The late autumn garden invites reflection. Something miraculous is coming to an end, and our memories of summer splendor mingle with other images of winter. T. S. Eliot notes in “The Dry Salvages” that we examine the present to see the intersections of past and future, but that we may also grasp that we are immersed in intersections between time and the timeless.
He links this to the Incarnation. Indeed, seeing a garden’s splendor falling and decaying, we may see more clearly its structure, and we may glimpse an underlying design. Under the rocks are words, as Norman MacLean put it. We cannot see the DNA of our plants directly, but we see the Word, the order, the design out of which the particular plants grow in their miraculous diversity of forms.
Through shortening days and cooling nights, the plants have slowed, then stopped growing. Tremendous information is stored in the poppy pods, loaded with seeds. Energy is stored in roots and tubers. What appears superficially to be death is more often life’s strategy to spread and intensify itself.