October Flowers

This is the time of year when I love the gardens the most. First of all, the expectations are low. No one is expecting the gardens to be fabulous. Everything that is dead is easily forgiven, and usually quite beautiful with its dried out stalk and seed head, and only occasionally offensively mushy and rotten or something. But no one is expecting flowers. And so the lush flowers of late October are much more appreciated now then they ever would be in high summer. Nastursiums are peaking. Never have they looked better, in the cool crisp air, dry, pristine, and unencumbered- exactly right for this time of year. And when I see them entangled in evergreens, traveling inwards and emerging through gaps and spilling flowers forth, I am brought back to England, specifically to Beth Chatto's when I fell in love with the red Tropaeolum speciosa scrambling through a weighty evergreen tree. At least that's how I remember it.

Cutting Back a Garden

Today I went to cut back a garden and I couldn't do it. It's a classic problem in October. After frost it is time to pull the annuals and put the gardens to rest (when not digging, planting, or planting bulbs).  And then I show up and it still looks like this. It might even be at its very best, at its absolute fullest and most rosy-bronze, with the best lines, sticks and seed heads and still so many flowers. I have to ask myself, 'Would you rather cut this garden back with spitting snow in 30 degrees weather?' If the answer is yes, then I have to leave it for another day- when it probably will be spitting rain and snowing and I will curse my past self.

And this grass- when it starts to bloom with that late afternoon back light illuminating the soft fluffy flowers- I keep thinking it is alive somehow, covered in hundreds of wooly caterpillars. The colors too, it is bronze pink orange, but dusky too, with gray and mauve. I can never capture the way it looks and certainly not the way it makes me feel.