OPINION

Time in a garden

Mary Agria The Petoskey News-Review
The five butterfly bushes in Agria's yard are a magnet for monarch butterflies.

Cold rains fall. The sun comes out and long shadows fall across my gardens. The maple at the bottom of our yard has begun to ‘turn’. Time to take stock of another gardening season.

Through it all, I am fascinated by the critters that also call the garden home. Monarchs soar and swoop among my butterfly bushes; fewer, sadly, with every passing day as the season draws to a close. 

A red admiral once known as an ‘admirable’ takes up residence on a globe thistle. Known for its laid-back personality, this large butterfly with its dramatic markings calmly sits on its prickly perch, enjoying the warmth of the sun overhead.  

Waiting on the porch rail, a red-tailed pennant — a type of dragonfly also common on our Arizona patio — spreads its delicate wings, unafraid of my presence. These beautiful creatures earn their keep, feasting on up to a hundred mosquitos a day.

The squirrel population has dwindled noticeably after we lost all those trees in last summer’s wind event. But a familiar chip-chip from the old lilac along the lot line reminds us the cardinals settling down in the yard again after their summer of foraging along the Bear River below our house.

It has been a bumper season for tomatoes. After years of unsuccessfully trying to establish an in-ground veggie garden, tomatoes and beans are flourishing in the self-watering beds on our deck. We wheel the containers around to catch the sun, something we couldn’t do with the poor plants in our old veggie bed.

Instead, with an on-sale Eastern redbud tree as an anchor, we created a pocket garden where the veggie bed once struggled and let about half the space revert to lawn. A great spot for a water garden? Perhaps, but that is the stuff of future summers.

The perennial beds are pruned and weeded and mulched.  As the bushes spread outward, we pushed out the beds for the border plants and relocated those languishing under the shade of the bushes. 

All the rain has made the digging and transplanting easy. I lost a galliardia and several bachelor buttons this summer. End of the season specials at a local nursery yielded a lovely blue delphinium and a variety of allium to fill some of the gaps.

Friends marveled at the dramatic growth of our perennial beds in just a few short seasons — changes we sometimes overlook in the day-to-day weeding and mulching. Globe thistles and a ligularia shared by a gardener friend several seasons ago have solidly established themselves, as has the fern garden she gifted me on the terraces below our house.

Soon it will be time to slumber and dream like the plants out there we love to tend. But for now I walk the beds with dew-drenched shoes and give thanks for another challenging and productive gardening year.