Late Blossoming Report

The chill of the past week has vanished and we’re back to mild nights and warm days. So autumn begins in New England. Having narrowly escaped the frost that visited my friends to the north, I’m hoping for another three or four weeks of growing season. And while most everything in the garden is long past its peak, there are some notable exceptions.

The single bare root dahlia plant I planted in the spring now sports two full and impossibly luscious blossoms. Like large chrysanthemums that have been painted by a Hallmark card illustrator, they are almost like plastic flowers stuck among the fall garden’s raggle taggle of leaves and spent flower stalks. This is, until you get close and see the scores of little ants scurrying this way and that in the dream landscape of pastel petals. The ants don’t seem to be chewing the plant so I’m guessing they are part of the healthy ecosystem of the blossom itself. Perhaps, like peonies, dahlias have a covenant with the little ants to work together toward beauty.

Then there are the sunflowers up by the road. A stand of seven is now sporting numerous blossoms on top of thick tall stalks that belie their recent appearance in the world. I started them from seed this spring. (‘I remember when they were just tender green sprouts emerging from the ground,’ says the proud Papa gardener.) I kept them many weeks on the porch to protect them from the fierce and hungry bunnies that roam the Temple grounds in the early summer. When they were two feet tall, I transplanted some up to the sunny patch near the sidewalk. I protected the lower stalk with small wire mesh cages and prayed. Later on I transplanted a few more without the wire mesh. Whether the bunnies had moved on to other territory, the proximity to the road was discouraged them or the stems were thick enough to resist chewing, I’ll never know. In any case, my prayers were answered.

The sunflower blossoms themselves are flat and round. About the size of a dessert plate, they hold scores of juicy and nutritious seed. Each blossom is framed and advertised with a ring of petals ranging in hue from yellow to deep burgundy. I don’t think the birds have yet discovered the blossoms. While I protected the seedlings from ravaging bunnies, I’ll be happy for the seed to go to birds that inhabit the area. It might be one way to pay them back for their morning songs that have graced the garden all summer.

We gardeners are fussy and unpredictable. A garden is about saying no to some things to be able to say yes to others. No to cute bunnies that would eat my seedlings (though they did feast on my cosmos patch, eating every single plant there) and yes to birds that would eat my seeds. I suppose if I grew blueberries, I’d be conniving ways to keep the birds away so that I could eat the berries myself.

So yes to dahlias and sunflowers. And, of course, yes to my beloved morning glories. Three or four chapters of my book This Truth Never Fails were devoted to the morning glories. (Including the concluding chapter that in re-reading I find to be almost scandalous in its depiction of the imagined sensual delight of the bees visiting the azure blossom.) That was the first year. And all of the ten years since then, they capture my imagination with their rising spiral growth and the impossibly soft and momentary blossoms. I can’t resist singing their praises and unfolding their morning glory meanings.

The mass of morning glory foliage that I have reported ealier finally began blossoming a week ago. The first two days each produced a single blossom. Then there were half a dozen the third day. Then came the cool weather with just a straggler or two showing up late in the day. Yesterday was in the seventies and last night was in the high fifties. I hoping for a profusion of blossoms over the next week.

We’ll see.

Gardening is always a mixture of intention, work and hope. Because the results depend on so many factors out of my control like bunnies, rain and small children, I try to make sure to focus all these three aspects that pertain to me. Then I practice noticing and appreciating (and sometimes complaining about) whatever happens.