Harvest moon garden

September draws me deep into the garden, where its fullness is evident in smooth bulbs of tawny butternut squash swelling under their leafy vines. Soft green Italian heirloom zucchini form a bush, and are delicious sliced thinly and sautéed with new onion. A beautifully formed white scallop of Patty Pan squash is ripe and ready to offer up its nutty flavor to taste buds. An iridescent humming bird startles me as I’m leaning over a pot of pink begonias by zooming horizontally just below my face in a split-second chase after its companion. Could their speedy flight have a link to summer’s quickening lease?

In this good season for transplanting, I seat a blooming tiger lily into its bed, only to discover much later, in my wife’s shocked gaze, that my hair and arm are streaked yellow with pollen.

Said Alice, “I wish we could talk.”

“We can talk”, said the Tiger lily, “when there’s anybody worth taking to.” (Lewis Carroll).

A red Stargazer lily gives up its spicy scent freely from its long silky petals. Tempting blackberries are fat and juicy, dangling from their long canes. Fistfuls of cherry and yellow plum tomatoes keep appearing at a mouth-popping size. Before any sign of an early frost, I’ll take in the green ones and spread them on newspaper to ripen. I transplant a few divisions of blooming phlox in pink, white and lavender, adding cow manure to each. It is not too early to put narcissus bulbs in. They’ll welcome the chance to set roots early.

My spirits lift unexpectedly on seeing two stalks of cardinal flowers waving above the water near the inflow of the pond. Their brilliant jewel-like petals set above the dark water fan like crimson flame. The broad slope out front is flush with a dazzle of latecomers. Brilliant geraniums provide the fireworks, tucked in color matching clumps amid mixed groupings of celosia feathers, blue ageratum buttons, and a fanfare of mums.

A wood frog peeps through the afternoon mugginess. Rain hangs heavy in low clouds that seem anxious to loosen their burden. Sun has been streaming recently, bringing life to the foliage. Last month’s woodchuck-chewed kale and cabbage are wearing crowns of fresh leaves. Traditionally, with slowing growth, shortening daylight and tress expressing fall shades of color, it is a time of reverence for the mysteries. The green-man-god of the forest is honored at this equinox with offerings of ciders, wines, herbs and fertilizer to the trees. In the tranquility of the late summer garden we sense transition. Chlorophyll retreats and leaves a symphony of color behind.

The season of rest and renewal arrives with the awareness of the balance of dark and light. The garden uses its downtime for rejuvenation, and is hungry for applications of compost and humus. Attempting practicality, I condense an accumulating sprawl of pots into a more organized mass, recycling the worn and unused. I save clear-backed annual tags to reuse for identifying spring seedlings. I spend a quiet moment imagining the coming harvest moonbeams spilling like an umbilical chord from the cosmos, shadowed here by glowing, and fragrant white blooms on our moonflower vine.