done, so there is a sense of accomplishment.
But mostly it is spending time with the plants that shapes these hours, or minutes. There are words – therapy, meditation, centering, slowing down, getting out of the house – that may apply.
The garden you are really working on is with you always.

8.18 What the Trees Said

What was here before us?
The big double-trunked oak tree. A few other shade trees, but the oak is clearly the monarch. It extends over the air space of more neighboring households than I want to think about. If I need luck, there is plenty of wood to knock on.
The tree harbors squirrel families, and I have seen juveniles chase their way all across the back garden to the place where the trees touch hands and jump from the oak to the big tree on the other side of the yard.
Families of birds have worked their way through its leaves in their nesting time hunger, chirping (at each other, presumably) and darting from branch to branch. Were there caterpillars, inch worms, there among the leaves for them to harvest?
There are often nests of torn leaves. Squirrels chew through the ends of twigs and sent them wafting down upon the flowers and the wrought iron table where we breakfast. Is the tree trying to banish us? Some years squirrels chew off sachets of still-green leaves with acorns attached to the twig because they are tired of waiting for them to fall. They fall on top of the flowers; I harvest the leaves.
One year the tree dropped feasts of acorns, a bumper crop. They fell everywhere, throwing their caps in the air, littered paths and plantings. The squirrels ran mad with excitement; what to do with such bounty? The solution – squirrel logic – they buried them everywhere. Wherever I disturbed the soil for an autumn planting, a squirrel added an acorn. I was doing their work, digging graves for acorns.
What accounts for the magic of trees? Why do we grow silent among them? Why does their dry, unworried silence work its way into our thoughts, slowing the rhythm of our thinking, turning us into listeners?
People are the same everywhere under the skin. Trees are the true other. They covered the land before we got to it. Sometimes I think they are waiting us out, knowing it will be theirs again when we leave. Trees are the bones of wilderness. They are “nature” as opposed to civilization. They are what we get to when we get away from it all. They are “country” as opposed to urban.
They are home to magic, ritual, myth, fantasy, other worlds, other ages of the planet, other generations.
And yet we harbor them, a few of them – a prized few – within our homesteads. We adopt a few of these others inside our own numbers, our built, man-made, terra-formed world. We have domesticated them, I suppose. We grow them on “farms,” sell them in “nurseries,” picking them out like children for adoption. We have tamed their magic, thinned their numbers to a manageable few, separated them a proper distance one from the other. Made it harder for them to whisper their secrets one to the other. We have thinned out their silence.
But we rely on those whispers. We count on their shade, their balm on sunny days. We rely on them to soften the hardness of our created world, its paved, concrete impervious surfaces. We count on their green to soften our eyes, to link hands above our heads when we frame our image of home, village, neighborhood, street, city. Tree city. We all want to live in a tree city.
We plant them now in despoiled places to balance our carbon output. They breathe our waste. They consume our waste and render it – some part of it – harmless.
We want them in our lives. People, houses, pets, trees: these are the fundamentals, the things we want in our lives. When a pet dies, we weep. It is easier to forget the role of the tree, who does not follow us about, wag its tail, greet us, meow for supper. Who simply guards the sky for us and holds down our earth with its roots.
We don’t realize we rely on them until they are gone, or threatened. That’s our tree, we say. You can’t cut that tree down.
Our spreading oak is there for us when we pause and rest in the garden. It murmurs in the breeze or speaks its peculiar and peculiarly restful silence. We don’t speak its language and so can’t put what it’s saying into words.
It doesn’t need words. It knows. Sometimes, wordless, we know too.

Trees

Who knows what they hear
Neighbors speak in tongues of wind
This year we turn soon

8.7 Window Flower

In August things are quieter in the garden. Most of our perennials have come and gone. I busy myself cutting off faded blooms, and cutting back dried foliage, flower stalks and stems. Meanwhile the morning glory takes a gulp of sunshine, mixes in a little water, and climbs voraciously – I don’t think it’s hungry but that’s what it looks like – up the shingles on the back of the house.
The vines form a pyramid under my work room window. I see the tendrils pirouette and twine against the screen. If I opened the window, I have no doubt they would come right in and begin turning my desk into a real, as opposed to a metaphorical, jungle.
You can see how abandoned houses soon get birch trees in the parlor.
This is our second year of planting morning glory – whose blooming habits are as good as its name – at the back of the house. Last year we built an ad hoc trellis from pieces made of lightweight wooden crisscrossed battens left behind by the two men who built our front porch. We drove the wood into the dirt and tacked the tops into the shingles. We planted the morning glory, an annual, in pots of soil. It was late in the season by the time we were ready so we bought seedlings. They climbed and bloomed in September.
This year we built the morning glory wall from seed. I planted the seed in my garden seedbed early in the season and transplanted the seedlings into the pots. They grew fast, climbed aggressively. I realized they needed a new height to strive for, and hammered some nails into the shingles below my window. Now the tendrils are climbing above the window. Ain’t no mountain high enough.
Where will they go now? While we wait to find out, I’m kept busy watering the pots every day.
There comes a time in late summer every year when you turn to annuals for color. We’re had luck with a Mandeville rose we put in a big pot on the patio with its very own specially purchased trellis. It makes showy rose-red flowers, set off by deep green climbing foliage. As soon as it started growing we began speculating on how we could keep it alive over the winter.
After morning glory seedlings grew up and left the nursery, I grew cosmos in my seedbed. They sprouted thickly, too thickly, because (sentimentalist that I am) I never thin successful germinations. We ended up with a couple score of eager cosmos which I now realize were probably already too thin when I transplanted them. We now have thirty or so rather spindly cosmos plants scattered in strategic locations around the front and back gardens, making tall stems with little round discs of flower on top. A few, owners of the choicest location, are growing sturdier stalks and flowers in a small plot near the vegetables. Another art to master.
But the morning glory blossoms do light up the mornings in the waning days of summer.