Creating Space to Reflect
Are you starting to take out your summer garden? I know for some in warmer climates it happened a while ago. But for us northerners who’ve had a pretty long (by local standards) season, we may be clinging onto those summer plants … simply because a frost hasn’t swooped in and taken those plants down.
This overgrown path will need my attention soon. I hope to cut more of these flowers to dry for arranging and gift-giving this holiday season, and that kale has also been nagging me to cut it down though I see so much winter food there that I am trying hard to accept its late-season fatigue with grace.
Every autumn, I spend a lot of energy mentally processing the season that is coming to a close. And the processing works best when I have the space to do the processing. I am very visual-spatial, so do a lot of my creative planning in the garden. And if I can’t see across the garden, I can’t fully envision the garden in a new way, which is critical to how I grow as a gardener and garden designer. And usually it’s the hot season crops dangling, drooping, and slowly senescing on their 7’ tall trellises that get in my way.
Even though the Italian Romas have been out for several weeks, this space still has a nagging vibe for me. Maybe it’s the remnant gem marigolds or perhaps it’s the rotting fruit lingering on the ground. But I leave the panels up so I can disinfect them with ease later this fall before storing them for winter.
Recently, I have come to believe we cling to our annual plants in a somewhat irrational way. By contrast, we expect — and even willingly accept — the dormant period of our perennials to arrive. Perhaps because they go off with colorful fireworks, I don’t know, but they seem easier to swallow than losing my cucumber plants in fall.
But of course because the seasonal shift isn’t the end, it’s the beginning. It’s the continuation of life. Perhaps because our perennials are still visible, in the form of bare tree branches that now reveal the squirrel nests and perched hawks. Or the dried echinacea seed pods that now feed the finches and chickadees, the fluffy goldenrod seeds that are drying on their plants, and the tufts of milkweed seeds exploding from their pods. What about those beautiful bare branches of espalier fruit trees that tell the story of seasons of John’s hands sculpting the trees into their double-cordon structure they now demonstrate.
Then we beg our annuals, those whose life cycles are truly ephemeral by nature, to outlive their natural life cycle. Just a few more weeks. Just a few more ripe tomatoes and cucumbers because I can’t endure winter without you.
It always crystallizes when I start to take the tomatoes down. I can see again. Literally see across the space. It is the singular gift I give myself sometime in late summer or early fall, giving myself garden space to breathe and process. Some years I pull them out by the first weekend in September. Other weekends an early frost might get them before I do, though that’s pretty rare these days. This summer was long, and I was ready but also avoiding. Not only was I avoiding taking them down, it morphed into avoiding the garden. It was all I could see when I spent time in the garden, those nagging tomato vines I needed but didn’t want to deal with. Disease had rampaged the planting since late July and I had more or less walked away from them.
Smothering my ability to take in the beauty of the changing seasons, that’s when you know it’s time to pull out your overgrown summer garden. I painstakingly curate a fall garden for a reason. For this very reason. To be able to take out a cornerstone of the garden and be left with an entirely new garden season growing right before my eyes.
And because of this, there’s something so joyful about this goodbye. Because we are not meant to be in every season at once. I think gardeners appreciate life’s fleeting nature, and many of us use it to help heal us. Help teach us about the life and death cycle. I’m delighted that we are finally welcoming the new season and fully saying our grateful goodbyes to the summer crops.
I’m ready for the shift, the looser timelines for harvesting and processing, and the unobstructed garden views because the vining crops are absent. It is slowly returning to that familiar blank winter slate, which means I can start to mentally build next summer’s garden as we close this season out. I need this open space for my creativity, as much as I need the summer garden to fuel the ideas and dreams that are about to germinate in me to be realized in future years.
