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.
Main Areas: Garden Writing; Sustainable Gardening; Homegrown Harvest
Published Books: “Terra Two”; “Generations”; "The Plant - A Steampunk Story"; "Letters to Lelia"; "Fair"; "Door Number Eight"; "A Year and A Day"; "Möbius' Code"Career Focus: Author; Consummate Gardener;
Affiliation: All Year Garden; The Weekly Gardener; Francis Rosenfeld's Blog
I started blogging in 2010, to share the joy of growing all things green and the beauty of the garden through the seasons. Two garden blogs were born: allyeargarden.com and theweeklygardener.com, a periodical that followed it one year later. I wanted to assemble an informal compendium of the things I learned from my grandfather, wonderful books, educational websites, and my own experience, in the hope that other people might use it in their own gardening practice.