Rene’s garden, 09/07/2014.
OK. The title to this blog is a bit of a misnomer. When one thinks of endless summer visions of June’s greening, July’s shimmering, and August’s oppressive sweltering come to mind. Well, that’s not quite what this summer has been up here in the Northland. We had an intolerably wet spring and early summer, the June rains and lack of light making our vegetable garden a whisper of what it could have or should have been. And July and August? Hardly ideal for growing edible things. Our carrots, potatoes, onions, raspberries, Russian berries, green beans and now, the sweet corn have done tolerably well. But the cucumbers, squash and pumpkins? Puny to non-existent. But for some reason, the late start to the growing season and the continued moderation of summer here along the banks of the Cloquet River has been a boon, an absolute godsend, to my wife’s flower gardens.
More of Rene’s flowers.
Beyond wheeling away an occasional load of debris from my wife’s constant weeding and tinkering in her flowery realms, I don’t contribute much in the way of labor to her efforts to beautify our place. Early on I helped a bit by moving rocks and topsoil. And whenever Rene’ hauls pea rock or landscaping materials home in her car, I help her unload. But to say that I’ve assisted Rene’ with the flower gardens would be to stretch the truth: the gardens and their ponds are my wife’s love and her creation. I’ve been mostly a bystander and naysayer bemoaning the fact that Rene’s gardens grow larger over time.
“I thought you were going to downsize” is a phrase I’ve muttered more than once as my wife sat on her plastic garden stool, pulling offending weeds, piling vegetative debris on my cleanly mown lawn.
Two summers ago, I contributed some actual labor to my wife’s beautification effort. When we moved into the new house, there were no shrubs or bushes of any kind surrounding our place at the top of a small rise located smack dab in the middle of a hay field. Rene’ went to work adding the flower gardens, her ponds, various shade trees, and an extensive rose garden. Over the years, the roses grew out of control until they became an ugly, angry mass of stalks and thorns. At my wife’s behest, I spent the better part of a weekend dismantling the landscape stones surrounding the rose garden so a local contractor could come in with a bobcat and dig out the offending plants. Then, again at my wife’s urging, I helped revise the plot into a line of shrubs surrounded by the same landscape stones. But beyond this singular effort, I haven’t had much to do with the flower gardens that surround our home with color during the height of summer.
Last July, a Japanese lilac gracing our front yard attracted hundreds of swallowtails to its flowers. The branches of the tall bush were crowded with fluttering yellow butterflies bent on sucking nectar
Endless summer color.
from the plant’s blossoms. But, despite this year’s endless summer, the plethora of swallowtails didn’t return this year. Oh, I spotted the occasional stray yellow butterfly flying around the place
but the great invasion of 2013 was not repeated. Also noticeably absent have been our bluebirds. For the past fifteen years, two pair of these colorful members of the thrush family have called wooden bird houses affixed to fence posts surrounding our vegetable garden their home. The birds were here, along with tree swallows (who also help themselves to our bird houses) in May. But the weather did them in. When I rebuilt the fence surrounding the vegetable garden earlier this summer, I found a clutch of abandoned bluebird eggs inside one of the birdhouses. I haven’t seen a bluebird or a swallow around the place since June. I’m unsure if the presence of flowers in Rene’s gardens into September makes up for the loss of the birds.
Blue flowers, not bluebirds.
It’s 5:00am on a Wednesday. I’m sitting at the family computer, staring at early morning’s inky blackness, listening to rain patter against the steel siding of our house, as I type this piece. Every so often the wind-driven rain thrashes the windows of my writing space. There’s an end-of-the-summer sound to the storm. Maybe it’s just my imagination but it feels as if Rene’s flowers are about to fade.
Peace.
Mark
