The Disappearing Garden

Little by little the garden is being cut back. The spent perennials, their flowering long past, have been cut back, their sad remains tucked into the compost pile. The compost grows, it thrives. It's that time of year. Again. And Holy Cow! Who can believe the time has gone by so awfully fast. Seems such a short time ago we were frantically planting, celebrating when it rained, anxiously filling up watering pails to ensure things didn't shrivel too badly in dry weather.

Then everything began to come into their own season, and the gardens teemed with new life, with colour, texture, bravura. And we loved every minute of it. Despite that there never seemed sufficient time to relax and really enjoy it, not just on the fly. Because the picking off of weeds is never-ending. And there is always something that has to be done to help plants look their best. And such pride when one day's activities, then another and another leads to an overall look that satisfies the creative compulsion.

Can't complain, though, not really. It seemed, from one succession of perennial bloom to another, that something was always coming up and calling attention to its brassy display, its verdant presence. We loved watching, hearing songbirds belting it out in our fruit trees, the goldfinches and robins bathing in the birdbath, the hummingbirds flitting among the flowers, and chickadees landing here and there on the deck.

And lots of butterflies, this year, all of them welcome and appreciated for that special anchoring accent here and there. Now, it's well and truly autumn, although we've still got lots of flowering going on, very impressive indeed. Plants have been tricked into thinking we're just approaching summer, not fall. It's the unseasonably warm weather. Enough so that the bergenia are sending up their springtime stalks of bright pink flowers.

Carnations are still blooming, and the huge dahlia has more blooms and buds waiting to burst into bloom than we've ever seen before. The tall zinnias, heavy with tight-petalled, brilliant flowers vie with the dahlia for presence; hard to choose one over the other for perfection. We've seen some truly great spiders making their presence in the gardens this year. I've tried time and again to get a photo of one spider in particular, success eludes.

The roses are still heartily blooming, especially Big Ben, one of our oldest and most reliable performers. Although our two brilliantly pink-petalled Faery Queens are, as always, unstoppable. And the morning glories, although late this year, have wound their tendrils in, up and around everything they could reach. The black-eyed Susan vines have outreached expectations. And the begonias, those amazing ever-blooming specimens are beyond reproach.

We're entering the no-going-back zone of weather, however. And from then on in, it'll be relentless cutting back and clearing away in preparation for the long frigid sleep of winter. Too sad.

And then there's next spring!