Mid August in Michigan is summer with a breath of autumn in it. Our weather has been cooler than usual this summer – tomatoes are still rolling in, but more slowly than usual; the squash seem unaffected. I cook them together, with onion and bacon, then mix it into spaghetti. Yum.
Out on the deck, this is the first time my nasturtiums have exploded like this, keeping the marigolds company in splendor. Is it the weather? It’s been more like spring than summer, which is especially strange compared with how hot it is elsewhere across the country.
Bugs, sadly,, are flourishing in my yard. The Japanese beetles are easy to spot, pick off, and drown in a dish of soapy water, but whatever the crickety chewers are, I never find them. Only the damage they’ve done, curse them. Have they increased because of the weather, or is it that the new fox family has cut back on the bird population? I won’t spray insecticides, out of concern for the bees. The bees are crazy about my zinnias, and ecstatic about the large-leafed mountain mint in the front yard, that blooms from now till frost. Bees can be a little hard to see in photos – there are two in this picture – but in real life the whole mountain mint patch is a blur of dozens of them. Busy doesn’t tell the half of it.
Meanwhile, the deer were eating my rudbeckia in the front yard, so I planted some inside the fenced garden. So of course now they’re leaving the ones out front alone. Well, if that’s what it takes… I saw an eight point buck under the crabapple tree yesterday, but that’s okay if the deer eat the crabapples. Keeps them out of the flowerbeds. I still resent it, though, that with all the bucks tromping through my yard, rubbing bark off the trees and decimating the hydrangeas, not one has had the courtesy to drop his antlers in my yard.
The buck had left when I went outside with my camera. Beside the front door the ceratostigma has begun to flower, but overhead the leaves of the weeping cherry have started to turn and fall. The front path and the driveway are edged with blue and maize. Football season can’t be far behind.
A gardener is always happy to see the flowers on blueberry bushes, tomato vines, and squash plants that will grow into good things to eat. It’s a joy, but mainly a practical consideration.
Up here on my deck where I will see them all the time, I’ve planted flowers whose whole point is to be beautiful. They are attractive to bees, hummingbirds, and butterflies, yes, but more modest flowers would please those pollinators just as well.
There’s evidence that people have valued flowers for more than producing food, for thousands of years. Traces of flowers have been found in paleolithic tombs. There are very few drawings of flowers in cave art, but once we get to the age of agriculture flowers are everywhere: in murals, reliefs, jewelry designs, pottery, and then in our oldest, most sacred texts. “I am the Rose of Sharon and the Lily of the Valley” says one Testament; “Behold the lilies of the field,” says the other, “not Solomon in all his glory was arrayed as one of these.”
They’re not talking about useful date palms or parables of vineyards here. They’re talking about beauty, specifically useless beauty, in the expectation that readers will agree. Did early hunter-gatherers have no time to stop, while searching for food, to pay attention to the inedible? It takes time, as Georgia O’Keefe said, to see something small like a flower. Or maybe they did see, love, and gather them, but being flowers no trace of them stayed behind.
I love the way Maria Newman set this poem of mine to music. You can listen to it 
Robin Richstone 