Late Summer’s Garden in the Midwest

I came to the flower garden late this year.  And I am waiting for a show of color even though I know it may not happen this time around.  As for vegetables, green tomatoes on the vine in August – and I wait still….for summer to finally turn up the heat and bring forth brilliance.  Gardening teaches me how to wait, but more than that how to have hope even when it all looks very, very green and small.

While I wait, I read.Onward and Upward in the Garden by the late New Yorker editor, Katharine S. White. – a compilation of the fourteen essays she wrote for the New Yorker from 1958 – 1970.  This book is  filled with facts enveloped in her opinions and personal reviews of seed catalogues, seed companies, books and authors dating as far back as the 19th century.

The Writer in the Garden, edited by Jane Garmey includes essays written by authors as varied as Edith Warton, Michael Pollen and W.S. Merwin.

I am lost this summer in these great books, I am lost in the fiction that is a garden.

I leave you with a thoughtful quote on what a garden is to W.S. Merwin…..

….an assembly of shapes, most of them living, that owes some share of its composition, its appearance, to human design and effort, human conventions and convenience, and the human pursuit of that elusive, indefinable harmony that we call beauty.  It has a life of its own, an intricate, willful, secret life, as any gardener knows.  It is only the humans in it who think of it as a garden.  But a garden is a relation, which is one of the countless reasons why it is never finished.

Never finished!