Perennial Ageratum

My local garden group, Perennial Swappers, toured my fall garden this evening. It's the last swap and tour of the season. Hard to believe, since it was 85 degrees today.

I still have lots of color in my garden. In addition to purple asters, white sanguisorba, and pink turtlehead (chelone), i have lots of perennial ageratum giving a sweep of color to several flowerbeds.

My Hoosier cousin, Jeana, gave me a single start of this ageratum a few years ago. Thanks to her generosity, i share big clumps of this ageratum with five or six of my friends every September.

Generosity is one of the foundations of gardening. I give plants to people. People give plants to me. This evening Ruth brought me a double white trillium.

Generosity is one of the foundations of our spiritual practice. Let go. Give.

The Fall Garden

The fall garden is blooming now with indigo monkshood, yellow mums, pink turtlehead (Chelone), and white burnet (Sanguisorba). Overhead, green is receding from the leaves on the trees that are turning yellow, red, and eventually, orange. Those same colorful leaves float down like confetti and add careless color to the lawn, the paths, and the flowerbeds.

The landscape is aging fast now, like vibrant 60-, 70-, and even 80-year-olds, capable of leading a colorful life while the body returns its strength (earth), flexibility (liquid), and even its air-y gases (ahem) to the world. These qualities, that we thought belonged to us, turn out to have been borrowed. In fact, our entire body has been loaned to us by the universe, and is not really "ours" at all.

In the fall, the river of life rushes on.