This Rose of Sharon was a gift to my Mom for her front yard, and it has come up and started its bloom season thanks to all the heat and rainfall that Amsterdam has had lately. A member of the Hibiscus family, the Rose of Sharon is one of those ubiquitous shrubs that often gets overused, but its happy colors and ease of coaxing into bloom make it worth growing. This variety is not as common, so it takes pride of place at my Mom’s garden. I love how the bloom of the featured picture hides bashfully behind a leaf – a coy, shy bit of beauty in a summer of quiet healing. 

While my Dad was always the family’s main gardener during my childhood with his vegetable expertise, Mom knew her way around the annuals. Her garage-side garden of impatiens was a simple but spectacular summer tradition. In her current home, she’s made the gardens her own. I’ve given her a few more Rose of Sharon plants, as well as a couple of lilacs that are still trying to take hold in the rather inhospitably-humid summer we’ve had this year. She’s also been able to grow the spectacular love-lies-bleeding plants that Dad used to grow from seeds he gathered one year in Ogunquit. That’s something I’ve never been successful at doing. 

Next spring we’ll look into refining the gardens she has now – a pine tree that my brother planted too close to the patio needs to go before it becomes unmanageable, and an unused fire pit will have to be repurposed as well. I’ll advise her to take photos and write down measurements now, so we can remember when snow is on the ground and we are desperately leafing through flower catalogs hoping for a hasty return of spring and planning for the next season of the garden. 

Island breezes are few and far between in these landlocked parts, but things have certainly felt tropical here. While I’ll never complain about summer being too sunny and warm, I also wilt like a hothouse flower in extreme heat. The plants and garden, however, are loving it. Our pair of fountain bamboo plants have sent up about a dozen stalks into the warm air, rising and rising but not yet releasing their foliage. It feels like they are behind, but I’ve lost track of their timing so maybe this is all as it should be. There are still almost two months of summer left.

Water droplets on banana leaves in upstate New York look gloriously incongruent to the tropical locales they naturally frequent. Along with a couple of palms, they are giving a very tropical vibe to our back patio, which retains pink elements of our coquette summer. 

Let’s have a quasi-tropical song then, where all of nature is wild and free – this is where we long to be…

Summer drains of a little color of late, the flowers in the gardens largely spent, the fresh bright green now watered down into deeper hues, or dried up into brown and tan like many of the ferns at this point. Yes, I’m hinting at fall, the way the slant of the sun has hinted at it, the way it always does this time of the year.