Putting the garden to sleep

The summer is gone, it is that time of year again! They came in a crew of four to put my garden to sleep. They cut the yellow and dead plants to the ground, leaving my perennials - still have good foliage and the season’s last blossoms - and spread topsoil and mulch on the flowering beds. 

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They pruned my sad orange grape vines and leaves, organized and tied the dry canes, and trained them horizontally along the garage door and front porch. It has been exactly ten years that I have planted my grape plant. Since then it has grown, blooming and bearing fruit over the spring and summer. I am blessed with my grapevines – growing, canopying the garage door and the front veranda extending across the side of the building, bearing dark purple Concord grapes in the seasons for the last ten years. I have seen daily walkers pass by my house, admiring my grapevines. It delighted me as I viewed them taking selfies. They would never know that I was watching them from upstairs, sitting at my desk looking through the windows. 

All these years I have harvested some ripened grapes and often left some on vines for the birds and bees to feast on. But I had moments of frustration too, when I caught the sight of a naughty squirrel as it pulled the grape clusters, brought the vines down, took only the ripened ones and, in the process, destroyed some green grapes. In the blink of my eye it would go away, leaving the vine dangling haplessly. Standing inside my living room window, I watched and endured the havoc the squirrel brought on my grape vines as it hanged upside down by its tail to eat the grapes. I would be overcome by a queer feeling in my heart, how does it know that this is the time to come to my grapevines! 

In the kitchen now in the late afternoon, busy after lunch, I stop cleaning dishes and stand back at the window that opens onto the patio and garden.  All the flowering beds are now snuggled under a thick layer of organic leafgro soil and shredded hardwood mulch. I enjoy the beauty of my remaining garden. The autumn sun is low in the sky, its slanting light strikes the yard, my Buddha statue is glowing in bright sun light.  He is in his nirvana! I see him all my awaking moments in various seasons, yet his disposition takes my breath away each time I view his sight …. I sense a kind of mystical stillness in the garden.

I have been reflecting on my love for gardening, and what it is that gives me so much pleasure; the only activity I can do when I am disappointed, sad, or angry. I had planted a range of things, from roses to lovely hydrangea, some sunflowers, some herbs, some veggies. I tended them meditatively with my own hands, discovered their needs, helped them to grow and let them stay beautiful- my secret happiness! I tell myself, “someday my garden will grow into a real cottage garden”.  

It has been like a metaphor of my spiritual journey for the past several months. How from a little seed in the ground - a shoot emerges and grows to produce flowers and fruits? I think of  my maternal grandmother.  An ardent flower lover, she would grow a garden in her little courtyard. Before sunset, she would pick flowers from her flowerbeds and bring them to her bedroom, “never pluck a flower after dark, it hurts them”, I never forgot her teachings and white fragrant Jasmines are still a reminder of my grandmother. Growing garden is in my DNA, I muse. 

As the weather gets colder, the earth slowly starts to tilt away from the sun, the leaves do not get much food from low sunlight and their colors start changing to red and orange, before they finally fall on the ground (except the evergreens). It seems that an encounter with aging, accepting it as part of the cycle, with death undeniably following is true of the garden too. So much resemblance between flowers and human beings….

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