Last night, “the growing season ended” said the report on NOAA weather radio.  Lows were in the upper teens in outlying areas and in the low 20’s in the city.  On a whim, I decided to visit the botanical garden on a day other than Saturday to see how the plants had coped.

The keepers of a botanical garden like this one have little in common with a plant dabbler like me. Preparations for this killing day began a long time ago here. While I waited until the cold killed my pentas, salvias, and sweet potato vines before making a move against them, the keepers of this garden already had pulled out vigorous flowers and plants to make way for winter and spring plantings and to keep their garden from looking like a field of soggy cabbage today.

By now tender plants like water lilies and papyrus had been lifted from the reflecting ponds and put away for the season.  (It would be interesting to know how the garden keepers store the giant water lilies (Victoria amazonica) whose pads grow to five-feet across in hot summers.  I’m glad it’s not my problem.)  On land, the cannas have been dug and put away.  The stocks of the banana trees have been cut to within a foot of the ground.  The stand of bananas in the Chinese Garden already has been covered with several feet of mulch.

This garden tries hard to keep visitors from seeing plants when they are not at their best.  I got here early so that I could see the remnants of summer’s end before they were all cleared away.  I wasn’t quick enough though.  I spotted a crew of workers dressed in white insulated coveralls loading their Cushman utility cart with the wilted remains of summer plants.  An eerie scene: dead plants being carted off by men in white.

I especially wanted to have a look at the reblooming iris ‘Decker’ that was doing so well last week.  I couldn’t spot it from a distance, so I thought the stock must have be cut and carted off.  As I got closer though, I saw the stock that looked so hardy a week ago sprawled on the ground—vigor gone and color faded.  The American Iris Society sponsors an interest group called the Reblooming Iris Society.  The group claims over 600 members, all “devoted to promoting interest and development of all iris types having more than one bloom season per year.”  These must be some thick-skinned folks – able to endure seeing vigor and beauty change to lifelessness within the space of a few hours.

The foliage of the Crinum lilies is limp.  The lilies are part of the amaryllis family and bloom in the summer on naked stocks that pop up from a clump of glossy green leaves.  The bulbs could freeze, so I was surprised to see that they had not been lifted and stored for the winter.  I checked the botanical garden’s website to find out why a bulb that prefers the weather along the Gulf Coast would be left to cope with a Midwestern winter.  The site says that lifting the bulbs “is generally not considered good practice because crinum roots do not like to be disturbed and once disturbed plants may not bloom for another 2-3 years.”  So I suppose that soon, when I look for the Crinums again, I will see only mulch, piled high.

The few leaves left on the ginkgo trees will be gone in a couple of days.  Their golden color peaked a couple of weeks ago and their leaves have been falling slowly ever since.  This morning though the leaves that remained are curled into tight cylinders.  After the leaves drop, they again spread into their usual fan shapes.  There is no wind to nudge the leaves to drop. Still, they drop in huge numbers exposing the nubs on the branches where the whole cycle will start again.

Visiting a botanical garden is a lot like going to an art gallery.  In a gallery, finished works are hung or displayed for visitors to see.  Gallery goers are expected to look.  They are not expected to add to what they see.  Likewise, visitors to botanical gardens are expected to look, but not touch.  Occasionally though, I see creations left by visitors who are not content just to admire the plants the garden keepers provide.

This morning I saw two pin-cushion boxwoods that were decorated quite carefully with the fading, but still colorful blossom heads of mums.  At this increasingly dull time of year, why not add a touch of exuberance?  The mums were ready to be replaced by pansies anyway and the boxwood wasn’t harmed.  Of course, there’s always the “what if everyone did that?” line of reasoning for why not.  Valuable specimens could be vandalized if visitors tried to out-do one another in their enthusiasm for self-expression.  To keep the monkey-see monkey do visitors at bay, I suspect that the boxwoods will be cleared of mums when I see them again next week.

A hard freeze--the first of the season—is expected by mid-week so this will be the last week for seeing things in bloom.  By next week the summer blooms and foliage will have turned to debris.  I’m especially glad I didn’t miss seeing a tall reblooming bearded iris called ‘Decker’ in bloom.  Seeing any iris in bloom in mid-November is always a treat.  But, in past years, the blooms on these fugitives of May seemed tentative, even anemic.  It was as though they knew they weren’t supposed to be around at this time of year and were edgy and embarrassed about blooming.  ‘Decker’ is different though: plentiful flowers with eye-catching colors supported on thick stocks filled with fat buds oblivious to their fate.  I have no more space for irises in my garden, but next year I’ll make room for this gutsy intruder into autumn.

Buds have already begun to form on the early spring flowering corylopsis shrubs.  It seems odd to see its branches filled with the yellow leaves of fall, open seed pods that have yet to fall, and swelling buds that hide the dangling chains of sweet bell-like flowers still to come.

Flocks of robins are roaming the Garden looking for fruit and berries.  I don’t know whether they are passing through or are newly arrived from places north.  Wherever they come from, they are systematic in their feeding.  I saw a flock settle into a crab apple tree in the Japanese Garden and set to work methodically stripping it of all its fruit.

At the edge of the daylily garden there is a stand of purple beauty berry (Callicarpa japonica). The variety is named ‘Heavy Berry.’  For good reason too – densely packed bundles of glossy, royal-purple berries bulged from both sides of the leaf nodes.  I wanted to take a picture of the berry clusters this week before the freeze hits them.  But the robins got to them first.  The shrubs were stripped – not a berry left.  Will the red winterberries be next?  The berries on the shrubs planted around a life-sized statue of Garden founder Henry Shaw that in years past fed a single catbird for the entire winter are gone.  Beauty is being lost for me.  In exchange, robins are being fed.

The most spectacular sight in the botanical garden today is the crop of peach-colored persimmons (Diospyros kaki) on the two trees that grow with the bamboo outside the wall of the Chinese Garden.  I counted at least three dozen of the fruits.  Last year there were none.  Persimmons, I’ve heard, are bitter unless they are cured.  I think the fruit are better not eaten though.  They are in their prime just now, hanging in clusters on the tree silhouetted against the sky.