TheBanyanTree: forgiving August

[Julie Anna Teague]

I have one and only one very large sunflower this year.  It looms five 
feet over  my 5'4" head.  Chipmunks, apparently, ate all the other 
seeds I planted. (Deer polished off the lillies and peppers, and 
raccoons ate most of the tomatoes.) This one flower survived due to 
being in the midst of some tough perennials nothing chose to chew 
through. Despite it's amazing height, I found that the record height 
for a sunflower is 25 feet, so mine is a good fifteen feet shy of the 
record. Still, for the kind of neglect my flowers sometimes suffer, 
it's a pretty good sunflower.

Once again I have hit the point in the year when my gardens look all 
but abandoned. The heat and humidity and bugs were simply unbearable 
this year, as they are most years in late July and August in Indiana. 
It is every year at this time that I ask myself why on earth I continue 
to plant as many things as I do. And then it's another fall, another 
winter, another spring, and I find myself, once again, standing in a 
patch of fading zinnias and drooping sunflowers and three feet tall 
weeds in the withering heat of late summer.

Because as much as I hate the heat and bugs of August, as much as the 
burnt leaves and spent flower heads remind me of the inevitability of a 
cold, gray, winter, there are still glorious moments I experience in my 
garden. There are spring herbs and tender perennials that amaze me with 
the first green of the year. And early summer mornings of deliciously 
damp grass and blooms that are so brilliant they take my breath away. 
There are the days I can walk out my back door and pick enough herbs 
and vegetables to make a good pasta sauce.  And once again, the 
following spring, August is forgiven.

Julie