I actually enjoy my garden at this time. I look around and feel a sense of accomplishment. There is nothing more for me to do here. The bulbs are in the ground, in garage pots or in root cellar pots. Everything that needs to be covered is covered – now it’s  just a Japanese maple in a tree stump and another in a big pot. I used to heap bags of leaves around my old-fashioned macrophylla hydrangeas, but now I find I’m just breaking branches more than anything else. Winters just aren’t what they were. Probably nothing really needs protection, including the things I’m still superstitiously protecting. 

It’s still pretty outside. Like Susan, I’m an amsonia fan and my Japanese maple obsession yields big dividends at this time.

There is still a good coating of leaves all over the place, but the street trees haven’t finished unloading. When they have, the leaves will be picked up and taken away by the city for its compost program. They will not be left. Nor should they, as they’ll soon become a storm sewer-clogging, spring-growth impeding tripping hazard.

What good timing that the botanical garden’s fall orchid show occurs now. Right when the outside garden can be ignored, a glimpse of another, unimaginable obsession is there to explore. My mother-in-law had success with orchids. “Benign neglect,” was her advice. It didn’t work for me.

And when I look around at these magnificent displays, it’s hard to believe that’s the advice that’s working for those who bring their specimens to this show. I might be imagining it, but the colors seem even more flamboyant, more red and orange combos and a purple variety (above) that seems to spring from a fantasy.

Too bad that the displays are kind of littered up with signage and ribbons – many, many ribbons. But they are deserved. If I was able to make any single one of the plants I saw at that show bloom after I brought it home, I would throw a party to celebrate.

Of course, I couldn’t resist and did bring one home from the vendor section. But I have no expectations of any kind of long-lasting relationship. Its denuded stalks will likely be in the compost sometime next months.

And for what it cost, why not? As Rant emerita Michele Owens liked to opine, a blooming orchid, with a few buds,  is actually a much better deal than a bouquet of cut flowers that would cost nearly as much and be completely dead within a week. You can easily get four times that out of an orchid – or even better. 

These plants will never find a permanent home with me. They are visitors from an exotic planet. They’ll be touching down again more than a few times this winter.