Every fall, with the first hard freeze warning on the weather report, I am faced with a choice—which of my containers of annual flowers am I going to fight to save, and which will I let the frost take?
It’s not fair that after nearly eight months of careful care and pampering, I have to bid my containers filled with petunias, snapdragons, marigolds and more a farewell. Mother Nature cares not for my feelings. And so, I rush around with my stack of old bed sheets and clothespins and try to decide which will get a reprieve even for one day. It’s an exercise in futility, I know, but I just can’t quite let them all go at once. I’ve invested a lot of time, money and heart into these plants, after all.
The pandemic took a lot of joy from a lot of our lives. I didn’t travel but once or twice out of the city limits these last eight months. There were no live music concerts or the annual crush of people in town for Dodge City Days. Just day after day of working from my dining room table in front of my wide picture window overlooking my front yard and my front porch.
So I put all my heart into gardening this year, into turning my corner of the world into a paradise. And every day I fired up my laptop with my mug of coffee and felt that quiet satisfaction from seeing a porch and front yard full of vibrant colors spilling out of my containers. There were the wine barrels I inherited with the house filled with their yearly bounty of purple petunias and bright green sweet potato vines. I found myself measuring time by the length of the potato vines and how far they wrapped around the porch railings. On either side of my steps were the urns filled with geraniums, because every porch is happier with red geraniums on it. And tucked here and there were smaller containers of other annuals in every color of the rainbow.
In the front flowerbeds were my containers of impatiens, marigolds, snapdragons and more. For the last decade I’ve been collecting fun and unique containers to plant with colors. By themselves they look old and ratty. But fill an old fish bucket, a couple of antique John Deere drill boxes, and a cream separator with blooming annuals and watch the ordinary take on a new life. And you’d think by looking at my yard filled with old galvanized washtubs of Spanish moss and snapdragons that I was starting my own laundry service. I even have a small succulent fairy garden planted in an old Bundt cake pan that sits on a table by my comfiest lounge chair where I rest with a cold beverage after I mow the lawn.
The process of selecting plants at the garden center, bringing them home and transplanting them into my containers brought a sense of normalcy to my spring. The world may have gone crazy this summer, but it was still spinning if there were petunias in those wine barrels on my porch. Nothing may have felt normal this fall, but in my little garden the butterflies were feeding on the plot of milkweed and the lavender bushes I planted just for them. And for a moment each day, I turned off the devices and the screens and just tended to my garden and cleared my mind.
But no matter how hard I worked, how many hours of watering, or the times I lugged all those containers onto my covered porch out of the path of threatened hail, I knew that it was all temporary. I knew winter was on its way with a killing freeze and snow. And no bed sheet was going to stop its icy march for long.
There is one thing that all gardeners know, and that is that there is a season to all things. It is both a joy and a lament.
And so, I say a prayer of thanks that those blooms served their purpose. The year 2020 may have been a dark one at points, but at least in my corner of the world it was filled with color and life.
The colors will come back in 2021, of that I’m certain.
Jennifer M. Latzke can be reached at 620-227-1807 or [email protected].
