Triage Garden

Bones show in triage.

Everybody knows trouble’s the best diet and it makes for a good late garden, too.  A family emergency this spring re-sorted our priorities like a deck of cards and we came to appreciate the garden more deeply as vast areas endure even more than usual benign neglect.

It has been a season of triage (all gardeners love a good war analogy), where you have to prioritize what’s worth saving. A close cutting of the outer garden is the first to go, somehow making the perfectly round dark green beech brood behind the flowering grasses in a way it never would on a mowed lawn.

This is the first summer our beloved American beech, Fagus grandifolia, planted from a woodland seedling a dozen years ago, has born nuts, just a few sprays here and there. I have seen old trees covered in nuts, a boon to wildlife – the great specimen in the courtyard at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D. C. and a lovely spindly one that rained down nuts on greenhouse panes at a private estate.

First beechnuts in the Hollow

The winged sunflower is overtaking some of the outer beds, and mugwort is fighting with Tartarian asters in the perennial border. But the Regale lilies got dead-headed just in time to keep them from dissipating energy on seeds and the idea that we could get the essential summer garden in – tomatoes, basil and peppers – before the solstice was an encouragement outside our particular troubles.

Last minute tomatoes and basil with larkspur going to seed.

We push against it a little at a time and still can walk among the beds in the evening and derive comfort.

Why is that?

The earth gives sustenance. Lilies and milkweed bloom and swarm with pollinators. Even in an overgrown patch, dill and sorrel are there for the taking regardless of anything but the tilt of the planet and the warmth of the soil.

We see life come from death every day in the garden and this is our reward for getting out there and trying no matter what.

Annual cicada emerges from its shell.