I used to mope romantically over the advance of fall, lamenting the loss of my beloved garden flowers, morosely plucking up as many roses as possible when hard frost threatened and generally carrying on as if horticultural Armageddon was just around the corner. The Grim Reaper seemed to step away from the neighbors’ lavish Halloween display to walk hand in hand with me as I cut back the endless swathes of fading perilla mint. It was positively gothic.
This year I was fully engaged in the usual autumn mawkishness when I had a major epiphany and realized that fall is not about mourning, but about expectation and preparation. Looking back, I see that this has been developing for some time. Over the last few years, I have become increasingly aware of the equinoxes and solstices, those quarterly events that mark the changes in the hours of light and darkness. We passed the autumn equinox on September twenty-first and are heading towards the great winter solstice on the twenty-first of December. After that, daylight will gradually return. That is the joyous event for which we should all be preparing.
All plants are daylight sensitive, though some, like the garden chrysanthemums, take it to extremes, waiting until the days shorten to even think about producing blooms. Their cousins, the garden center mums, would do the same thing, but wholesale growers have tricked them into early flowering by cleverly manipulating light and darkness. The asters, now finishing their glorious flush of autumn splendor in locations ranging from sophisticated gardens to crowded hedgerows, are preparing for the big sleep by setting seed and dispersing it with all their might. I used to put off cutting back my asters to save the seedheads for the birds. In the process I acquired hundreds of asters. Now I realize that just as the asters are prepping for next year by dispersing seed at warp speed, I should be cutting back stalks at a deliberate pace. There will still be plenty for the birds.
Every time I go out now, I reinforce the preparatory urge by taking a handful of crocus bulbs and planting them in the beds. The bulbs are plump and firm, despite having lived in a double thickness of plastic in my refrigerator since last October when they arrived from the grower just before Hurricane Sandy. There was no time to plant them, so after the power finally came back on, I double-bagged them and stuck them in the fridge. I hope that they will sprout in abundance next spring, having been primed for their big moment for eighteen months.
It is no surprise then, that these past few weeks I have felt even more than usually happy and creative in the garden. The plants are not just creative, they are downright procreative and the feeling must be contagious. Think of all the spring-flowering bulbs newly planted in the earth. Each tulip or daffodil already contains the embryo of the flower that will shoot up next spring. All it needs is rest and gestation in the cold garden soil. All of the aster, morning glory, perilla, larkspur and other seeds flying about as I cut back the stalks will land on the ground and undergo cold stratification, a process that they require in order to sprout next spring. The cimicifuga, which is blooming now in honey-scented glory, is providing food to late season pollinators, prior to setting seed for next year. A few of the roses are also feeding the pollinators by pushing out blooms, but the more sensible among them are setting hips that contain enough seeds to ensure the survival of their species, if not their heavily hybridized varieties.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see Art Wolk’s wonderful book on forcing bulbs, Bulb Forcing for Beginners and the Seriously Smitten. This is another way of preparing and looking ahead. I will take some of the bagged bulbs that are currently clogging the aisles of every store in the area and set them up for forcing. Wolk is a master of demonstrating how easy it is to do so with just a small amount of forethought. By skipping the lolling and lamentation that normally occupies my time as the growing season winds down, I will have the energy to get some bulbs organized for late winter bloom. The Grim Reaper will just have to sit and sulk on the neighbors’ porch.