The Desperate Beauty of Fall

The nights are getting chillier. The sun is setting earlier and in an entirely different spot over Little Traverse Bay. In the garden, the Stargazers and rich wine-colored lilies are a defiant blaze of color against the larger and larger patches of deadheaded green.

For some gardeners, the adjustment to Fall is a sad and wistful time. I have always seen a fierce and desperate beauty in that turning season.

Those late bloomers of every species are finally coming into their own. Lush mounds of mums lift their buds to the sun, preparing to burst into glorious flower. Simple "prairie" asters, relatively low on the pecking order of perennial garden plants, lift their feathery purple and hot pink heads long after most of the garden is settling in for the long winter ahead.

This, too, is a season where the "volunteers" come into their own, misfit daisies or astilbe or Canterbury bells that just weeks ago would have been considered "out of place". Liberated by the latest deadheading, they burst into bloom amid that sea of barren green. Monarda, popularly known as bee balm, continue to hang on, appreciated late in the game for their tenacity.

For much of the summer, the gardener has cut back the emerging blooms on the hostas, encouraging the plants to send all their energy to producing those lush and beautiful leaves. Now the tall and wiry stalks are allowed to stand, lovely bursts of lilac in the midst of all that glorious green, white and cream foliage.

Creative deadheading allows the heads on the Annabelle hydrangeas a couple of precious weeks of bloom. By careful clipping around the edges or hand-maneuvering of those ponderous clumps of blooms, it is possible to eliminate the dried, brown and bloomed-out patches. The transitional fall garden may not display the abundance of the beds at their peak. Still, there is a beauty in simplicity and the sight of individual plants defying the shortened daylight hours to bloom even as the hint of frost threatens to put an end to it all.

How different from Spring, I find myself thinking, where all is hope and promise and struggle, but with the awareness of a prolific summer of blooming to come. In Fall, the garden cannot escape the reality that the long, hard Winter is not far behind. And yet, it blooms.

The Fall garden can teach us a great deal about our own growing seasons. Fall in the garden is the best argument I know for hope. Those plants are short on excuses and long on determination—the desperate faith that it is never to late to bloom and grow. Tough stuff, life and time in a garden, but beautiful for all that.