Vignettes From a September Garden Tour

This afternoon my mother and I went on a cycling expedition to allotment gardens in the southwest of Berlin. Pink bee balm, pale purple asters, and Canada goldenrod were growing in the grass, chestnuts and chestnut hulls littered the setts on one of the roads, and yellow is beginning to show in a few of the leafy trees. In one yard of a house, a threatening set of corn stalks was literally taller than many a one-story building.

In the gardens, traditional quinces were large, green-yellow and ripening on bushes, grapes bunching on the vine, little Japanese quinces in a richer, deeper colour thronging along a fence. Dahlias bristled from one garden, red honeysuckle dipped from another, and the apple trees were full of fruit. Sweet peas had flowered and stopped flowering again, long black seed-husks burst open and shedding their cargo as the plant stalks bleach and begin to decompose. Deep red rose hips were grouped on gracefully curving twigs, white snowberries clinging to the tips of bushes. On the ground, large leaves of zucchini or pumpkin still had trumpet-like yellow flowers, but the gourds themselves seemed to be mostly harvested.

It was cloudy and cool, clearly the beginning of autumn.