Hello, September. In the Philippines, September is the start of the Christmas season, the longest holiday celebration in the world. Filipinos start enjoying the Christmas carols piping in from the sound systems of the malls and major department stores and claiming the airwaves courtesy of radio and TV stations. Some Pinoys even embrace the overly-stretched holiday celebration by starting to put up some Christmas decorations, never mind that there's still the Halloween celebration to come. We so love Christmas and the commercialization of gift-buying that the celebration starts whenever the month ends in -ber. So Christmas celebration for Pinoys is from September to December, and even add a bit of January, why don't we?
Yes, welcome, September. In the western hemisphere, September is the end of summer and the start of fall. This also means longer and colder nights ahead and shorter daytime. The westerners somehow do not look forward to the -ber months as much as we Filipinos do. To the westerners, the -ber months are the brrrr months. The temperature starts to dip, the cold breeze starts to howl, and the snow is not far away. The non-westerners like us Pinoys love snow unless we actually got stuck in snowstorms or have to travel on icy roads. But, hey, it never snows in the tropical Philippines.
September is not the best month for gardens and gardeners either. The colorful blooms of summer have just about disappeared. The annuals and tender perennials are looking haggard and will soon succumb to the cold temperature. The first frost brings the start of the "death" of the summer beauties in our gardens.
Luckily, there are fall flowers to fall back on. The Japanese anemones are the stars in our early fall garden. The asters and chrysanthemums are readying themselves for their final days in the sun and the limelight in our garden as the other flowering plants take their bow for the year.
Holding supporting roles are the Marguerite daisies, phlox, sunflower, coneflower, and the Rose Mallow. The annual petunias are holding on to whatever blooms they can shoot out before the chilling frost finally knocks them off and out.
Yet, we don't cry over the chilling fall temperatures. Our garden is prepared for the incoming vibrant fall foliage fanfare. When the frost comes, the many hostas we have scattered all throughout our garden will soon have their big leaves turning into bright yellows and gold. It's like our garden's edges turn into a strip of gold from the hostas skirting our flowerbeds.
The few chrysanthemums we manage to plant in our garden also shine gloriously, adding to the beauty, though flitting, in our little home garden.
The chrysanthemum blooms come in yellows and bronzes to pinks and burgundy, and while most are unitone, a few have multi-colors or varying shades and tones of colors.
The blooming chrysanthemums remind us of the fall of 1911, when the American British author and novelist of literary realism and literary modernism, Henry James, once wrote to his friend Isabella Stewart Gardner (an avid plant collector and gardener):
An autumn gale is blowing & spattering about me here as I write and the wind sounds like great guns in my old chimneys. But my lawn is as lustrous as your finest emerald… & I have just been out to look at the private chrysanthemum show in my greenhouse—sighing with baffled pride that it can’t be public.
Of course, Chrysanthemums are out in the public now, including in our home garden. They’re all over people’s home gardens and public parks. Mums are standouts in Fall, blooming beautifully while the rest of the garden has started to sleep or get ready to hibernate for the coming wintry months.
Just as they did hundreds of years ago, first in China and then spreading all over the world, Chrysanthemums continue to enchant gardeners each fall.
Also very much blooming in our garden are the Japanese anemones. Japanese anemones have beautiful maple-like leaves that gracefully hold tall wands of flowers in pastel pink or white. Japanese anemones are vigorous sprawling plants, so our front and back garden has many of this fall beauty. They look lovely en masse.
But what we truly look forward to are the reds and oranges and golds of the fall leaves. The vibrant and colorful leaves of maples look totally splendid, even mesmerizing, in our early fall garden. We have purposely planted Japanese and Canadian and European maples in our garden to get the amazing foliage colors of fall.
Thus, while we hardly have flowers in our fall garden, the soon-to-come colorful leaves of the maples, hostas, and a few other color-changing plants help make our garden a lovely landscape to look out into from our house and for the passing pedestrians and motorists to enjoy. Fall for the garden and the gardeners is not that bad, after all.
(And hey, as true-blooded Pinoy and Christmas lover, I might want to start decorating for the Christmas holiday, too. Naaah, maybe not... Christmas can wait.)
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