The downside of gardening...

Gardening is not for the faint of heart. At least not here in the Northern Hemisphere.

I think Fall is beautiful, but I have learned to dread it just a bit. I wish I could write good poetry, for I'd write about the beautiful but ultimately devastating fire that consumes all the green things in the fall. Yellow, orange, fiery red... it's a fire that burns and consumes the green my eyes love to behold, particularly against the blue sky.

The hardest thing for someone from a "green," tropical country to experience here (at least for me) is the barreness of Winter. Looking at bare trees for over 6 months is very depressing. Some people actually get sick because the lack of sunlight, thankfully that makes me only sad, but not really seriously depressed.

(I agree that the bare trees do look gorgeous in the snow, or, better yet, glistening in the sunlight after an ice storm, but snow comes to visit only a few times a winter - even in Massachusetts it had been like that in the past few years - with global warming and all, winters are not what they used to be, I think...).

Back to gardening, though. Every fall I feel sad to see the plants wither and either die or become dormant for winter, sometimes I'd have some potted plants in my patio and they'd die too, but this was first the year I actually planted some seeds, and watched them grow (the music from the Broadway musical about one of my favorite books Secret Garden comes to my mind here, I never saw it, but have a tape). And I also planted small flower, tomato and herb seedlings. It's been a truly sad experience to see these annual plants die.

On Friday I ripped half of the morning-glory vine from the front porch, and that was so hard! I know, it's just a plant, it will die anyway, and it's best to "euthanize" it before it becomes really ugly and dried up, but I still felt it was heartbreaking to do it. The plant seems to want to go on living, you know, it tries to keep on growing, even though the new vines are kind of shrivelled, and it does keep blooming. Throwing perfectly good, unopened flower buds in the trash feels strangely wrong to me!

One interesting aspect, a good side of all this, is the harvesting of the seeds - I have been saving the morning-glory seeds for a while, but on Friday I would literally pick those little black specks from the ground, as if they were precious stones that had fallen there...

They are my hope. They will bring these beloved flowers back to me next year, and then all will start again...

I do concede that there is an inherent beauty in the cyclical nature of the more marked seasons of the Northern Hemisphere. However, even though I can "rationally" appreciate this beauty (and I say with certainty that now, after almost 10 years, my favorite season is definitely Spring), I can't help feeling a bit of despair when I see the last leaves falling, or when I see the annual plants dying. And I know, deep down, that in the years of gardening that lay ahead of me if I remain in this country, my faint heart will only get stronger. I do look forward to that.