The Garden Path

 “... dark and soundless day in the autumn of the year. … I was busied in earnest endeavors to alleviate the melancholy of my friend.…” — “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Edgar Allen Poe ————— Fall, Poe and other poets have reiterated, is the most melancholy time of the year. The word melancholy is simply a euphemism for depression, clinical or otherwise. And as the days shorten to almost nothing, melancholy can easily beset the heartiest of souls. I know whereof I speak. But wasn’t it a November to remember? Deciduous trees are mostly over by now, as they should be, but it was a ride while it lasted. October, usually our prettiest month, let us down with record rainfall and gray days, but November made up for it, being one of the driest on record. Fall foliage seemed to go on forever; well for six weeks at least. Toward the last, several trees changed color one by one, on our place and yours. Crape myrtles were the most spectacular ever, gradually turning to yellow, orange and red over weeks. A 20-foot Natchez in our front garden held sway in burnt orange for two weeks or more, what with a lack of hard rain, frost or wind in late November. The leaves finally floated down as they could no longer hold to their moorings, leaving a carpet of color on the bright green grass. I almost hated to mow them away. Japanese maples, famous for fall color, did not let us down. One particular one, a seedling that I paid $2 for some 15 years ago, is now 20 feet tall. It is a common type, with green leaves. There are, however, no bad Japanese maples, and the striated bark on this specimen is a year-round pleasure. The leaves turned to the most brilliant red-orange and stayed that way for a couple of weeks, despite the deep shade of its site. Most trees and shrubs in such shade do not color up in autumn like those in full sun, but this one was an exception. Earlier, a bottlebrush buckeye, likewise some 15 years old and 10 feet tall by 20 feet wide, had morphed from green to butter yellow overnight, the large leaves shining from a long distance. A single significant rain about the middle of the month denuded it. Down low, a few perennials produced excellent fall color. Some hostas turn the brightest yellow and are able to hold their own with any tree. Likewise variegated Soloman’s seal, with oval leaves strung out single-file along three-foot stems. Yellow is the thing here, too. Totally different in form is bluestar, Amsonia hubrechti. It, too, turns yellow, but the little leaves are only an eighth of an inch or so wide by a couple of inches long. They are, however, arranged thickly on tall stems to three feet or so and give a ferny effect. When they turn banana yellow in fall, they stand out from the decaying crowd around them. With all this bright autumn effect, it would seem the result would be cheering, and melancholy would be the last thing from our minds. ’Taint necessarily so. ——— Editor’s note: Jimmy Williams is production superintendent at The Paris Post-Intelligencer, where he also writes this column. Published in The Messenger 12.8.09

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