In early September Sara and I try to find a way to see the ocean. Usually we go to Cape Cod. The crowds are gone but the water is warm and the shops are still open. This year, however, we explored the Rhode Island shore. Next year we will find a way to get back to the Cape.
I am all for our September trips, as long as we are back home by the end of the second week of the month. Because, echoing Lancelot who admits that there is no season when he can imagine leaving Guinevere, why would I leave my garden in September? Like Monet, I am obsessed with light and September light is clear and tender, so different from the harsh middays of July and August. The sun’s lower angle softens all its light touches, bathing the garden in a golden haze, even at midday.
The September garden satisfies as well my passion for color. Like Matisse, I am mad for color, craving it more and more as the days get shorter and the dark times longer, needing to stuff myself with red and yellow and blue and orange so that I can survive the brown of winter. From my kitchen window I can see the blue of the Little Bluestem grass, streaked with shades of rose. I can see the bright yellow of the volunteer black-eyed Susan’s, backed by the lipstick pink of the Phlox ‘Robert Poore,’ backed in turn by the bruised purple of the Joe Pye-weed. To one side of this feast of color, I glimpse the yellow plumes of the Amsonia hubrechtii; to the other side lies the dwarf ninebark, its purple leaves interwoven with the golden leaves and orange berries of the barberry ‘Aurea nana,’ though ‘nana’ is a stretch for this largish shrub It’s an explosion of color and it is happening everywhere.
For years I bought chrysanthemums every fall, seduced by their designer color combos. I could never get them to return reliably. Finally it occurred to me that I ddin’t need chrysanthemums when I have the pink and white Japanese anemone ‘Robitussima’ (and it is); the tall spikes of bright yellow Rudbeckia nitida ; purple, white, orange Echinacea in bloom or in seed head and pecked at by goldfinches;the rosy-hued ‘Autumn Joy’ Sedums, the bluish-purple perennial Salvia, red Lobelia.
As I tend to the lesser needs of my September garden, I actually have time to enjoy the palette it presents, for September is not October when I must begin the hard work of taking down the garden and preparing it for winter. Of course there are weeds to pull, but their end-date is on my calendar so why bother? Of course there is pruning to be done, but that is a November task. Of course I could edge but this chore can wait until next spring. The one task I focus on is the occasional transplant, a job best done in the fall when I can see the holes that need to be filled, the design that needs to be tweaked, and when regular rain is more likely.
Abundance leaps out at me as I take my time in the garden. At full growth the plants tumble into and over each other. A red lobelia, fallen to the ground because there is not much point in staking it now, snakes its way through the gray-green leaves of the lamb’s ear. The large perennial (who knew?) Hibiscus continues to produce deep red flowers the size of saucers. My ‘Snowflake’ Viburnum, queen of the spring garden, unexpectedly puts forth a final burst of flower, defying the “natural” order, demanding to be seen, refusing to die. If I am lucky the profuse late blooms of my Buddleia will bring me multi-colored butterflies, swooping and swirling and sucking, taking off and coming back, over and over, bulking up for the flight to Mexico or elsewhere, taking a bit of my garden with them. Everywhere I look there is more than enough to satisfy my need for color and motion and light. Sometimes, I say to myself, more is really just more.
Out in the garden one September, working in a bed infested by thistles which need to be managed no matter the month, I felt something prick my finger. I thought “thistle,” so I drew my finger back. The prick continued, so I drew my finger back even farther. Then it felt like pincers and I got a bit panicked, thinking “snake.” I jerked my finger out of the thistle patch and discovered that I was being grabbed by a praying mantis. I had no idea that a praying mantis could or would grab my finger, but I was not in the least afraid. Rather, I was inexplicably moved by this experience and began to think, a bit sentimentally, that the mantis was clinging to me in order to cling to life. I knew it would not survive the winter, I knew it just thought I was food, but I imagined a different recognition..
I gently detached the mantis from my finger, watched for a few minutes as it moved ever so slowly away from me and went back to work. For days afterward, however, I could feel the grasp of that insect on my finger, clinging to me, clinging to life, against the odds, against the coming end. Out in the garden in September, working in the thistles, I still can feel that insect’s touch..
If you aren’t already a subscriber, I’d be honored to have you as a reader.
You can sign up here.http://perennialwisdom.net.