Saying Goodbye to My Garden
The photographs in this post are all from this last season in my garden. You can see more photos from over the years and learn a bit more about its specifics here.
Usually in October I say goodbye to my garden for the season. I gather my last harvests. Cut as many flowers as I can before frost blackens the plants. It’s a bittersweet time of year.
This year is different. We had our first killing frost yesterday, but I’d already said goodbye to my garden and had been saying goodbye to it for months.
The day I published this post, I contacted our realtor about a property I wanted to see. Just a little over a month later we closed on it.
I was still planting my garden when I began saying goodbye to it. I knew I’d be able to harvest fruits and veggies and herbs as we moved and as we prepared our home to sell. But the garden was no longer mine.
I planted these strawberries this year, buying the plants on the day we waited to hear whether the sellers accepted our offer
I tended it through the spring and summer, but not in the same way I would have if I’d been living there, looking out at it from my studio window every day. Eating meals on the patio. Reading on the deck.
My heart had already moved on.
In September when I went to the garden for the very last time, I felt a tug. I walked through the space I’d created slowly over the years and was filled with love. And gratitude. And a surprising sadness.
I love growing a mixture of herbs, annuals, perennials and native plants
My garden was the source of so much inspiration and joy. It was a place of growth, not just for the plants and flowers, but for me. As a gardener. As an artist. As a person.
I harvested a basket full of tomatoes and eggplants and herbs and said goodbye for the last time.
the last harvest from my garden
I’ll carry the garden and its memories (and tens of thousands of photos) with me into the future. Some of its seeds — literal and figurative — will sow my new garden.
Although I shared a little teaser in May, with a photo of a seedling and a promise I’d be telling its story in June, I never did tell the story.
Did you notice? Did you recognize the plant?
In August last year, I gathered jewelweed seeds from a weedy area in my neighborhood. I’d noticed the plants while walking the dogs and watched week after week as they bloomed and then formed seedpods. Jewelweed is a native wildflower in the impatiens family. As a child I was first fascinated by its exotic-looking flowers growing along the lake at my great-uncle’s house.
I’m not sure what impelled me to try to grow it, but for some reason I tucked the seeds in my pocket during a walk and sprinkled them behind the birch tree when I got home. Jewelweed seedpods are fun because when they’re ripe they explode. At least one seedpod exploded in my pocket. Would they grow? I didn’t know.
In the spring I spotted seedlings I didn’t recognize behind the birch tree. Could they be jewelweed? I looked it up and discovered that, yes, they were.
Not many days later we walked the property with our realtor and everywhere I looked were jewelweed seedlings. It felt like a secret message from the universe.
I was hoping my jewelweed — the plants I grew from seed and the plants on our new property — would have orange flowers. I thought I’d gathered seeds from orange flowers. But the plants growing in both places ended up yellow.
I never had an overall plan for my garden. Whims like trying to grow jewelweed from scavenged seeds helped it to develop.
Right now I’m planning my new garden — or at least dreaming about it — with all of the joys and frustrations of my last garden fresh in my mind.
a self-seeded sunflower plant surrounded by self-seeded gem marigolds and self-seeded dill
I’m thinking of projects and experiments I never got around to tackling before saying goodbye to my garden. And I’m making lists of what I want to grow. (They’re long). Many are things I’ve grown year after year. Some will be things I never had the space for before.
One thing on my list is cup and saucer vine. It was another whim in this summer’s garden. Seduced by garden catalog photos pored over during the winter, I bought a packet of seeds. I sowed them under grow lights and carefully tended them. They didn’t go into the ground until after I’d begun saying goodbye to the garden. I wasn’t sure whether I’d see them bloom. On my last visits I noticed the purple flowers opening at the top of the arch.
I have plenty of seeds for next year.
When I’m being realistic, I know it will take many years for my new garden to develop into what I’m imagining. My last garden took many years. And so did the one before it.
I definitely want to plant Contender Peach trees in my new garden
Every garden is different. My Cleveland garden was different than the garden I grew here in town.
The Poet’s Wife David Austin Rose
And my new garden will be different than either.
a flower on one of the Daddy’s Girl dahlias
But there will be similarities, too.
lavender hyssop and coneflowers
Yesterday’s frost probably blackened many of the plants and flowers in my newly former garden.
an Alpenglow Zinnia from Floret
This year I wasn’t there to see it. Those flowers are still blooming in my memory. In my photographs and in my art. In some ways my former gardens, sweetened by memory, are now more beautiful than they ever were and my future garden, sweetened by fantasy, is more beautiful than it may ever be. Not a bad place to be, this in-between state, remembering and dreaming.
Has a killing frost come in your garden yet this year? Are you remembering and dreaming, too? Do you already have plans for next year’s garden?
I’m testing getting back to a twice-a-month blog schedule. I’ll be cross-posting on my website and on Substack. If you’d like to support my work, you can do so on Substack. I have plans for future posts — gardens, art, creativity, nature, joy — but would also love to know what you’d like to see, so please let me know!
Thank you for all of your encouragement and support over the years.
