They say there’s a “ten minute rule” in southeastern Michigan: if you don’t like the weather, wait ten minutes. It’s an exaggeration, but only somewhat. We have weather that slides up the Ohio river valley and weather that slides down from Canada, and they seem to have a lot of fun with each other. I left town for a few days with the yard looking like this,

and returned to find it looking like this.

Those are not black and white photos; that’s what it has today for “color.” It seems all the more amazing to me because I spent the previous forty years in Southern California, where there is only one weather forecast for May through November. I can recite it by heart, but will spare you. December through April aren’t much different.

My immediate task is to get out the rake and knock the wet, heavy snow off the branches of various shrubs before they break under its weight. This is fun – organizing my own mini-blizzards. I could grab the ends of the branches and shake them, but the rake keeps me far enough back that the snow doesn’t land on me.

The ground’s not frozen yet, but I’m still glad I got the bulbs planted before I left. The air is cold. A thin coating of ice gathers on the handles of my tools, and when I pick them up it melts coldly onto my gloves. But next week it could be (relatively) warm again.

I’ll let you know.

It takes a lot of walking in autumn leaves, planting bulbs, and puttering in the garden to get some peace these days amid the slogans and shouting. Nature, at least, is ready for change: leaves turn bright and fall away, juvie eagles are gone to fish in open water somewhere else. We’ve had a rainy October and the colors were late in coming, but here they are, lighting up trees before drifting down to mulch the winter ground, the end of one growing season and preparation for another.

Yard and garden give us concrete things to do to bring success, and I am grateful to them for that clarity: observe their needs, nurture them, and be rewarded with fruit and flowers, usefulness and beauty, which seem otherwise to be in short supply.

I have planted a hundred more bulbs in front of the house, and a few shrubs in the edges of the woods; I have a few more still to plant. I want glory to come bursting out of the dirt come April, making neighborhood dog-walkers stop and look up from the echo chambers of their smartphones, at least for a moment. I won’t collect their data and sell it to advertizers while they’re looking at my daffodils.

For something with such a material result, gardening is mysteriously satisfying to the spirit. Tomatoes can be beautiful, but I grow them to eat. I grow them for a material benefit to my physical body. But I buy most of the food I eat and could easily buy all of it; why do I garden? The transformation of dirt, water, seed, and sunlight into a substance nourishing to cell and sinew, supplying the gardener with the power to move, think, and write blog posts, is the most ordinary fact of existence on earth; still, the ripe tomato in my hand seems miraculous.

Gardens have been connecting people to the cosmos like this for as far back as we have stories about it. Time, our oldest literature tells us, began in a garden, and the garden was where we learned to tell good from evil. I’m still doing that in mine, sorting the processes that help my plants from those that hurt them. They aren’t always obvious, and it’s done mostly by trial and error. The triumphs of understanding, when they come, feel like sudden little windows opening into the great wide secrets that the whole universe has always known.

I went out to the garden to gather the green tomatoes, because a frost was predicted overnight. Ripening is what tomatoes do, and they will continue to do it indoors, slowly, without leaf or vine. It is in them to do it; they participate directly in that large universal scheme. The vines spent the night open to the cold sky and this morning they are withered, the blackened leaves of tomato plants sifted over by red leaves falling from the nearby maples. I stand in this wide sweep of time, lifted into the flow of seasons, and for the moment not even needing to make plans.

This is what some of that ambition led to. We ran out of New York Times and had to use packing paper, brown paper grocery bags, and random pieces of cardboard for the base. Many barrowloads of mulch later we had a lovely winding path with places to stop and look, or sketch, or sit. My idea was to mark out areas where certain plants could be encouraged or yanked out – confining (good luck) raspberry brambles here; spreading a fern bed (more likely) there. It also made it possible to visit the redbud and the kousa dogwood we’d planted back deep. If I can find more shrubby perennials this late I will plant them in the bends of the path, but it may have to wait for spring.

The woods are thinning out a little with autumn, but it seems to be way behind again this year. The only red in my yard is on the slowly flourishing late tomatoes. Maybe this is the new normal.

We put a white wrap around selected tree trunks to keep the deer from stripping the bark any more than they already have. I still wish, if they’re going to ruin my trees, they’d have the courtesy to shed their antlers where I could find them. With all the deer traffic in my yard, you’d think at least I could have some souvenirs.

The garden right now is Easy Street. Weeds and bugs have slowed down with the cooler nights and shorter days, while the tomatoes keep rolling in like it’s still mid-August. Mostly all I have to do is go out there with a gathering basket and let the gorgeous ripe delectable tomatoes fall into my open hands.

So of course I become ambitious. Shall I clean out the raspberry brambles taking over the little clearing in the woods where I like to sit and write? How about transplanting some of those ferns to the bare spot on the other side of the yard? Or starting a new crop of cilantro? Or readying the cold frame for a some cool-weather greens? Or mulching the heck out of places where I might want to plant more bulbs?

I did about half of those. The mulching was facilitated by Doug, who carted mulch by the

caryopteris

barrowfull. I’m using it to turn a weedpatch into a civilized bed of caryopteris and nepeta, two shrubby perennials that bloom blue in late summer. Doug also facilitated my tea break when, ambition satisfied, I plunked down into one of the new adirondack chairs he made. Tomorrow will be another Sunday, with another New York Times, and then more paper to mulch with. Perfect.

herb garden in august

There are many positive interactions between a newspaper and a garden. Stressful current events come at you more slowly when you read them on paper in natural daylight, while the peace and calm of the garden provide another focus when you need to stop and regain composure, so often the case these days. Raise your eyes from the paper, look out across the garden, admire your handiwork, and muse on what to do next. The garden is a place you can always do something about.

Sunday is the best day for this, actual news being confined to one section. Among the other sections you can read about gardens to visit, find reviews of gardening books, see photos of garden parties in rich people’s back yards, and maybe find a few ads for useful things to wear or use while gardening. Apart from all that, you can read the Sunday Times for the quality of the writing. Felicitous phrases abound. How can you not love reading that morning people are “firing up coffeepots at an hour usually reserved for mating fruit bats.”

And then you get to the prize at the bottom of the Crackerjack box: the crossword puzzle. In especially lucky weeks you get the acrostic, too.

When you finish extracting information from the paper, you can put it to one more use. Take the paper, a bucket of water, and a wheelbarrow full of mulch out to the next area where you’d like to kill a swath of weeds or grass, lay the paper three or

mulch with nyt

four sheets thick right over the weedy grassy whatever, water it from the bucket so it doesn’t blow around, and spread the mulch on top about three inches thick. With a nice big paper like the Sunday New York Times you can cover a lot of ground. Nothing will grow up through it. It’s satisfying to see facts stamping out chaos.

mulch without nyt

I was just settling in to weed the shade garden under the wild black cherry tree, when I noticed an errant overhanging lilac branch and raised my clippers into it. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a robin – a robin! – dive-bombed me, bopping me on the head and pooping on my cheek as it flew away. I had an extraordinarily close-up view of a wing and a red breast for probably half a second, and was so startled I dropped the clippers.

the shade garden

And then I started laughing. Here I was with my large size (compared to a bird) and my sharp pointed tools, but the robin easily won. When you’re been pooped on by a bird you absolutely have to stop what you’re doing and go wash it off. It might not be effective against other predators, but it was an adaptation well tailored to human-bearing suburbs.

Once I was cleaned up, I went back out to see where the nest was; because the only thing that could motivate a small bird to attack something like me, was danger to its offspring. The nest was about ten feet from where I raised my clippers. I wanted to be sure so I could stay clear of it, and not upset such a devoted parent again.

I’ve watched robins dive-bomb the eagle when he sat too near a nest, and I thought they were very brave. Knowing my own intentions, I don’t think of myself as a potential threat – but how would the robins know my intentions? How would any creature? They guess, and they err on the side of safety. It’s so easy to be wrong.

Though the garden is bunny-proofed and deer-proofed, there is no proofing against squirrels. They leap around in the treetops as a feint, then parachute into the garden. Though they mostly confine themselves to planting and digging up acorns and walnuts, this is the second year in a row that I’ve had them marauding among my tomatoes.

So I was pleased to go out the other morning and find Juvie Eagle sitting on one of the fenceposts, peering into the garden. I didn’t see him make any squirrel strikes, but I didn’t see any squirrels, either. Not anywhere in the whole yard. There were only the usual jays and robins making a racket and dive-bombing Juvie, who shrugged them off. After a while he spread his glorious wings and flew up onto the roof of the house, out of sight from where I stood.

It seems to me the birds have the best case to make for their behavior. The squirrel doesn’t need to be snacking on tomatoes when he should be stashing nuts for the winter, and I won’t exactly starve if I have only a small crop of tomatoes to eat. But the jays and robins are protecting their offspring. The eagle, though they’re naturally suspicious of him, is not attacking them or their nests. In fact, I don’t know what he’s doing. What goes on in the mind of an eagle when it sits on a fencepost for half an hour, turning its head up and back, flicking its wings a little, on a day in summer when the temperature and humidity are human-perfect? I tend to fill the mouths of all these critters with my thoughts, but they sing, and whistle, and screech, their own tunes.

It reminds me of this poem by my friend Alicia Ostriker. I wonder if my eagle would agree with her dog.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/12/20/wrong-about-the-horse

The three-year juvie eagle was sitting atop my chimney this morning. An assortment

Mr. Juvie Eagle, not bald yet

of small birds that nested nearby were dive-bombing him in panic and outrage, trying to drive him off. He was busy with a very extensive grooming session, beaking and smoothing away at his chest, his shoulders, his tail, completely unperturbed by these dinky birds, whose eggs and young would not have made a decent snack for him.

And so the National Bird held himself above the fray.

Down on the deck my Fourth of July decorations are still flying. There was a time when I was not enthusiastic about the flag. During the Viet Nam war, supporters of the war adopted the flag as their emblem, defining patriotism as refusal to evaluate whether one’s country was perhaps making a mistake. They hogged up the flag to the point that you couldn’t be seen with one, without being taken for a war supporter. My anti-war friends and I shunned the flag.

Then one day Senator George McGovern, a prime opposer of that war, appeared with a flag pin on his lapel. The assembled reporters went wild, assuming it meant he had switched sides. “Why are you wearing that flag?!” they called out. Senator McGovern smiled innocently. “It’s my flag,” he said.

So I learned not to cede worthy symbols to opponents.

It’s as true now as it was then, that you have no claim to loving the nation if you hate half its inhabitants. And as Peter, Paul, and Mary once sang, “there is no freedom in a land where fear and hate prevail.”

I watched the eagle for a long time, hoping to get a photo when he took flight. But when he was all preened and ready, he swooped off the other side of the roof, out of my field of vision. I couldn’t see him as he went, but I have faith that he was flying.

Milkweed in the herb garden

Orange is my least favorite color. Though I’m fond of it in marigolds and pumpkins, and have been known to appreciate a field of California poppies, I generally avoid orange flowers. So when I wanted to help out the monarch butterflies (which also get a pass on orange), I tried planting pink or white flowered milkweed. Whether through mislabeled seed packets, chance, mutation, or chicanery, what I got was orange flowered milkweed. I was feeling grumpy about this until I discovered that a monarch butterfly had found it.

I watched the monarch fanning herself over the flowerheads, lighting here and there along the way. As she flapped her wings I thought of the butterfly effect: the idea that the small shiver of her wingbeats in the local atmosphere could propagate, cascading, until it influenced an entire tornado forming – or not forming – somewhere else. It is a very pleasing demonstration of the interconnectedness of separate actions, and inspires hope that small local acts can lead to big changes in the country, or even the world.

Milkweed – what an innocuous-sounding plant. But the reason the monarch caterpillars thrive by feasting on it, is that it supplies their bodies, and those of the butterflies they become, with a foul-tasting, heart-stopping steroid that deters or destroys would-be butterfly predators. The butterfly, all delicate stained glass flutter, has this power at her core. No one talks about this butterfly effect, but it is proven, rather than supposed, and of much greater importance to the butterfly. Just thinking about it, I feel strong.