Six on Saturday: Fruits of the Season

Figs

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Gardens teach us many things.  Like any other education, you might want to believe you’ve learned everything there is to know; but the next week, the next semester, the next season, the next garden proves how much we still have to discover.  Gardening is a slow study; more than a lifetime can master.  And it can not be rushed.

One of the first lessons one grasps, an understanding that shades and colors all others, comes when one understands the nature of passing time.  Like a precisely choreographed dance routine, a garden unfolds and ripens within the context of time.

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Begonia grandis, perennial Begonia finally blooms by late summer.

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The wisdom of all the ancient schools is written within a season in the garden.  It is all there for those who will read it.  But only those who pause, and observe, and look for it will find it.  Like a ripening grape hidden under a leaf, knowledge grows in plain sight and yet also remains cloaked to a casual glance.

This is the season of fruition and ripening.  All of the promises and hopes that built through the winter and spring are maturing, now, into reality.

The hazelnut tree dances and shakes as squirrels scamper through its branches.  The ripening nuts satisfy with loud pops and crackles as a squirrel’s strong jaws crush them and the pieces rain down to the ground.  The nuts will be gone before they ripen, crushed into green fragments, snacks lying there waiting for other small animals to find.  A single huge buckeye pod swells in the upper garden.  all the others have been carried away already, or fallen, not quite mature.

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Muscadine grapes will soon turn dark purple as they ripen. These grow near the back door, in easy reach.

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Green figs ripen high in the branches of our fig tree and swelling fox grapes hang in curtains from their vines stretching across the canopy.  It is that time of year when golden Black-eyed Susans finally open and tight buds swell atop stalks of butterfly ginger lilies.  The perennial Begonias have finally bloomed, and branches of beautyberry are thick with tiny green fruits.  In another few weeks they will ripen to brilliant purple before they, too, disappear to feed the animals who make our garden their home.

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Butterfly Ginger Lily will begin its season of bloom this week.

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For as everything ripens, so it also will fade in time.   The first hints of autumn have already brought a scarlet tinge to the dogwood leaves.  Collapsed Hibiscus flowers lie crumpled on the ground.  moonflowers bloom for a night, filling the patio with radiant white flowers and their intoxicating perfume.  By noon of the following day they have finished.   Time measures the rhythm of each growing thing in the garden, just as time measures our rhythms, too.

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Abundant rain has made this a good growing season here in Coastal Virginia.  Leaves are large and lush.  Japanese stilt grass fills in any space not cultivated, mown or mulched with its exotic, bamboo like leaves.  I was wandering through the paths today and discovered a rare surprise:  nature sown ferns.  There in the path, arising from a clump of moss, was a perfect little fern I never planted.  What a gift; what a little miracle of chance and opportunity and exuberance.  Later, camera in hand, I found some more.  I wonder now how many more little ferns may be growing in hidden, moist places, growing in their own rhythms from spore to frond.

This week the garden has grown nearly to its peak of lushness.  Paths have closed as plants reach from one side to the other to touch one another, and perhaps to soak in a bit more sunlight.  Late summer flowers come into bloom, vines stretch themselves ever further, some sprouting new leaves to replace ones lost in July.  Cuttings root, buds form and shrubs expand.  Goldfinches harvest seeds from faded flowers even as fallen leaves litter the street.

Every ending balances a beginning.  Time’s pendulum swings in a never ending cadence, marking nature’s pulse.  After long years we finally feel it and harmonize to its beat, at long last learning to see each moment as fully perfect and perfectly ripe.

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Moonflowers, Ipomoea alba

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Woodland Gnome 2020

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Beautyberry, Callicarpa hybrid

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Visit Illuminations, for a daily quotation and a photo of something beautiful.

Many thanks to the wonderful ‘Six on Saturday’ meme sponsored by The Propagator

Sunday Dinner: Exercise of Imagination

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“What I’ve always found interesting in gardens

is looking at what people choose to plant there.

What they put in. What they leave out.

One small choice and then another,

and soon there is a mood,

an atmosphere, a series of limitations,

a world.”

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Helen Humphreys

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“When tended the right way,

beauty multiplies.”

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Shannon Wiersbitzky,

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“Humility, and the most patient perseverance,

seem almost as necessary in gardening

as rain and sunshine,

and every failure must be used

as a stepping-stone

to something better.”

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Elizabeth von Arnim

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“It is only our limited time frame

that creates the whole “natives versus exotics” controversy.

Wind, animals, sea currents, and continental drift

have always dispersed species into new environments…

The planet has been awash in surging, swarming species movement

since life began.

The fact that it is not one great homogeneous tangled weed lot

is persuasive testimony to the fact

that intact ecosystems are very difficult to invade.”

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Toby Hemenway

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“I’d love to see a new form of social security …

everyone taught how to grow their own;

fruit and nut trees planted along every street,

parks planted out to edibles,

every high rise with a roof garden,

every school with at least one fruit tree

for every kid enrolled.”

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Jackie French

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“Dandelions, like all things in nature,

are beautiful

when you take the time

to pay attention to them.”

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June Stoyer

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“Gardening is like landscape painting to me.

The garden is the canvas.

Plants, containers and other garden features

are the colors. I paint on the garden of canvas

hoping to create a master piece with my colors.”

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Ama H.Vanniarachchy

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Photos by Woodland Gnome 2019

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“Half the interest of the garden

is the constant exercise of the imagination.”

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Mrs. C.W. Earle

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“A visitor to a garden sees the successes, usually.

The gardener remembers mistakes and losses,

some for a long time,

and imagines the garden in a year,

and in an unimaginable future.”
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W.S. Merwin

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Sunday Dinner: In the Shadows

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“There is strong shadow

where there is much light.”

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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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“To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow.

For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly

as when one longs to taste it,

and when is the taste refracted

into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth,

and when do our senses know any thing so utterly

as when we lack it?

And here again is a foreshadowing –

– the world will be made whole.

For to wish for a hand on one’s hair

is all but to feel it.

So whatever we may lose,

very craving gives it back to us again.”

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Marilynne Robinson

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“One realized all sorts of things.

The value of an illusion, for instance,

and that the shadow

can be more important than the substance.

All sorts of things.”

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Jean Rhys

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“A garden should make you feel

you’ve entered privileged space –

– a place not just set apart but reverberant –

– and it seems to me that, to achieve this,

the gardener must put some kind of twist

on the existing landscape,

turn its prose into something nearer poetry.”

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Michael Pollan

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“It was such a pleasure

to sink one’s hands into the warm earth,

to feel at one’s fingertips

the possibilities of the new season.”

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Kate Morton

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“If you wish to make anything grow,

you must understand it,

and understand it in a very real sense.

‘Green fingers’ are a fact,

and a mystery only to the unpracticed.

But green fingers

are the extensions of a verdant heart.”

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Russell Page

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“The green thumb is equable

in the face of nature’s uncertainties;

he moves among her mysteries

without feeling the need for control

or explanations or once-and-for-all solutions.

To garden well is to be happy

amid the babble of the objective world,

untroubled by its refusal to be reduced

by our ideas of it,

its indomitable rankness.”

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Michael Pollan

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“To love a swamp, however,

is to love what is muted and marginal,

what exists in the shadows,

what shoulders its way out of mud

and scurries along the damp edges

of what is most commonly praised.

And sometimes its invisibility is a blessing.

Swamps and bogs are places of transition and wild growth,

breeding grounds,

experimental labs where organisms and ideas

have the luxury of being out of the spotlight,

where the imagination can mutate and mate,

send tendrils into and out of the water.”

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Barbara Hurd

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Woodland Gnome 2019

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“It is not hard to start a small garden,

all you need is a sapling, a planting pot,

a small bag of soil,

and regular watering.

There you go,

you helped cooling the earth down by one plant.”
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Noora Ahmed Alsuwaidi

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Fabulous Friday: White Butterfly Ginger Lily

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The very first blossoms on our white butterfly ginger lilies opened yesterday morning.

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Their fragrance is indescribably sweet.  With pure white flowers over a long season,  they are one of the flowers we love most as summer slowly melts into fall.

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Our patch of ginger lily has grown a bit shaded over the years, and I see them leaning out for the sun.  By October they will be at least a foot taller, and covered in white flowers.

The hummingbirds love ginger lily flowers, too, and we’ve even seen hummingbirds feeding on them at dusk.

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These elegant perennials are one of the few ginger plants hardy this far north.  Hedychium coronarium grows in zones 11-7b, so we are right on the northern edge of their range.  Last winter was hard on them, and they were slow to return this summer.  In a good year, and in good sun, they can grow to 7′ high.

We are happy to see them coming into bloom now, and look forward to weeks of their beauty.

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Also blooming for  the  first  time  today is the red spider lily, Lycoris radiata.  After last night’s heavy rains, we expect to find many more stems emerging over the next few days.  These  bulbs  wait  for  a  good  soaking  to  finally  bloom in  late  August  or  September, often  after  a spell of  hot, dry weather.  Which  is  how  they  earn  their  other  common  name, hurricane  lily, when  they  suddenly  appear  after  a  big  storm .

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It is always interesting to watch the garden unfold day by day and week by week.  It is always changing, and there is always something to look forward to as the seasons come and go.

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Woodland Gnome 2018

Fabulous Friday: 

Happiness is Contagious; Let’s Infect One Another

Blossom XVII: Samhain Magic

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“And above all, watch with glittering eyes

the whole world around you

because the greatest secrets are always hidden

in the most unlikely places.

Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.”

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Roald Dahl

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“We do not need magic to transform our world.

We carry all of the power we need

inside ourselves already.”

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J.K. Rowling

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“I want to be magic.

I want to touch the heart of the world and make it smile.

I want to be a friend of elves and live in a tree.

Or under a hill.

I want to marry a moonbeam

and hear the stars sing.

I don’t want to pretend at magic anymore.

I want to be magic.”

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Charles de Lint

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Photos by Woodland Gnome 2016

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Blossom I

Blossom II

Blossom III

Blossom IV

Blossom V

Blossom VI

Blossom VII

Blossom VIII

Blossom IX

Blossom X

Blossom XI

Blossom XII

Blossom XIII

Blossom XIV

Blossom XV

BlossomXVI

Blossom VXIII