November

Caladium leaves lie limp on the ground, their stems like spaghetti.

Hummingbird feeders are abandoned.

Mornings are dark and cold.

November. Complaints are abundant.

Life seems more precious in the scarcity of late autumn.

The crickets still sound in the evening. And maple trees release their golden leaves to drift from the canopy to the soil below, while the Japanese maple turns from purple to crimson.

The impatiens continue to throw off a few blooms, even the rare white one that reseeded itself.

Green headed coneflower and pineapple sage only bloom in the shorter days of autumn.

Hurry little fella. Winter will be here soon.

Photos

The door closes. The last guest backs down the driveway. The lights are switched off.

The photo album sits on the table, the sales receipt between the pages. Images of joy and laughter, garden tours, dinner celebrations and dancing, all remind us of happy times.

Yet a moment is only lived once, and photos are a thin line of smoke after a fire. Memories come with silent tears and a stinging in the throat.

After a wedding, hundreds of photos are viewed, edited, cropped, saved, moved, copied and ordered. Production methodically moves to completion, yet one photo still tugs at the heart.

It is an image of a moment when all things seemed possible, like wildflowers in early spring, emerging from their shared tangle of roots to greet one another under the warming sun.

Season's end

At season's end, the days grow shorter, one minute at a time.

Asters fade, one petal at a time.

Oaks bare their branches, one leaf at a time.

Ripened autumn fruits bend the boughs low to the ground. One by one, they drop from the branches to the soft earth waiting below.

And so it is with us. One by one, the days pass. In the end, one last breath lingers on our lips. We taste its warm sweetness like a kiss.

We long for one more moment like a lover, knowing that at days end is a long moonless night.

Wild side

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Memory:

We stopped by Winn Dixie early on Sunday morning to pick up a few items. My husband tasked me with buying toilet bowl cleaner while he headed over to the produce section.

"Meet me at the checkout counter."

I recognized the brands Tidy Bowl and Vanish, but which one was superior? As I read the ingredients on the labels, I noticed that some were similar and others were different. I compared the number of uses per product, and computed the prices per ounce. I compared the frequency of application. I wondered if the shape of the container offered any advantage. I considered how blue water would look in a bathroom with gold tile.

Suddenly, a face loomed over me.

"Are you still here? Take a walk on the wild side. Get the Tidy Bowl and let's get out of here."

Here's a wonderful walk on the wild side.

The driveway garden may look disheveled to some, but I love the abundance at summer's end.

In the driveway garden, I ripped out Coreopsis tripteris and planted a spicebush in its place, but it came back and bloomed in spite of my abuse.

Beside the pavement, the beautyberry takes on magenta colors. Later in autumn, the leaves turn a lime tone, a lively combination.

Solidago rugosa 'Fireworks' blooms behind Salvia farinacea in a rare sunny spot in my garden. Bees love the salvia and tiny pollinators flock to the solidago.

You can see where 'Fireworks' gets its name. This explosion holds its own between the passionvine and the crossvine.

Rudbeckia laciniata, green headed coneflower, blooms in a shady spot, where few flowers dare.

Rain garden

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WRAL reports that early September is the most active time of year for tropical storms. I would welcome a gusher because there has been little rain throughout the summer. I also want to try out my new rain garden.

A rain garden collects water that runs off hard surfaces, such as roofs and driveways, storing and filtering the water to recharge the groundwater. This type of garden needs to be in a particular place, of a particular size, and contain particular plants.

This spring, I bought a book on the topic, Rain Gardening in the South by Helen Kraus and Anne Spafford, which provides instructions, advice and photographs about creating a rain garden. I used the charts in the book to estimate the size of the roof and to determine the size of the rain garden, 10 x 6.

I selected a spot in the backyard about 20 feet from the house, downstream from the downspout at the corner of the house. The site is near the pond and the compost pile, surrounded by several oaks and a hickory. A low area is not ideal, but there were no other options in our heavily wooded yard. The area has standing water at times, but the water drains within 48 hours, even after 5 inches of rain.

The first step is to remove the existing soil. I marked a few plants to be saved. When I started digging out the daylilies, I was surprised to find them shallowly rooted in gray sandy soil. The soil had little organic matter and no worms.

Fortunately, there were no roots from nearby trees. This made digging easier and prevented me from damaging our trees. On the PBS show In the Garden, Bryce Layne said that for the health of a tree, you should not cut any roots larger than your pinkie finger. No danger of that in this particular spot.

Back to the book Rain Gardening in the South. Kraus and Spafford recommended removing all the soil from the hole to a depth of 12 inches. Here I made my first mistake. I found a ruler in the house and brought it outside. I started digging, removing all the soil from the 10 x 6 hole to the depth of the ruler. Later I noticed that the ruler was 14 inches long instead of the standard 12.

After digging out the soil to the proper depth, it was time to stir in the amendments. I had a leftover bag of Black Cow manure and a large pile of compost. I added these amendments at a ratio 2 to 1, soil to amendments. Then I put the soil back into the hole.

By this time, I have been shoveling and amending for 3 days. I remembered reading in Gaia's Garden that old pieces of log would hold water for plants to use during drought, so I buried some limbs of oak trees that had fallen 7 or 8 years ago. This may have been my second mistake. I will find out soon enough.

In the end, the rain garden was 4 inches below grade. I used chunky semi-composted oak leaves from my new compost pile as a 2 inch mulch on the top. Then I formed a berm on the north side of the rain garden.

The following weekend, I was ready to plant. Using the lists of plants in the book, Rain Gardening in the South, I had long ago made a planting plan that was interesting and attractive. I purchased new Illicium plants and planned to transplant Ajuga, Epimedium and ferns from other areas of our garden.

Then I made my final mistake. I went to the plant sale at the NC Botanical Garden and found several that I have been seeking for a long time. I bought twice as many as I had space for, so some of them found a home in the rain garden.

At last it was time for planting. The soil in the rain garden had been resting for seven days. It was rich, dark and moist, perfect for roots of young plants. I was tempted to lie down in it, but I didn't.

Now I am waiting for rain, and lots of it.

Butterfly

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Butterflies turn up their proboscises at the flowers in my garden. They prefer a hot sunny spot and my garden is cool and shady. But over the years, I have planted perennials, shrubs and trees that the caterpillars need for food.




The monarch caterpillars eat plants in the milkweed family. These two large fellas are feasting on common milkweed, Asclepias syriacus.





The spicebush swallowtail eats foliage from spicebushes and sassafras trees. The large "eyes" are fakes, designed to intimidate predators.





This year, I only saw two Eastern black swallowtail caterpillars on the parsley.






The pipevine swallowtail caterpillar feeds on pipevines. This year, we had a bumper crop.





This pipevine swallowtail has just emerged from her cocoon and dries her wings before floating away to nectar in a sunnier garden.

Good luck, little butterfly.



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Rosebud

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You were already gone when I met you, a pink rosebud on a satin pillow. By days end, you were wrapped in a thousand tears and buried in a silent place.


Later there was a wildness behind your mother's eyes, like the sky before an autumn storm. She spoke in a calm voice, but in the distance, dry leaves rattled in the wind. The sky was heavy with dark clouds and there was a scent of rain in the air.


That was years ago. She still thinks of you every day, whether she speaks of you or not. Even for me, despite our brief encounter, I think of you more often than you would imagine.