By Noah salt
The Pleasures of Deep Summer
A tart and refreshing toast, if you please, to the slow rituals and reveries of August, summer’s traditional end, the month of going away and laying low. Deep summer, says poet Sam Keen, is when laziness finds true respectability, and our gardens begin to orient toward the autumn harvest. As summer’s lease expires, the first apples and pears begin to ripen and drop off the limb, grapes ripen on the vine, suntans deepen, summer novels are finished, lilies and lavender reach peak bloom, and gimlets and mojitos taste even more divine on the porch. In ancient Rome, this month was revered as a time of family rest and renewal, watched over by the goddess Pomona, one of the Numina guardian deities of home and garden whose job it was to look after a household’s fruit trees and gardens as the days grew noticeably shorter. In a normal year, the heat and stillness of afternoon lies like a fevered hand on a withered brow, although this year’s coolness and abundant rain has made an English summer of our Carolina gardens. Jove be thanked for the timeless song of the Brood II magicicada, the locust that filled lazy afternoons with its roasted-sounded mating call much of this summer. The brief courtship of the mysterious large-eyed bugs, which actually lasts only days, comes on a 17-year cycle, and this year’s cicadas were the descendants of the same bunch Thomas Jefferson noted in his garden journal near the end of his days at Monticello. “I am an old man,” he also famously took pains to observe, “but a new gardener.” The Almanac Gardener knows exactly what he means.
“What dreadful hot weather we have! It keeps me in a continual state of inelegance.” — Jane Austen
The Garden To-Do List
* * * ** ** The Ar t & Soul of Wilmington
Water in the cool of morning. Pay special attention to potted plants on hot days. Apply extra mulch to control weeds and cool soil. Raise lawn mowers by a full inch to provide extra protection to grass Train vines on support structures Share cut flowers from your garden with a neighbor Paint and stack wood for drying Thin fruit trees and enjoy the first fruits of the autumn harvest
A Writer In The Garden
“I walk without flinching through the burning cathedral of the summer. My bank of wild grass is majestic and full of music. It is a fire that solitude presses against my lips. — Violette Leduc, daughter of a French peasant and best-selling novelist
August 2013 •
Salt
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