| October 13
Let’s Leave the Nasturtiums There comes a moment in October that literally takes my breath away. I run, neck scrunched backward, eyes on the sky, searching for the source of the honking, When I find them — the geese, the real geese, flying high, flying south, not the ones who stay here all year and fly low – I stop and shout: “Have a safe trip. Have a good winter. Come back in the spring.” I know they can’t hear me, but I can hear them, loud and clear. How can they be so high up and yet sound so near? And why do they use up precious energy honking? I guess they talk all the way to Mexico. For moments after they have disappeared from my sight, I stand there looking up. Then I go back to my fall tasks. It’s that time of year when what came up must come down. I try to put off the taking down until the end of October or even early November. If I wait too long, though, I run the risk of sudden snow or Sara’s “way too cold for you to be out,” with the subtext of “especially at your age.” So I start slowly, in mid-October, doing some wee tasks, thinking about cycles, thinking about geese. On Friday, I weeded Sara’s vegetable garden for the last time. Sara declared she was done with the job of stripping, chopping and freezing kale leaves for winter soups, so Kevin dug out the giant Dinosaur kale that has been a dramatic, even threatening, presence in our backyard for weeks. The tomatoes were already gone but out came the last bit of Swiss chard, and most of the by now scraggly marigolds. We left the nasturtiums, though. They remind Sara and me of the trip we took to Monet’s garden in Giverny where, in September, the orange and yellow nasturtiums spill out over the main pathway and tangle your feet as you walk. Sara regularly cuts a few blossoms of our nasturtiums and sets them in a tiny vase on our kitchen table. Like Monet, we are mad for color and they satisfy. We agree to let the first deep frost be the cause of their demise. I start on my own gardens slowly, cutting down the perennials that have turned raggedy – the Phlox, the Japanese painted ferns, the Filipendula ulmaria, the delphiniums. Cutting down the very ratty looking Filipendula rubra, I admit that I think it looks ratty all season long. I make a note to remove it next spring. Reluctantly, I cut back the Brunnera, its green and white leaves now splotched with black and unsightly. I make sure, however, to spare the tiny new leaves, all freshly green and white, that poke up from crown, carefully cutting around them. I know it is ridiculous, but I can’t help myself. They are so perfect in color and shape and they remind me that, with any luck, there will be a spring next year. Still more reluctantly I take down the Echinacea that I left up as seed for the goldfinches. There have been no goldfinches this year. I don’t know why but I fear the worst – population decline due to poisons in the eco-system. I miss their yellow dartings among the bronze seed heads. Of course, I leave a few Echinacea seed heads for winter interest. It’s a delicate dance, though, this question of how much to leave up and how much to take down. I want to get a jump on the spring chores, but I have to balance that need against the pleasures of winter interest and the imperatives of eco-horticulture. Pithy stems provide space for bees and bugs to hibernate, but they must be left up for an entire season in order to be useful the following winter, If you have a meadow, this is possible; if you have a garden, it is not so easy. Still, I have changed my ways around raking since becoming more ecologically aware. Now I leave the leaves and let them cover the gardens for winter, Big leaves like those of the maple must be shredded before they can be used as mulch and oak leaves are best removed as they will, even if shredded, mat up and smother. But leaf mulch provides a nice winter blanket for the garden. It keeps soil from eroding when pounding winter rains create major runoff. It keeps soil temperature even, making all those little microbes that create the secret of your soil happy. It returns organic matter to the soil when the leaves decompose, as they ultimately do under winter’s pelting. As we begin to understand the complex needs of our local pollinators, we learn that many of them are ground dwellers. Leaf mulch gives them the cover they need to winter over safely. Of course, this cover can also provide a habitat for creatures like voles that will eat the roots of your favorite oakleaf hydrangea. But Doug Tallamy says that if a plant isn’t eaten it is not doing its job since the point of plants is the creation of food. Checking the huge and partially eaten leaves of my ‘Sum and Substance’ Hosta this fall, I reframe my dismay into a compliment and say, “Hey, Hosta, it looks like you’ve done your job.” Ever since I read Sara Stein’s 1993 book, Noah’s Garden, I have been a believer in the ecological potential of the backyard. I am about to order Doug Tallamy’s latest book, Nature’s Best Hope, which also argues for the possibility of ecological restoration through how we use the space we have. I don’t think we have a lot of time to decide whether or not we want to be backyard eco-horticulturalists. Just yesterday I was out in the garden and heard the sound of migrating geese. When I finally located their high-in-the-sky V, I saw why I was having trouble – they were flying north. What had they seen going south? Where were they headed? What did they know? I stayed quiet. No point in telling them they were going the wrong way. Because maybe they weren’t. |
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