I love the late-season garden. There’s a poetry to the graceful, spent and still colorful forms of the plant architecture. In places, there is the last-minute frenzy of concentrated insect activity on the remaining blooms of chrysanthemums, hyssop and California poppy. One of my favorite things to do is to stand by these blooms and listen to the soothing hum of wings intently gathering pollen – because I know that the profound silence of winter is on its way. The swamps and bogs are silent now except for the territorial red squirrels patrolling their claims, and the trees are nearly bare.
It has been an amazing year here. I have never seen the landscape so exuberant with growth as it was this year. The garden is beginning to develop its own voice that comes from maturity and being allowed to range as it needs to through spreading roots or thousands of seeds establishing. Where before there were distinct plants, there are now intermingled communities and ecologies that have developed and formed relationships that are surprising, spontaneous and beyond what I had imagined, but had intended. Such life and vigor! I can hardly believe it – especially as I look out my window into a composition of brown and gray that I see now. So I am thankful for another year of discovery, for a year of being inspired by the magic of the growth of these plants, and for the apparent signs of new life in the buds that are already set on the trees and the bases of the herbaceous plants.
