The season's sweet homestretch

The season winds down with a last burst of color. — Shamanic Shift/Creative Commons

There is nothing quite like the voluptuous abundance of the early fall garden when plants, sensing the relaxation of human control, run riot.

By now, we care less passionately about maintaining order in the beds — or secretly enjoy the garden unleashed and in vegetative crescendo. Blowsily overgrown, toppled onto their neighbors or splayed across the path, the vigorous survivors of summer are wild and beautiful in their chaos. If the once-crisp outlines of our garden schemes are blurred and overwritten, it hardly matters since the season will soon be over.

When I stand at the garden gate, I am undismayed that the pink Japanese anemones have tumbled onto the spires of the deep blue salvia since they harmonize so prettily, rosy disk and slender spear. I’m not unhappy that a single, wiry spider flower has insinuated itself among the tall white phlox since it is such a handsome interloper.

There’s a new pattern here, one not of my making, but one with layer on layer of texture and color in an intricate weave.

My several blue asters are thickly studded with tiny round buds just beginning to show color. Some grow right next to an especially lovely two-toned pink chrysanthemum that has fallen open at the center. Should I try to give it a corset of stakes and string, or should I just wait to see how this behemoth, now 36 inches across, looks when it flowers? It’s a toss-up, since sometimes nature arranges things far better than I ever could.

Now is the time to revel as well in the sheer massiveness of plants at the outer limits of their potential.

The ornamental grasses that were such wisps in spring are now big enough to conceal a car — or lose a spade in. The sunflowers have become giants, peeking over the fence at the neighbors, and the moon flower vine has draped the entry in curtains of foliage and scented blossoms. I remember when I could hold their seedling selves in one hand.

Enjoy fall’s lambent light. — popofatticus/Creative Commons,

Impressive as "big" can be, sometimes plants take it too far. The hyacinth bean vines, scrambling thickly on the arch became so overgrown that I had to bend low to enter the garden. The other day, I grabbed a ladder and a pair of pruning shears and cut them all down, making a mountain of green leaf and ropy stem.

No matter how meticulously we plot, every year the elements conspire to give us a garden different than the one we planned. The searing heat of midsummer claims the new, the small and the delicate. The rains beat down the weak-stemmed and the winds blow over the top-heavy. Mankind proposes, in other words, but Mother Nature always has the last word.

The heavily blooming, shrub-like spider plant beside the path to my back door was flattened by the blustery remnants of one of those summer storms. I thought it was a goner, but it's flowering still, leaning on the stiff stems of a salvia repositioned to support it.

There's no denying that the storm rains brought new life to the weeds, which have sprung up everywhere. Where they don't make themselves conspicuous, I'm turning a blind eye — frost will cut most of them down along with the plants they are crowding. I'm willing to let things go a little.

Some "weeds" will surprise you. I found the other day that the tall unknowns growing among the Siberian irises aren't thistle at all as I thought, but some self-sown, multi-stemmed bold yellow sunflower such as I have seen growing along roadsides. You never know what might fly in on the breeze or drop from the wing feathers of a bird.

Maybe the lesson of the garden in September is that it's too late to fret and fuss over what didn't go as planned, but not too late to enjoy the last savory bites of summer and early fall. It's fine at this late date to loosen the grip of control we gardeners like to wield over the plants we've brought to live with us.

Relax and enjoy them before the bitter winds blow and the cold drives us indoors. Sit awhile and witness the brimming profusion of color and scent in the smallest garden patch. Watch the honeybees at work, the butterflies on the wing and the dragonflies patrolling the paths. Too soon, you will long for just this thing: an hour or two to do nothing more than enjoy the garden you created this year, tangled stems, weedy bits and all.