Enticing Time in the Garden: That Special Fall Look

This is our garden in its last stages. After a spring and summer filled with color, we have settled into lots of browns and greys with occasional yellows and oranges from decaying leaves. This is clearly the time to take out the rake and the pruning shears and to cart away what were once lively, growing things. But wait. I love the garden when it looks just this way. It is subtle and mysterious. It draws me in to appreciate things that are spent and on their way out of their earlier way of being. Every year, without fail, I take out the pruning shears only to put them away again. I say to myself, "This perennial plant can stay a little longer. I like the way it looks now." This year it was the plant with yellow branches in the middle of the first slide that led me to take out and put away the shears. Simply put, I love these dying things. Maybe Freud wasn't all wrong about the death instinct.

So, what do I do if I am not doing those fall clean up chores? I let the garden stay the way it is and do a sketch.