I returned to an autumn landscape: acorns underfoot, leaf litter, the late-summer growth of the climbing rose. I love this second bloom, have written about it before, will always be touched by it.
Today I see the fall roses as a valentine to summer, a hand outstretched with a bouquet.
Here, take this, goes the caption. Take these poesies with you into the next season, the one of chill winds and scant foliage. Let them remind you that spring will come again.
I turned the corner onto Lawyers Road the other day (yes, there is a road called Lawyers here, one called Courthouse, too), and ran right into a cloud of milkweed fluff, a passel of winged silk flying in the wind. Only the warm air flowing through the car reminded me that I wasn’t driving into snow flurries.
More gardeners are cultivating the milkweed plant now for the monarch butterflies it attracts and protects, which may explain the proliferation of fluff.
And what a perfect time of year to receive it, perfect for the milkweed most of all, but also perfect for humans, who are more likely this time of year to have crispy leaves or hard acorns falling on our heads, whose imaginations are beginning to take on the more realistic, less whimsical cast of fall and winter.
Fluff seems a springtime thing, as gossamer as our gardens are in April or May, more like cherry tree petals, which also swirl around in a light breeze. Fluff in fall runs counter to our expectations. It helps us dream.
(Photo courtesy Stockvault)
“Good fences make good neighbors,” Robert Frost’s neighbor says to him, though the poet believes the opposite is true: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall/That sends the frozen ground-swell under it/And spills the upper boulders in the sun.”
But when it comes to deer, good fences do make good neighbors — or at least they have this summer. Some of these day lilies haven’t bloomed in years. They’ve been nibbled off at the stem by a hungry mob of does and fawns.
This year, we put up chicken wire and caution tape (the latter is for Copper, who kept trying to run through the fence without it), and, voila, here are creamy yellow day lilies, lovely rose red ones, too. Here are the cone flowers in pink and white and russet. Here are black-eyed Susans, too. It’s a bounty, a visual feast.
For years I’ve relied on something called Liquid Fence to protect the flowers. But a heavy rain can wash it off during the night and a marauding herd of deer can eat every bud in sight in one unprotected evening.
“Before I built a wall I’d ask to know what I was walling in or walling out,” Frost says.
I don’t need to ask. I know.
Whenever I travel I face the same dilemma, and it’s a delightful one. There’s the exploratory part of the process — finding new trails to walk, new museums to explore, new food to eat. And then there’s the hanging out aspect of it all. The dilemma is how to create a perfect blend of the two.
This trip has done it effortlessly due to the wonderful family we have in Seattle and Portland. We’ve had lovely at-home dinners, long mornings chatting over mugs of tea, and one big raucous birthday party. And that doesn’t include the boat ride and trips to favorite local watering holes.
The sum of these parts is even greater than its whole — respite for body, mind and soul. And then … there are the roses!
Walking through an Eastside Portland neighborhood yesterday, I saw roses and rhododendron, lavender and wisteria, poppies and fuchsia. I saw tall fir trees tipped with new green growth.
I didn’t actually dig into the soil, but from the profusion of bloom, it appears that most anything will grow here except maybe cactus. I’m not much of a gardener, but with inspiration like this I think I could become more of one. What struck me as I strolled was the pleasure these flowers bring to the eye. Looking at them felt elemental, as if I was taking sustenance from the stems, leaves and blossoms.
Years ago, there was an iris and day lily farm a few miles from here. Gardeners would flock to the farm this time of year to enjoy the blossoms and perhaps buy a few bulbs, which would be delivered weeks later in a brown paper bag.
Margaret Thomas was the gardener. She was a relic of the old days, of small farms and neighborliness. She lived in a green house with a picturesque shed out back, half falling down. Artists would set up their easels in her garden and paint the iris with the ruined shed in the background.
Our Siberian iris come from Margaret, and though they share the garden with their showier cousins, they are the ones that catch my eye every spring, their delicate beauty I seek when winter’s done.
As for Margaret’s garden, it’s now a subdivision: Iris Hills.
It’s the golden season for weeding, a precious period before the arrival of stilt grass and the more noxious undergrowth, when I can (and do) plop myself down and gently remove the crabgrass, wild strawberries and dandelions from the periwinkle and forget-me-nots.
Weeding at close range can be a meditative occupation. It feels less like banishing what I don’t want and more like welcoming what I do. It is garden shaping rather than green demolition. And it’s a chance to be part of the landscape, one with the clematis and creeping jenny and bleeding heart.
Before long the tenacious troublemakers will move in, the invasive grasses that seem bent on making the world their own and require a full-scale assault to stop them. But until they do, just call me the weed whisperer.
A wild wind blew in from the west yesterday, bending the bamboo and sending Kwanzan cherry petals flying over grass and street.
It was a veritable petal storm, as the wind continued through the night and into today, sending overnight temperatures below freezing and forcing us to bring in the few plants we’d set outside.
I’m telling myself that it’s only a temporary retreat. Spring is on the march this Earth Day, and it will persevere in the end. Until then, I’m watching the petals as they fly. At least they’re not snowflakes.
As the great trees have fallen, the yard has grown brighter, able to support sun-loving plants. Shade still rules the back of the lot, but it’s a more open place than it was ten years ago.
Zinnias are old-fashioned flowers that like the sun. They, like the recently transplanted knock-out rose, are the silver lining in the oaks’ demise. You can sow zinnia seeds directly in the soil when the ground is ready in spring. Which means I ventured out over the weekend, when the garden was moist and tangled in weeds, to start what I hope is a small crop of zinnias.
Planting, like painting, is mostly about preparation. In this case, the preparation was weeding: ripping wild strawberry and mint from the flower bed; pulling the weed du jour, a tall, gangly stem topped with a baby’s breath-like white flower; and digging up wild onions and dandelions.
Once I’d made room, I shook the seeds — the chaff, really, because that’s all it seemed — into my palm. How insignificant, barely more than pocket lint or specks of dirt with dust attached. But I spread them evenly and covered them with a light blanket of top soil.
Surely planting seeds is the ultimate act of faith. If these wee, floaty things produce flowers I will be the most surprised one of all.
(Photo: Wikipedia)
