About composerinthegarden

A composer by vocation, a gardener by avocation. My garden and my life as a composer are deeply intertwined - the yin and yang of my creative life. . .

If there was no tree this year

Posted on December 12, 2025 by composerinthegarden

As we decorate, it occurs to me that a Christmas tree holds so much more than ornaments. Resting on all those boughs is a treasure trove of memories that remain long after the tree is gone and Christmas itself is over for another year. ~Nita Prose, The Mistletoe Mystery

It is no secret to anyone who knows me that I love Christmas. I have since I was a child, and as an adult, it has become an entire season for making music, decking the halls and celebrating with friends and family. In the 1980’s my husband and I performed as a high tech musical duo for several overseas tours with the DOD/USO, entertaining the men and women who served in the armed forces far away from home.

Hand carved desk sign from the Philippines

One year, we did a seven week Asian tour that stretched over Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve – honestly, I didn’t expect to miss the holidays. But when Christmas Eve arrived while we were in the Philippines, I shed a few tears of homesickness. After our concert that night, we were invited to a local Christmas Eve service in a newly completed mahogany cathedral. It was magnificent, this cathedral with no walls, open to the warm night air and dark skies filled with a million stars. We were humbled and grateful when we were treated as guests of honor. While singing Silent Night by candlelight accompanied by young girls playing guitars, I couldn’t help but think of that lovely song’s first performance in 1818 for a Christmas Eve service in Austria. It was written to be accompanied by guitar when the church organ broke.

That was a Christmas I will never forget – no trees, no presents, no decorations, but brimming over with unfamiliar but delicious food, bountiful good will, the kindness of strangers, and a midnight sky outlined by palm trees swaying in the breeze between mahogany columns. When we returned home from the tour, I promised, like Scrooge, that I would always “keep Christmas” and I have. I even wrote a song inspired by that special moment.

I will honor Christmas in my heart and try to keep it all the year. ~Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

This year will be another memorable Christmas for me. Last week, I began the deep house cleaning that I do before decorations go up. In my enthusiasm, I slipped on a wet tile floor, thereby performing an impromptu cheerleader split. Ouch. An ambulance ride and several days in the hospital revealed that my hamstring was torn and that I had several months of bedrest and sofa lounging ahead of me. My first night at home, I went through all five stages of grief in a few hours and then resigned myself to a quiet winter of healing and restoration. No Christmas trees, no lights, no bows, no ribbons, no wreaths. No snow filled adventures in the garden with Pixie and worst of all, no sitting, at least for a while. The many guests who were coming here for Christmas dinner have been redirected to my niece’s house while Pixie, Bill and I will have a quiet feast at home.

Lest you pity me, I’ve already made the necessary mental and emotional adjustments and have come to see this is an opportunity to consider new avenues of creativity and to plan for the coming garden season. Since I can only stand for a short time or recline at this point, no holiday cards are going out and no new garden videos will be posted until I regain mobility and am able to sit at a computer. That said, I offer instead my Christmas video from last year that uses Christmas in my Heart as its soundtrack – the story of that beautiful Christmas Eve spent so far away from home. (my apologies for the repeat to those of you who have seen it before!)

And if you want to see and hear Bill and me as our duo Aergo in the 1980’s, watch this historical music video of us performing Free the same year we did that memorable tour.

Here’s wishing each and everyone of you a holiday season filled with joy, wonder and happy celebrations, no matter where you find yourself. Peace ❤️

Autumn – the beautiful denouement

Posted on November 23, 2025 by composerinthegarden

Denouement is a French word that literally means the action of untying, from a verb meaning to untie. Noun: the outcome of a complex sequence of events

The leaves have untied themselves from the trees, or perhaps they were gently let go. Generously covering the garden beds and the forest floor, they color the world in tones of gold, orange, rust, and brown while returning the nutrients to the earth in an ancient process of release, decay and regeneration.

Autumn was a long languorous process, with its first hesitant steps in September proceeding through stages of leaf color change and ultimate descent to the earth.

Every day, the stroll through the garden was different. The early morning sun could cast fiery color and deep shadows or it could be filtered through a gentle mist that saturated the leaves and enhanced the rich range of autumnal color.

At last the storms and winds prevailed and the fall of leaves over a few days and weeks was spectacular. I was able to capture some of the magical moments of this process in video.

You may be in the southern continents where spring is now emerging, or in a tropical zone where there is no autumn. The earth is a wide and wonderful place and I have been privileged to see much of it in person. Yet, there is something about autumn in the northern continents that tugs at my heart, the dramatic shift in color and the subtle earthy scents of a world renewed by the long arc of seasonal change. Wherever you are on this planet, I hope that you can savor the beauty and sweetness of denouement, the end of one season and the beginning of another.

The beauty around us

Posted on September 30, 2025 by composerinthegarden

Every day I see or hear something that more or less kills me with delight, that leaves me like a needle in the haystack of light. ~Mary Oliver

After a seven week-long drought, four days of slow steady rain arrived exactly on the September equinox. The constant rain healed the deep cracks of dried earth and gradually refreshed and revived the trees, plants, and wildlife. Constant morning fog was catnip to this photographer.

The sweet smell of dry earth refreshed by rain, known as petrichor, filled my senses for days. The woodland path held that scent the longest, the first place Pixie and I explore each morning.

The ferns and sedges came back to life quickly, as green as if it were spring again.

The circle garden was showing some tattered damage from the weather extremes, but somehow looked gloriously lush in the fog.

I was struck by the layers and textures in this photo, so I decided to create a black and white version.

In some ways, I like this one better, as it emphasizes the layers and depth as well as the range from light to dark in this part of the garden. What do you think?

In contrast, the copper corner was a riot of color that required the full spectrum treatment.

Everywhere I walked, everywhere I looked, I was surrounded by notes of beauty. I began to notice the smallest lovely detail and the largest sweep of color and texture. I was walking through a liminal moment in time, the earth balanced between a change in seasons while the fog seemed to stretch and elongate that moment in an otherworldly fashion.

I tried to capture those moments of beauty in the garden with this video, hosted by the inimitable Miss Pixie.

And finally, I was editing photos for this post on my back deck when I suddenly realized that the late afternoon light had changed to a rosy glow. I looked up from the laptop and saw glimpses of a vibrant sunset through the trees. Entranced, I spent the next half hour simply watching the sunset deepen and finally fade. I’m not adept at taking sunrise or sunset photos but my friend Mary Pegher is. With her permission, I’m including one of her stunning images of sunrise over a foggy lake in our nearby county park. Oddly enough, I had asked Mary if I could include her photo in this post a day before I experienced that beautiful sunset. Synchronicity lives. Photo credit: ©Mary Pegher 2025 Used with permission.

I hope you are having a marvelous change of seasons wherever you live and that you find yourself surrounded by moments of beauty in the coming days.

The August garden – imperfectly perfect

Posted on September 6, 2025 by composerinthegarden

The garden in late summer is an odd contradiction of flowers swarmed by feasting pollinators Bumblebees on Echinacea and plants, having fulfilled their seasonal life cycle, now tipping into senescence. Dead leaf caught in grass inflorescence

There is no stopping this process – it is life in the garden and the world, the dynamic of change and imperfection.

One of the basic rules of the universe is that nothing is perfect. Perfection simply doesn’t exist. . . Without imperfection, neither you nor I would exist.
~ Stephen Hawking

Without the cycle of organic death and decay, the moss and mushrooms would have no place to grow and thrive.

Mushrooms growing on a mossy log

Tucked in the brown stems of a native iris that bloomed in May, a spider web is strung with drops of rain like a miniature Indra’s Net in the garden.

Long gone is the youthful beauty of June and July, when everything was fresh and colorful. But every day I treasure the richness and wildness of late summer, the garden overflowing with abundance.

The lines of the paths and arches are now blurred by plants freely growing past their boundaries.

Late blooming perennials like the hardy begonia promise fresh new flowers, Hardy begonia buds

while an annual amaranth drapes to the ground with a full season’s worth of bloom. Amaranth flowers

Late summer, more than any other time in the year, contains that full circle of seasons, a crescendo of life well-lived, the ebb and flow of a garden in all its imperfectly perfect beauty. Enjoy this stroll through the garden buzzing with life in August.

I wish you joy in the inherent wildness underlying this season of abundance, growth, and change.

The color of summer

Posted on August 17, 2025 by composerinthegarden

I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music. ~Joan Miró

The garden was lush and green in July and overflowing with colorful plants. Cool foggy mornings are a special joy, wrapping the garden in quiet. They create rich moments of saturated color that enspell me and often make me late for appointments, as I cannot bear to leave such a gift of beauty.

Color fills my sight at every step through the garden and I revel in it. Miró was right about color and music and poetry. Tone poems are the stuff of musical artistry and if I get it right, the whole garden becomes a tone poem, an artistic romance realized in the color and texture and juxtaposition of plants. And the fireflies add an extra magical note. Here’s a cinematic look at the garden in July, beginning with flowers and ending with fireflies.

Of course, poems and paintings and written music don’t really change over time, but the garden certainly does. It is more like a dance than a painting, perhaps starting awkwardly like a preadolescent but then coming into its own moment of time. I am constantly amazed how it can change overnight – new color, shifting light, some plants finishing their solos while others step forward.

Copper corner

Daylily ‘El Desperado’

Daylily ‘Persian Ruby’

The sounds of summer have changed as well. The birds are done raising their broods and their songs have given way to the constant hum of cicadas during the August days and the pulsing rhythms of katydids at night. The katydid songs in my midnight woods are captured in the audio clip below.

I’ve been spending mornings on my upper deck lately. As the larger gardens gather their strength after a late summer haircut, I find joy in the color that is more constant in this little retreat tucked among the treetops. The winged ones find their way to this garden in the sky and the cherry tomatoes that thrive there are a delicious surprise at happy hour.

In spite of heat, drought, wild thunderstorms, and fog, this summer’s garden has been a joyful place to be. How is summer treating you?

composerinthegarden

Gardening in harmony with nature

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