It’s that time of year once again. A nostalgia, a sense of melancholy. Remembrances of past glory. Yes, it’s time to start letting our summer plants, our garden experiments, the joyful blooms of the season, go – like rolling the credits at the end of a movie. It’s time to let the greenery turn brown and drop off. To clip off the dead stalks. To wait silently for the leaves to change color, which they will inevitably. And then they too will morph from bright colors to coppery browns before they’ll drop and become . . . . well, mulch.
You probably thought this piece was about children going off to college, or moving away to exciting new careers. While that’s important too, they’ll be back. Particularly if they need money. They’ll call from time to time to see how we’re doing, and to tell us about the wonderful things, and occasional mishaps, that are happening in their lives. Those are all to the good. But my outside container gardens will be gone, empty spaces with just pleasant memories, off to that celestial compost heap, where they’ll contribute to whatever I decide for next year.
Some time ago, I wrote about the endless variety appearing in the garden. Well, this too is a time of transition and, yes, departure. Oh, I still water the containers each morning. I water the beds too, but it’s futile. A waste of water, really, particularly as we’ve had a dry summer. But let’s face it, for the last month, they have reached the mountaintop and have pretty well gone down the other side. We can try to keep them vital – cleaning up the withering leaves, plucking and clipping dead blossoms, in the vain hope that they’ll sprout new ones. But they won’t. In June and July, they would reward us. Now, a blossom gone is just that – a blossom gone. Few buds, and fewer pops of color. They have started to give up, greeting my nurturing efforts like a prisoner on death row. Brown edges on the petals. Leaves losing their green as they become yellow, then brown and shriveled. Some stubbornly hang on, and I have to cut them off. A number of gardeners have year-round plants, bringing a number of them inside for the winter. I suppose if I had some really exotic plants for which I had room, I would too. But I remember past years when I dumped the containers out back on my pile of dead stuff, a number of them had a nice assortment of little creepy, crawly lifeforms down in the soil, and I’m not partial to bringing those it too. Nor is Her Ladyship. She takes great person affront to bugs of any sort, be they crawling or flying, in her sphere of influence and direct control. So, I keep a separation of outside and inside plants. One or two from the screened porch may come in, but everything else will be tossed.
I’m not a huge fan of mums, which are now the staple. The go-to plant that will still have blooms. I’ve put in asters before, which I quite like. They’ve done fairly well for a few years, and then nothing. One year, the rabbits cut them off at the pass, devouring them in their sprouting infancy. But, yes, the mums are everywhere, replacing virtually everything else in the nurseries, garden centers, and even the grocery stores. It signals the end of the growing season. Even their colors scream, fall. Yellows, russets, deep burgundies. The occasional pink, but that’s not fooling us. In the Northeast, they tell us to prepare for that first hard frost, followed by ice and snow. It’s not that I find their appearance objectionable, but it’s short term – the plant version of a vacation rental. Poinsettias at Christmas, lilies at Easter. That’s also true of many of our garden plantings in spring and summer, where the blossoms are in and out for a week or two, but there will be something else that come along to take their place. When the forsythia fades, the azaleas leap into action, followed by the peonies. There are some that keep going all summer, like my Russian sage, or rebloom like the roses. No, the mums are a signal, like the hydrangeas as they turn a deep red and finally to parchment, like pumpkin spice coffee and apple cider donuts. Bare branches and cold mornings are on the way. Soon, the plumber will text me, reminding me that the furnace needs to be serviced before winter. Another nail in the coffin.
And so, I go on, waiting, doing what I can to keep things looking, if not exciting, at least presentable. I’m having to throw out some outdoor chair cushions that are past their prime. Do I buy some new ones now, when they’re on sale, or wait until spring? Do I turn my attention to my indoor plants, moving them about because some don’t really like where I put them for the summer, repotting them, restocking? My daughter, as my readers know, refers to this process and any new acquisitions as “squandering her inheritance”. It happens in spring when I start constructing my containers for the front terrace and the back deck, and continues through the winter with indoor containers and seasonal plants. Somehow, though, she does manage to salvage a portion.
Fall, as I said, brings a pleasing burst of color before the world reverts to an old movie – white and black and shades of gray. The trees here in New England put on a vivid display, which is of course what we pay them for. It’s also the first opportunity for people to over-decorate their houses. Stalks of corn, bales of hay, all manner of pumpkins and gourds. It used to get us through until Thanksgiving, but in recent years, it seems that the Christmas decorating is happening earlier and earlier. Reindeer, brightly lit, munching on the bales of hay and the last of the mums.
And so, as we gardeners look with sullen resignation to next year, we’ll salvage what we can and wait patiently for the inevitable. We residents of the New England used to envy those that, like the geese and hummingbirds, went south for the winter. But with ever increasing frequency and ferocity of the hurricane season, climate change in general that’s blowing ancient palm trees out into the Gulf of America, that’s becoming a risk we don’t want to take. No, I’ll stay here and give my plants a decent burial. While we can, we’ll take “foliage tours”, and enjoy the final bursts of fall craft fairs and farmers’ markets. Then, we’ll have forage in the grocery stores for fresh produce that is prohibitively expensive because it’s subject to tariffs or most of the farm workers have been deported. The hot house tomatoes that taste like cardboard. Bags of salad ingredients that were turning brown as they came off the truck. You know what I mean.
And so, for anyone reading this as fall envelopes us in its crisp embrace, enjoy the brief “rental of the mum”, and savor an apple cider donut or a pumpkin spice latte – it’s a short season. Artificial Christmas trees and peppermint mocha are bearing down on us like a tractor trailer in the passing lane.
I'm Thinking...No! 