Fall Textures

The best way to describe the September garden is a charming mess. The summer plants don’t know whether it makes sense for them to keep going, and when they do bloom they do so in bursts and spurts that have a jarring effect on the fall landscape, which is of a completely different breed.

Meanwhile the fruits of the spring flowers are starting to ripen, adding touches of brown, red and orange to the messy texture, and suddenly everything in the plant world seems to decide they have no reason to maintain hierarchy and order anymore. By the end of the first month of fall, the garden is pure chaos.

There is no telling what is what in the jumbled mess: dried up seedpods compete with exuberant stonecrop mopheads and unripened grass plumes, the pendulous hostas slowly turn to sticks and above the clutter the catmints rule supreme, with their diminutive but very persistent flowers.

This is usually the time when I too abandon the fight, why fight the garden’s messy streak so late in the season? Besides, this year the rain provided additional excuses for not keeping the flower beds neat and tidy.
Here comes the rain again. So much rain.