Extremes
And endlessness
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After weeks of mild temperatures and frequent rain, June has exploded into shocking heat and punishing humidity, with a heat index near 110. Skulking inside next to the window unit, I look with occasional pity at a garden I don’t dare enter until after sundown, blessing the divine intelligence that gave people legs to move around on instead of roots to graft us to the spot. I have no envy, at the moment, for the plants that have to stand at attention all day in this iron sun.
So many of our beloved plants in this part of the world were first cultivated by English gardeners, and I sometimes wonder what a shock it must have been to endure the first few years in this new world of extremes, where both high and low temperatures can reach excesses unheard of in British climates. It is strange, too, to see which plants are faring best as the global climate shifts and things become even more unpredictable. My clematis “Montana,” for instance, a variety thought to be very hearty indeed, gave up the ghost to a paltry March cold snap this year, while my new roses don’t seem to mind the heat at all and my beloved Clematis “Purpurea Plena Elegans,” a delicate-looking variety that was cultivated as early as the sixteenth century, seems as comfortable in this oven-like heat as it apparently was in Rennaissance London.
In the wee hours of tomorrow morning, I’m told, the heat will break, ushering in several more days of cool, mild, rainy weather that I will welcome like an old friend. And the plants will get some much-needed water just as my rain barrel was about to run dry. Midsummer’s Eve, the Summer Solstice, is now behind us, and though you’d never know it by the weather, the light is now growing less by around a minute each day. In spite of myself, I can’t help but mark the moment: a pivot-point from which we will hurtle through all the loveliest parts of the year and into the cold.
Despite the extremes and the transience, summer has a way of projecting endlessness. On milder afternoons, my boys and I will stretch out on the back porch and watch the wind play in the line of Norway Maple trees that shelters practically our whole neighborhood. It’s intoxicating to watch the buffets curl among their green and shifting billows, and fills me with an echo of the summer tristesse I can remember from my boyhood, where ten weeks constituted a separate lifetime of play and activity and solitude, at the end of which I felt not like a kid ready to go back to school, but like an altogether different person. It’s a season that doesn’t shift so much as vanish, taking a version of us with it, a relaxed, sun-numbed version whose inner voice has quieted and for whom the days merely are. One unexpected day, the first cool suggestion of September will steel through an open window and we’ll snap out of it, shifting back to that active, world-facing, attentive other self. Sometime soon. But not yet.
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