Flowers from the Garden

There isn’t much left in the cutting garden. The zinnias have faded and the cosmos have long withered away, but the strawflowers are still blooming. I filled a bucket with their jewel-like stems and went wandering in search of what might grow alongside them. The goldenrod was first, growing wild in the midst of the shrub roses. Snip, snip. Then I spotted a delicate branch of asters poking through the bottom of the fence. A few steps farther and there were more. None of it planted. None of it tended. Just the things we tend to call weeds, quietly marking the change of season. There is something especially beautiful about what grows wild this time of year. Goldenrod along the roadside, asters appearing at the edges of fields—the landscape beginning to trade the bright colors of summer for ochre, rust and brown. Back inside, I went digging for a vessel sturdy enough to hold all that wildness and pulled out this old brown stoneware pitcher. It felt exactly right. Earthy and substantial, with a little cream glaze dripping around the rim. Brown stoneware seems to belong to autumn in the same way those roadside weeds do. Neither is particularly precious, and perhaps that’s the point. Sometimes the truest markers of a season are the things we barely notice until we stop to gather them.