Harvest moon garden

“By all these lovely tokens

September days are here,

With summer’s best of weather

And autumn’s best of cheer.”

— Helen Hunt Jackson, September, 1830-1885

Fruit droops and plummets in the cool morning air of September. Deer browse beneath apple trees, drawn by sweet scent. It is an idyllic scene. The abundance of the land is ready for harvest. Many hands are busied preserving nature’s bounty. Gardens offer unexpected rewards, at this time.

Foremost is the “Wow!” factor, the unearthed and hidden surprise. My wife, Sandy, with roots extending into Manhattan’s concrete jungle, has been expressing joy at visiting the garden for dinner. I, too, am excited by the simple pleasure of a nodding Cosmos, or a yellow scaloppini squash. I am most touched when transplanting a pot-bound orchid, and I overhear passersby commenting on this or that bloom along my roadside garden. Some eye-catching favorites include multi-colored dwarf dahlias, Red Fox Veronica and picoteed Echo Lisianthus.

We garden for such moments of delight, and seek enchantment of small successes. Sometimes we are astonished, as I was, realizing that a dark green shadow was actually a ripening pumpkin suspended from its leafy vine, gamboling over the garden fence. Sharon, our librarian, shared her dismay on seeing her ripening tomatoes and beds of flowers vanished one morning, after a doe had leaped in and helped herself. But with grace, she reflected on the warm time spent sharing the garden with her elderly mother. Sometimes our harvest is of this very precious kind.

I would imitate heaven in my hubris. What gardener has not sought a beneficiary for a surplus zucchini? Just the other day, my brother-in-law tried foisting off a green blunderbuss of a squash that lay idling on his kitchen counter. Sharing a bouquet of posies, or ripe tomatoes from one’s garden is reward in itself. As I wade in the thickets of my own little paradise, I am humbled by natural beneficence. The flush of beating hummingbird wings a couple of feet in front of my nose invariably catches me off guard with unexpected joy. I’m stopped at the gate of the garden, to taste gleaming blackberries bursting in my mouth, a wild and savory delicacy.

I push loose potting mix down in its container of pink geranium. It springs back. I push again. It springs back. Once more I try to tuck the mix, but this time a brown toad emerges and jumps free of my perturbations. A bull thistle is aflutter with yellow goldfinches. Waves of cardinal flowers sway in the afternoon sunlight along a creek bed.

At the Little World’s Fair, an elderly man is tickled as I reaffirm his contention that a green-berried sprig is a Pagoda Dogwood. Serendipity seems to pop up almost anywhere for a gardener.

As if to reaffirm my enthusiasm for native wildness, another small toad pushes out of mulch. I was putting it around a transplanted clump of Rudbeckia and Echinacea, a gift from that dear gardener, Lynn Elfert. I know the flowers in heaven are laughing with her, as I write. I move a cold morning’s moth from under a car tire. Cedar waxwings paint the air with their swooping movement overhead, while I listen to an eagle’s sharp cry piercing the river quiet. This season’s harvest is coming in varied hues.