Mid September

Mid September is neither summer nor fall. A couple of mornings about a week ago, we felt a drop in the temperature, but the trend did not continue.

The summer has been so wet that all the plants are thriving. The sandy bed out front has two saw palmettos that are now looking well established. Early in the spring I seeded the bed with coontie seeds, layered live oak leaves on top, and marked the coontie nurseries with small bamboo stakes. A neighbor passed by and looked at me quizzically just as I was sticking the bamboo stakes in the bed. I explained that I was planting natives, and in about ten years this would look like something. Then the oak tree fell right across that bed and all the way to the rose of Sharon and Rosie Meyer daylilies on the other side. The tree was taken down while I was out of town, so when I returned I looked at the wreckage and discovered a wonderful thing-- the coonties were beginning to sprout. Now there are a couple of dozen coontie seedlings scattered around the bed.

The surge of monarch activity has subsided and the milkweed has put out new leaves. I just saw a newly hatched monarch fluttering around the front flower bed milkweed.

On the side of the yard where the passion flower vines grow up through the sasanqua camellias, this morning there were probably thirty or forty zebra longwing butterflies hovering around the vines.

Citrus trees and camellias have doubled in size. The branches of the citrus trees are loaded with tangerines and beginning to sag under the weight. And finally, after two weeks of rain, today there is a dry day to mow and clean up a little around the garden. The driveway, for example, has that covering of pine needles that drop at this time of year. It looks like a path through the forest instead of a driveway. With a little raking, I'll have some mulch to add here and there.

Today's meditation is from Hamlet, "how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world." While it is true that some human affairs get me down, I never feel that the world is weary and stale when I look around the garden, listening to the hummingbirds chatter as they fly up and seeing the new leaves on the holly tree. Hamlet might have felt better if he had taken time to pull the weeds he saw in his garden, not just use them as metaphors all the time. Maybe he could have gone kayaking instead of moping around the castle. However, if he hadn't been talking to Horatio instead of going for a walk in the woods, he would never have realized that "there is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow," and I take comfort in that thought every day.