I look out the window and what I see is a stark contrast to what I saw two months ago. My little garden is perishing; my little backyard is strewn with brown, amber, and butterscotch-coloured fallen leaves from nearby maple, sycamore, oak, and birch. The buzzing bees, hummingbirds, goldfinches, doves, and blue jays are all gone. The season has arrived.
I smell the fragrance of fall in the air. The morning air is crisp, the leaves are turning, and the temperatures are dipping. The quilts are out, the comforters are in. Sweaters, jackets, and scarves have been pulled out of the closet in preparation for the cooler days ahead. While the aforementioned things are easier to adjust to, it is my garden and its changing appearance that asks me of my patience, for it is going to be a long wait before my garden dresses up in a myriad of colours afresh.
My vegetable plants have nearly stopped producing. The Italian eggplant is still bearing blossoms, but which dry out and drop to the ground, because nights are getting cold. The leaves of my serrano pepper are turning yellow, but are still sparing no efforts to bear peppers. Many plants try till the end! The Malabar spinach plants, however, have given up on climbing and getting taller, and the tomato vines are often producing fruits with cracks and scars, a result of nighttime low temperatures.
The lilies, peonies, irises, and ferns have died back for the season, new leaves will peer from under the soil come March or April. Marigolds, pansies, and petunias, which are annuals, have already perished. Without flowers, my backyard is colourless; it is now merely a lacklustre reminder to what it used to be during the summer months.
Roses are quite hardy and many varieties withstand low temperatures until it gets too cold for them to bear. However, my hybrid roses, too, will go dormant in the coming weeks. From their leafless canes, one will then find it difficult to imagine that from these bare canes, tiny red leaves will one day sprout, harbingering the advent of spring. The good thing about roses is that some varieties bear one or two flowers even in late fall. My yellow floribunda rose, for instance, gifted me with flowers as late as November. My Blue Girl rose, however, bore her last flower in the last week of October; a fragrant lavender-coloured beauty she was.
The arrival of fall means that you need to collect and bag dead leaves, branches, and sometimes, whole plants. It also means that you have to cut back your perennial flowering plants. Cutting back is not enough for vegetable plants, though. You need to remove vegetable plants completely and also clean any materials used for supporting, for instance, sticks, tomato cages or trellises. Needless to say, it is a lot of work, but a kind of work that gives me little joy, for it is always hard to say goodbye to gardening.
Once the fall cleanup project is over, my little garden surely looks tidy, however, it stands out there like an artist’s still life - no leaves flutter, no flowers sway to the wind, and no blue jays come to the bird bath for a drink.
Photo: Wara Karim
Comments