The garden in late summer is an odd contradiction of flowers swarmed by feasting pollinators and plants, having fulfilled their seasonal life cycle, now tipping into senescence.

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.

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,

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

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.