The nights are cooling off, there’s dew on my bike seat every morning (pretty soon it will be rain) and the sun has been breaking through the misty grey later in the day. It’s autumn.
I’ve been busy collecting seeds for our seed exchange program, sowing cover crops on the annual beds, deadheading the prolific self-sowers to make my job easier in the spring, and, as always, weeding. There’s still a lot of green but the brown of spent flower stalks adds a skeletal contrast that helps remind me of the circularity of life.
Often, visitors to the garden in winter will ask why everything is dead. Of course, it’s not. Many herbaceous perennials are storing all their energy for the next year in their roots. Annuals that have completed their one-year cycle will spread their seeds which will germinate in the coming years. And the weeds are always doing well. Don’t worry about the weeds.
Here are some images from the garden.
whorlflower (Morina longifolia) section A
goldenrod (Solidago canadensis) section C
xu duan (Dipsacus asper) section B
Chinese winter melons, dong gua ren (Benincasa hispida) The harvest from section C
dang shen (Codonopsis pilosula) section E
An array of Asian umbels, section C
dry leaves flitter down
paths ajumble in chestnuts
sky of cawing crows
See you in the garden.