Our Garden's Sumptuous Beauty
It is August, after all. If a garden is going to look, well, beautiful it will do so in August. Mind, we think the garden looks beautiful in the spring when everything is emerging and we're continually surprised by the colourful show-offs that spring out of the ground. And we think the garden looks beautiful in early summer when the early-blooming show-offs have come and gone and other wonderful flora take their place. But late summer that's quite another thing entirely, for this is when the garden has filled out every little nook and cranny, when mid- merges with late-summer and there is texture and form galore, and colour everywhere we look and we fall completely in love with what we see.
If there were sumptuary laws in effect, we would be fined most heavily, and we'd deserve it. Since sumptuary laws went out of fashion many centuries ago and passers-by, neighbours and friends appear to be as enraptured and entertained by the show-offs in our garden as we are, there are no fines, merely a deep and abiding satisfaction with what nature has wrought. With a little bit of help from we meddlers.
It's true, in the spring tulips, hyacinths, miniature irises and their ilk pop out of the still-cool soil. We have the splendid blooms of our magnolia tree, our apple trees, plum tree, crabapples, all flush with hundreds of magenta, white, white/pink blossoms. The flowering pea sends out its delicate yellow blossoms, the rhododendrons gift us with hot-pink-to-purple blooms, the holly sends out its sweet little white flowers. Columbine, lilies-of-the-valley, irises, peonies, and roses, lots of roses send their sweet fragrance into the ambient air, and celebrate new life.
Then come our delphiniums, lupins, penstemon, heuchera, canpanule, bleeding heart. We carefully tweak these blooming beauties, stake them to ensure the exotic blooms last as long as possible before wind and rain take their toll and their freshness disappears, all too soon. Oops, what about all those clematis, some with shy, hardly-to-be-noticed drooping bellflowers, others with great lush floral blooms the equal of any flower seen in the tropics.
Then we see coreopsis, coneflowers, black-eyed Susans, hostas, purple loosestrife, astilbe, daisies and poppies. Marguerite daisies, nasturtiums, balloon flowers, cosmos, begonias, gazania, they all brighten the gardens and our hearts. We have marigolds, cleome, impatience, mimulus, portulaca, pansies, violets. And those sneaky little Johnny-jump-ups that manage to inveigle their way into any area of the garden not otherwise occupied.
We've got black-eyed Susan vines twining here and there, over and around, above and beyond, their shy little yellow flowers peeping out along the length of the vine as it grows and grows in twirling length. We've the colourful offerings of sweet-pea vines, morning glory vines, ingratiating themselves along the length and breadth of the fences, sneaking up onto the stems of lilies, around the trunks of trees.
And lilies, more lilies, lots of lilies, oriental ones, day lilies, tiger lilies, they of the Ontario backroads. Almost forgot the hydrangea with their huge masses of flower heads, the pink princess spirea, the white, the yellow cinquefoil. Oh, there's the peppery-fragrant phlox with their generous, candy-tempting multiple flower heads, and all those four o'clocks shyly opening pale florets.
There's more, plenty more in the garden, but they don't come that readily to mind. Asters, did I mention them, and the zinnias, with their vibrant colours? How about the trailing petunias? Oops, forgot chrysanthemums, in all their various splendid shapes, sizes and colours. Did I forget the California poppies, those orange, yellow, gold heads that nod, turn quickly into pods and seed themselves for another year?
Get the picture?
posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, August 15, 2006
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