August garden | 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.

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

Tag Archives: August garden

The August garden – imperfectly perfect

The color of summer