August is summer with a difference. Hours of daylight are still plentiful, but you can feel them drawing down, heading toward the equinox. No more strolling in the garden at ten p.m.; nights are cooler; but the harvest is rolling in. Tomatoes are coming into their own, and the squash – oh, the squash. I plant yellow crooknecks instead of zucchini so I have a chance to find them before they get as big as doorstops. Even so, they seem to have an amazing ability to be four inches long one day and twelve inches the next. I would be tempted to say they’re called squash because they squash anything else trying to grow near them, but being a wordsmith, of course I looked that up. One kind of squash comes from “quash,” a Middle English word now used chiefly for subpoenas, and the other from “asquutasquash,” from the Narragansett. It sounds like the Narragansett people taught the pilgrims how to eat some kind of squash they’d never seen before.
The Narragansetts would also have had blueberries, a native North American fruit. I came across an argument online about whether the Indians called them “starberries,” but was unable to delve into it because AI kept changing “starberries” to “strawberries.” Thanks, but I’m well aware that no one calls blueberries strawberries.
The flowers that produce seeds instead of fruit are also hard at work generating harvest. The seed pods of my California poppies are so elegant, I have sometimes tried to preserve them. They’d look lovely in a dried flower arrangement but they always burst open, their goal achieved despite my desires.
My zinnias produce new flowers and ripe seedheads in equal numbers right up till frost. They’re a mainstay of my bouquets, so I was disturbed one morning to find the petals munched off of a few of them. I spent some time searching carefully for miscreant bugs in need of control, but none appeared. A bit later, looking out the kitchen window, I laughed to see the riddle resolved: it was a goldfinch, ripping seeds out of the still-petalled seedheads. The petals fell to the deck, where they soon turned an inconspicuous brown. The stems bent over when he landed on them, but not so as to interfere with his snack. The really funny thing was that I was looking right at him thinking he was a bright yellow Cut and Come Again zinnia blowing slightly in the breeze, until he moved enough to show the black stripe on his wing. He was gone before I could get a photo of him at it.
After weeks of summer and fall bumping into each other in a jumble, fall seems to be emerging triumphant at last. The stags are about done destroying small trees by using them to rub the velvet off their antlers. I’m still waiting for one of them to graciously leave his shed antlers in exchange – seems like the least he could do. Maybe this will be the year.
Between the light frosts and the subsiding hours of sunlight most of my flowers and tomatoes are gone, but out in front, facing south, one rudbeckia plant persists. It’s not the only rudbeckia out there, but it’s the only one still blooming. A mystery of nature.
Over in the shady section, a single foxglove has re-bloomed. It was pink the first time, but has paled in the shortened hours of daylight. The foxgloves are spaced widely, so in their case it’s understandable that individuals may have different amounts of light, or shelter, or competition from other plants. Less mysterious.
Out in the fenced garden, once the tomatoes were gone, I planted lettuces in the cold frame. They’re flourishing. This is very satisfying to me as a gardener, but the flaw in the plan is that I really don’t eat much salad in cold weather.
That was the trouble with radishes too, until I learned that they can be cooked. How did I get to be as old as I am, and never knew this? They’re so cute out in the garden, with their little round, red shoulders peeking out of the dirt, and they demand so little in the way of warmth and sunlight, I can’t resist planting them when random space becomes available. I’m still working out the best recipes for them.
Meanwhile, the main path into my woods needed help. I spread several layers of the Sunday New York Times over the old path, poured a bucket of water over that so it wouldn’t blow around as I worked, and topped it with mulch. That will be one less thing to do come spring, when things to do are plentiful. As much as I love gardening, there comes a time when I really need a break. If spring is the reward for winter and harvest is the reward for spring, winter is the reward for three seasons of hard work. Just curl up with a good book and eat all those quarts of tomato sauce.
The late warm season continues. Most of the flowers are gone, but there’s still a lot of autumn color. The spirea planted in front is mostly down to bare branches, but this one in a pot on the deck is still in glory. This is odd, first because the front yard gets more sunshine, facing south, and the deck faces north; but also because roots in the ground get more protection from weather than roots in pots do. Nature surprises us whenever she wishes. The potted spirea is a volunteer – a pot of nigella was colonized by free-range spirea seed, and quickly became too lovely to remove. Here it is garnished by a couple of immigrant maple leaves, likely carried by whatever forces brought the spirea seed.
Here’s the donor tree for those maple leaves, with just a little left in its branches to continue decorating the yard.
My herb collection has a mixed response to autumn. I had to bring the basil indoors, but thyme and sage will persevere outside all the way to Thanksgiving. The pot of mint may not last quite so long, but meanwhile has collected its own leaf embellishment.
Meanwhile, after much inspection via the internet, I ordered a memorial stone for my wonderful cat, Zerlina. Many of those offered had elaborate decorations and extensive text, but none came up to Zerlina’s level of elegance. I chose one in her colors, with a soft shape. Not that a stone will be puffy, but hard angled edges seemed wrong. Doug came out to the garden with me while I buried her ashes in the center of the garden next to the thyme, and placed the stone on top. I needed the hugs. Then I sat for a while on my glider bench, thinking about her. The thyme will spread, and maybe I’ll encourage it to surround the whole stone. I haven’t decided yet, but thyme sounds like it belongs with memorials.
Then I went back into the house, where I picked up all the pumpkins and put them back in different places. I had to remember that things can change. And I found a sort of puffy one for the hearth.
I was puttering at my garden bench when I noticed a lot of bees whizzing past me. A little inspection revealed that they were coming from – and going to – a hole in the ground, just inches from where I stood. I set a large flower pot right up next to it, not to block them but to block me, from stepping into the nest. I’d seen a ground-bee colony once before, but had never looked up their lifestyles. This time I did: Mining Bees, genus andrena.
The local botanical garden says they’re important pollinators of the Michigan native black cherry tree, carrying 18 times more cherry pollen than other bees. I have several of these trees in my yard, including one that hangs over the deck and makes a total mess for a month while the cherries fall. The cherries are small with a tiny, thin layer of flesh around the pit, so you could boil them up for jelly but you can’t eat them unless you’re a chipmunk. I do like to watch how the chipmunks fight over the cherries though there are enough to feed a whole neighborhood of chipmunks, possibly for the whole winter. So human of them. It briefly occurred to me that if I got rid of the bees, maybe I’d be pestered with fewer cherries. But I find the industrious, focused little bees endearing, so that’s out. They’re also big on pollinating tomatoes – thank you, bees – but my tomato blossoms are definitely too few these days for this much bee traffic. What’s blooming now? I have lots of zinnias,
many marigolds,
some bee-shaped snapdragons. None of them mentioned in the article, and nope, no bees on these flowers.
It was hard to follow the bees in flight. They soared way up high before they traveled on, and I lost them in the sun. But scanning the yard, I thought I could see where they came down again. It wasn’t listed on the Bee Menu, but for heaven’s sake, isn’t this where you’d go if you were a bee – an Autumn Clematis, just bursting with bloom? I didn’t manage to catch them in this photo, but they were there. Busy, like all the best bees.
My friend Cindy is always a little sad when the rudbeckia bloom because in Michigan, she says, it means summer is almost over. But Labor Day is no longer the benchmark it once was, not even for schoolchildren, who are increasingly likely to go back to class in August. No one would say summer is over in August. And this year frost is not predicted for southeast Michigan until November, so I think she has plenty of summer left.
So do the fawns. I’m told they’re mostly born in June, but we don’t see them foraging in our yard until mid-July, and more of them in August. They will lose those spotted markings as they grow their winter coats, usually starting in September. It will be interesting to see when that happens this year.
Bumper Crop
I have a good lawn for deer and rabbits, full – if only accidentally – of diverse edible weeds. Looking out over it, especially when Charlie has just mowed, the lawn looks smooth and manicured. Appearances frequently deceive. For instance, this photo might look like a nuclear deer family, two fawns, a buck, and a doe. But four other the deer had already gone ahead into the woods before I got my camera out. The buck would have been bringing up the rear as usual, except that the fawns were lollygagging behind. But as soon as I made a tiny sound of satisfaction at getting this photo, their heads snapped up and the fawns leaped after the does, while Mr. Buck stood guard in case I made any moves. I didn’t. I was trying to see whether he was an eight point or a ten point, but he was gone before I could be sure.
My lawn has a lot of white clover in it, which some consider a weed but I do not. In my suburban childhood it was common for lawns to be seeded with half grass and half clover. Clover is sturdy, holding up well to children and pets; clover fixes nitrogen so you don’t need fertilizer; and clover flowers attract bees, which will pollinate your garden plants and fruit trees. Charlie was late mowing this week, because we had two days of Hurricane Beryl’s leftovers drenching Michigan with rain. Amazing that a hurricane came all the way from Africa to crash into Texas and charge up the Mississippi and Ohio River valleys to the normally hurricane-free Michigan. Many were the frantic sump pumps in Ann Arbor, but the sandy soil of my yard was up to the task. When it was over, everything was safe and green, green, green.
Besides the clover, there’s plantain in the lawn and purslane at the margins. Plantain, native to Europe, was called “white man’s footprint” by Native Americans: where the white man set his foot was where you found plantain. It’s not only edible to deer, it’s edible to us. Purslane is, too. My attempts to actually eat these plants have never worked out. Purslane leaves are small and have to be gathered in large quantities, and I found plantain, which grows flat against the ground, hard to clean. I magnanimously leave them for the deer, in spite of which they persist in eating things they really, really shouldn’t. For instance, milkweed. Milkweed is poisonous, but if you are a clueless fawn, well, just look at those big, juicy leaves. I assume it’s the fawns because I assume they don’t grow up if they eat the milkweed.
Deer sometimes also eat my rudbeckia, yarrow, and shasta daisies. Garden catalogs will tell you they shun these plants, but garden catalogs have never met my deer. Every evening or two, I walk through the yard with my trusty spray bottles of animal repellants, switching off now and then so the critters don’t get used to one of them. I almost dread to say so, for fear it will jinx their effectiveness.
The amount of rain in that storm varied a lot from one part of town to the next. I don’t currently have a working rain gauge, but friends and neighbors have measured anywhere from five to seven inches over two days. One curious thing I’ve noticed is more birds using the birdbath after a rainstorm. This seems totally counter-intuitive to me. Didn’t they shower in the rain? Is it easier to bathe when they’re already wet? Or maybe newly-fallen rain is more attractive to them than water that’s been sitting around for a few days. Not being a bird, I will never know.
One of the joys of the spring garden is surprise. Where did these ultra-fluffy, double pink columbine come from? Not only don’t I remember buying them, I don’t remember even knowing they existed. Could they have arrived as seeds embedded in bird droppings? Such an ignoble origin. Could there be a Johnny Columbineseed at large in Ann Arbor, spiriting unusual flowers into unsuspecting gardens under cover of night?
Then over here, how did one tiny patch of forget-me-nots take over the entire flowerbed, even crowding out weeds? A blue haze under the fading spikes of daffodil leaves, it manages to be really in your face despite such tiny petals. It should be called I-dare-you-to-forget-mes.
Moving around to the back yard, a flower pot that once held cosmos has come up with a crop of these little purple flowers, small enough to be violets but somehow I wasn’t convinced. Pansies were in the pot next to it last year. My garden books say four petals up and one down makes it a pansy, two petals up and three down is a violet. Two up, one down, and two sticking out to the side? Panselets?
And then there’s the asparagus patch. I’ve seen it every year since we moved into this house, but it still makes me laugh to see the way it comes up out of the ground, looking for all the world like someone has snuck out to the garden and stood a bunch of asparagus spears upright in the dirt as a practical joke. But no, they’re growing right out of the ground. The second joy of the spring garden: that dirt, water, and sunlight turn into food and beauty, whether the way we expected or not.
Robin Richstone 