Quieter Days of Autumn

Having waxed melodramatic on the subject of my autumn clematis in a recent post, I'm reluctantly ready to "dial it down a notch." My divisions are......... done. As I tend to the tasks remaining, it's all so quiet, so crackly, so peaceful, so thought provoking. Ghosts of this year's garden are my silent partners. Brittle seed pods, green leaves turning purple, the brown stalks that the daylily plants are so eager to release, the yellow nasturtium just daring the frost to nip it away, the burning bush now clashing with a neighbor it found companionable a few weeks ago....to everything there is a season. And so it is with these posts. I will not go away. (But I may be a little calmer!) The quiet season will afford me opportunities to share an occasional thought, follow an impulse, and perhaps to recommend books I enjoy, like this one.

Two Gardeners - A Friendship in Letters is an mmmmmm read for anyone who loves to write, read and garden. Funny how those three things seems to pop up in the same person so often! Katherine White was a legendary editor and garden columnist at the New Yorker Magazine. A beautiful friendship began when Elizabeth Lawrence, another noted garden writer sent a letter of encouragement to Ms. White. Over the next twenty years they exchanged letters, seeds, suggestions, catalogues, concerns about each other's health, and sentiments of the gardener's heart. The ideas they shared with each other they now share with us, the readers. Tomorrow after I make sure all my changes are entered on my garden map I'll drag the Adirondack chair to a place in the sun where I can put my feet up on the stone wall. Lulled by the lazy cricket sounds at the edge of the crisping woods, I'll escape into this book again. Maybe, just maybe, I'll look past the page to the garden and despite all the challenges and setbacks will be able to say, "Well done, Lauri."