August is a curious month here in the Southern California clime near the coast. Our gardens are in what the English term late "High Summer", and so "Summer's time is finished/ diffused across a path of indifference ", as one poet puts it. It is hot and the air has a subtle rustle of dried leaves that is the harbinger of fall, a fall not yet here but certainly ambiant in the heaviness and fulness of plant being---the flowers are "too heavy with the weight of their own being." They sing queitly to themselves in the morning air. How refreshing.
August is the eighth month of the Gregorian Calendar, named after the Roman emperor Augustus. Here in Southern California the weather is august, but dry, so we need to water if the garden is to flourish and grow and look good. A low water, low maintenance garden is suitable for our rainless clime, but if one wants to savor a beautifully green, flowering garden, one must work hard, be sensitive, and of course, water. What's the use of having a garden that is low maintenance and sterile? The ones that I see in my suburban proper neighborhood are all so fittingly presentable and thusly, depressingly boring or 'noioso' as the Italians so aply put it. I want to walk out into the garden in the morning and observe the emergent leaves, the tiny meristematic buds of growth, and the flower scented atmosphere. If I want low maintenance, I'll go to some corporate office, glassed in entry-way-planting. I want Borodin's Oriental maidens of lovely feet stepping out into gardens of evening cool. But, like all of us, they must step carefully, watching out for poisonous serpents, rattlesnakes. It's their garden too.
The August garden here on the coast is a Mediterranean one of "almost-goodbyes." It is only one degree away from what Giuseppe Lampedusa calls a "garden of partched scents" in his epic nostalgic novel of a lost Sicily "The Leopard". What else can I say--the poets say it so well! Such gardens of heavy roses have the scent and color of Mahler's convalescent slow movements. I experienced this one August in a public garden in Vienna. The roses floated in bloom, their petals in fully opened balls, and the air was warm and sunny of a morning as people strolled on the leaf strewn lawns and walked their dogs among blotches of warm shades, and then the very next morn the cold was there with its final chill, like a stiletto. It was finished; 'Abschied' the farewell until spring, as Mahler says in "Das Lied von der Erde"--"The Song of the Earth". Such gardens have an imploring music all their own singing "wait one minute more before I say goodbye," and that is the essence of Mahler and of August.
We are not quite yet at the season's 'Abschied'-farewell. We will need to wait until late October or perhaps early November for that, and then there is the promise of the Eternal Return.
