Fall inevitably forces gardener to put plants to rest

I hate to bring myself to do it. I put it off for as long as possible. I ponder. I stare. I procrastinate …

Pulling up the garden and putting it to bed for the winter has to be one of the most, well, if the truth be said, purely dreaded tasks of the year.

I watch the frost come and go. I watch the geese fly south. I watch the leaves turn color and drift to the ground. And when I can make no more excuses for myself, I gather up my wheelbarrow, my rake and my spading fork, and reluctantly head down to the garden.

The truth is that I hate to face the garden in autumn. Compared to its glory in high summer, it is so sad and pathetic I can’t bear the sight of it. Although it’s a situation of my own making, I don’t like to face it. I know I could have started to set it to rest when it looked a bit finer – leaving me with fonder memories – but I couldn’t stand that either. I can’t bring myself to pull a plant that has the least bit of life in it, yet I hate to see my plants withered at their end.

So, once again, I find myself trapped in the oxymoronic world of fall: the beauty of the greater landscape, the unsightliness of a garden undergoing a natural death.

The garden isn’t the only place Mother Nature has struck. Hops vines stretching the length of our house are in such a sorry state that I can’t bear looking at them. Usually this hardy plant weathers the worst of the growing season, but this year it was a gruesome sight with ugly caterpillars attached to it. Their bodies were ringed with orange and white stripes and they had some mighty scary-looking headgear that was so intimidating I had no desire to look them up and find out their name.

They munched constantly and made short work of the pretty hops leaves. In the end, only stark, twisting vines, with a few sorrowful-looking flowers dangling from the uppermost part of the stem, remained.

As the hops vines are pulled from the string they climbed this summer, a fine yellow powder that comes from a lupulin gland tucked under each petal of the hops flower wafts through the air, over my skin, on my clothes and in my hair.

And that’s another dreaded part of this cleanup season. I’ve been pulling annuals and vegetables, inadvertently dispersing their seeds and parts as I go about my job. Millions of minute seeds from 7-foot-tall woodland tobacco get stuck on my clothes, between my fingers, down my shirt and in my shoes. As I rip out enormous Polish amaranth, painted tongue and cosmos plants, their seed shakes off the stem and shoots downward to the soil. I can almost see each tiny seed smiling as it settles in for the winter, knowing it has thwarted my attempts to dispatch it to the compost pile.

I squash stray cherry tomatoes with my feet, and the seeds wedge into the crevices of my boots, wanting to be deposited in the most undesirable place.

All these seeds – every one of them potentially capable of germinating next spring – are spreading their prodigious potential to unknown areas of the garden. I groan at this thought: In spring will I think of them as welcome volunteers or weeds?

I groan, but I don’t complain – really. I’d call it more of a lament. Every cell of my body screams, “why does it have to be this way?” Why does the glory of the garden have to decay to a sad state of affairs that at once leaves us with a bittersweet taste and knowledge that it couldn’t be any other way?

To watch the plant world fall into a quiet slumber, my friend, is the way it must be. The message drifts through the garden with each fallen leaf. It penetrates with each gust of wind. It is punctuated by the first snowfall.

The resignation – and perennial bliss – of autumn.

Diana George Chapin is the NEWS garden columnist. Send horticulture questions to Gardening Questions, RR1, Box 2120, Montville 04941, or e-mail them to dianagc@ctel.net. Selected questions will be answered in future columns. Include name, address and telephone number.