Month: November 2025

November Clouds

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Doug thinks of birthdays in astronomical terms. Congratulations on completing another orbit, he’ll say, and I picture myself zooming out into space, floating planet-like against a background of dark sky and bright stars, hair wafting, skirt billowing. Whereas in fact, on the evening completing this particular orbit, we were having dinner at a luxurious restaurant, consuming the products of sunlight on farm fields and pastures filtered through ten thousand years of agriculture and the hands of chefs and waiters, as anchored to earth as we could be as it rolled us through the universe.

When we look at the sky we don’t usually consider that we’re in it, even when clouds come all the way down to the ground. Sometimes we see in those clouds a metaphor for gloom, sadness, and unhappy fates; at other times an end to drought, a gift to farmers, a respite from heat. Was the storm coming or going in this photo? There was certainly a real answer, a weather map answer, at the moment the photo was taken. Lifted from its moment as a photo is, we can give it any story that suits us where we are now. 

Here’s another beautiful Michigan scene, enhanced, I would say, by clouds. It’s a local farm’s You Pick flower patch in its days of former glory, gone to standing seedheads, offering nourishment to such small creatures as hang on here while we orbit through the winter. The clouds, again, connect us to the sky.

Or here are some extremely, maybe even comically, muscular clouds, seen through my workroom window in their brief existence. I expected drama from such clouds – maybe a tornado? Hailstones? Nothing happened; they dissolved into airy nothing, the natural element of clouds. 

It’s an old saying, that you need clouds sometime, to appreciate the clear blue skies when they come. I say appreciate the clouds. They do wonderful things with the sun, which you can’t look at without their intercession. They decorate the sky, giving us a reason to keep our focus upward. I mean the real clouds here, but feel free to apply it as a metaphor wherever you need one. Happy orbiting.

Resilience

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Our first frost happened a couple of nights ago, drawing a map of hardiness, protection, and resilience across the garden. The hardy perennials, like these asters, didn’t notice, originating as they do in climates that reward ability to cope with winter. Tender annuals, like my basil and tomatoes, withered and keeled over. I had already brought into the house several pots of basil and all the green tomatoes still on the vine, in anticipation of this. These are plants whose ancestors never met with winter weather, and had no need to adapt to it.

Then there are hardy annuals, like petunias. They can resist the kind of winters we had in Southern California, which did sometimes include a light frost in late December. They seem to be familiar with this and will persevere through it, but when the hard, serious frost comes, they succumb. Marigolds and pansies are also in this category. Okay, so far all is neat and clear in the life cycles of my garden plants.

But then we have this scenario from the way back of the garden. Marigolds, check, still abloom as expected. But there’s that cosmos standing tall and happy, while all the other cosmos in the garden is dead. Sort of looks like the marigolds talked them into it. Good story, but the reality is different. There’s a tall black cherry tree just outside the picture, leaning over the garden fence enough to shelter the cosmos from the sky. The same thing that makes this part of the garden too shady for plants like tomatoes, expected to ripen fruit, offers protection from light frost.

So the resilience a plant shows in the face of frost can be inborn, or it can be situational. It’s the job of the gardener to situate the plant where it can have its best outcome. Here’s some milkweed in process of its best outcome, which is not the propagation of Monarch butterflies, but the launching of its frothy seeds into chilly autumn air that carries them into the future.