The closing scenes are not necessarily funereal. A garden should be got ready for winter as well as for summer. When one goes into winter quarters he wants everything neat and trig. Expecting high winds, we bring everything into close reef.
—CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER,
My Summer in a Garden, 1870
Autumn came slowly to Santa Cruz. The trees didn’t change color. No frost accumulated on the ground. In fact, autumn here looked suspiciously like summer everywhere else in the country, with clear, sunny skies and surprisingly warm afternoons. I had heard people talk about year-round gardening on the West Coast, but it didn’t seem right. The garden needed a rest and so did I. The canning and freezing had all been a little overwhelming, so as the days got shorter and the tomatoes and squash stopped producing, I was almost glad to see them go. I had not planned for a fall vegetable garden; Brussels sprouts and butternut squash should have been planted in August, and I should have started some lettuce and snap pea seeds in September. But late summer drifted into fall and I didn’t once think about gearing up for another gardening season. By October, when I began to miss the daily supply of garden produce, it was too late to do much about it. I put in a row of kale and chard near the back door, along with some flat Italian onions and a cold-weather parsley that I’d found. Enough for an occasional winter soup, and that was all.
The flowers kept blooming with no encouragement from me, and I was glad of that when I realized that my garden would have visitors in the fall-Monarch butterflies who migrate from Canada to Mexico each autumn in search of a warmer climate for winter. Nobody knows why, but they’ve taken to stopping off in a particular eucalyptus grove in Santa Cruz on their way. As many as sixty thousand butterflies share the same fifteen or twenty trees, hanging from the branches in tight clusters.
It is good that the monarchs stop here to rest, because they have quite a trip ahead of them. They emerge from their chrysalis in the late summer and begin a southern migration, following a nectar corridor down to Mexico. They feed on salvia and cosmos and pincushion flower as they stream southward, and gardeners all along the coast are glad to play host to them as they travel. Mostly they will end up in Michoacán, Mexico, where they will hang from the trees in wet gray masses until spring, unable to fly in the damp cold, remaining mostly dormant, living on the food supply they stored up during the fall. When spring arrives, the females will awaken, hungry for milkweed, and the males will awaken, hungry for love.
The female shakes herself loose from the group long enough to dry her wings in the sunlight, and the male pounces on her in midair, pulling her down to the ground to mate and carrying her back up to the trees afterward. Once the female is impregnated, she begins her search for milkweed, the only food source for her young. She travels north slowly to Canada, leaving up to five hundred eggs behind as she goes, depositing each on a scrap of milkweed with a drop of glue to hold her young in place. Sometime over the summer, exhausted from the long trip, the monarchs die just as their larvae are hatching and getting ready to repeat their parents’ journey.
When my Aunt D’Anna was in town from Dallas, I took her with me to see the monarchs. D’ Anna and I have always been close. We understand each other, we speak the same secret language. Even now, when I see her, she leans over and whispers to me, “You’re my child. I loaned you to your father and he never gave you back. He has all my Aretha Franklin records, too.” I knew she would love the monarchs.
When we got to the eucalyptus grove, people were standing around in dignified groups, craning their necks up at the butterflies and whispering to each other as if they were in a museum. The monarchs were mostly stuck together like wet leaves clinging to the trees, only the pale dusty undersides of their wings exposed, holding onto the branches for their lives. But as the sun came out and warmed their wings, they shook themselves loose from their huddle and hundreds of them took flight at once. The sky filled with orange butterflies soaring up to the tops of the trees, then drifting calmly down again. Each wing appeared in sharp relief against the blue sky, a perfect symmetry of black, orange, and white, thousands of them floating above us.
D’Anna and I lay right down on the observation platform, among the schoolchildren tugging on their parents’ sleeves and the nature enthusiasts snapping pictures. Lying there on our backs, gazing up at a sky filled with fluttering wings, it was difficult to feel anchored to the ground. They drifted down around us, landing on the platform, on our shoes, on the camera bag, then soared up again. We felt suspended in the sky with them, as if we were flying ourselves. Speech became difficult; we were in awe.
“You know … “1 murmured. “They only live for a year. These monarchs have never been here before. But somehow they know to come to the same place every year.”
D’ Anna replied in a dreamy, drugged voice. “Huh … how do you ’spose they know where to go?”
I thought about it. “Maybe it’s the signs that say, ‘Monarch Sanctuary’. Maybe they can read.”
She giggled. “Maybe they come each year to see [us. Maybe the butterfly parents tell their children, ‘Every year, in Santa Cruz, all these humans gather in a little eucalyptus grove. Nobody knows why. But it’s really a spectacular sight. You should go next year on your way to Mexico.’”
A few days later, I had dinner with some friends who live a few blocks from the eucalyptus grove. “Have you seen any monarchs at your place yet?” they asked. “After they get settled, they start flying all over town. They’re all over our neighborhood.” The next morning, as I walked downtown for breakfast, I saw at least a dozen fluttering along the river. They were a couple of miles away from the eucalyptus grove, and as I walked, they circled the path in front of me, giving me a good glimpse of the fine detail on their wings.
THE MONARCHS SHOWED UP in my garden as well, fluttering down like autumn leaves. They landed on the last blooming sunflower; all the others had gone to seed and were getting picked apart by the sparrows. The monarchs continued through the garden, stopping at every cosmos, opening and closing their wings slowly as if they wanted to show off the contrast between their bright orange wings and the deep fuchsia petals of the cosmos. They skimmed the pincushion flowers, drinking from each one with their long, narrow tongues and moving on. I spent as much time outside with them as I could; they wouldn’t be here much longer. They took advantage of the last burst of energy my garden had to offer. Before long, the rains would start again, the monarchs would head south to Mexico, and the garden would fold in on itself, going dormant and quiet until spring.
As the butterflies flew around, I tidied up the garden, getting ready for winter. I knew how wet the ground would get once the rains started; I wouldn’t be able to do much outside without sinking to my ankles in mud. I put a new layer of straw down in the vegetable paths over the first layer, which had already started to decompose. San Lorenzo had put signs up the weekend before advertising cover crop seed, which, when planted, would hold the soil in place, add some nutrients over the winter, and make good “green manure” in the spring—high-nitrogen plant material that could be tilled under and allowed to compost in place, just in time for planting the spring crops. There were several to choose from—clover, rye, fava. The idea of having young fava beans to eat in the early spring appealed to me, so I bought a bag and planted them in the new vegetable beds I’d marked out a few months back. I pulled some weeds, turned the compost pile, and tucked a blue tarp around the worm bin to shelter it from the rain.
There wasn’t much more to do to put the garden to bed on that October afternoon. I didn’t have much time anyway—the sun was almost down, and with November right around the corner, the days would only get shorter and colder. My first year in the garden was almost over. I was about to pack up my tools and go inside when I realized that there was one more chore I should do—rip out my tomatoes. Most of them were dead already, destroyed by wilt or fungus or aphids. A few of Mammy’s Holland tomatoes hung on the vine, and the Sungolds were still going strong, continuing to bloom and produce fruit, but the tomatoes had lost their peak-of-summer sweetness. I needed to get them out of the ground and plant the rest of my fava beans in their place before the ground turned cold and soggy. I put my gardening gloves back on and turned, a little reluctantly, to the tomatoes. It seemed I’d spent the whole year getting this garden started; now, suddenly, it was coming to an end.
The tomatoes came out of the ground easily. I did not bother to unwind them from their stakes; I just grabbed a stake and a few of the thicker vines and pulled. The soil seemed to cleave in half as I pulled, separating just enough to let go of the stringy brown roots. I dropped the vines, tangled up as they were with twine and bamboo stakes, in a heap on the patio, and grabbed the next plant. Each one came out, slowly, smoothly, a few overripe tomatoes dropping to the ground as I pulled. I turned the ground a little with my spade and dropped in my fava beans. There was nothing more to do. Winter was coming, and I was ready. With a few swift tugs on my tomato vines, the vegetable garden was closed for business, and the growing season was at an end. Just in time, too: There was already a damp chill in the air, and the clouds that accumulated on the horizon were more than ordinary ocean fog. They were rain clouds.
The tomato plants, along with a few aphids that had stuck it out for the whole growing season, went into a plastic bag in the garbage instead of on the compost pile, where the aphids would surely have set up camp for the winter and attacked again next spring. Before I threw them away, I picked the few remaining ripe tomatoes. I still had a little basil growing, and plenty of garlic, so I brought one last handful of produce inside to make a plate of tomatoes as a summer farewell: sliced tomatoes, ribbons of basil, chopped garlic, and the most fragrant, spicy olive oil. I wouldn’t see this dish again until July or August next year. I called Scott into the kitchen and he sat down across from me at the kitchen table. As night fell in the garden, we ate those tomatoes slowly, and savored them, because it would be a long time before we tasted them again.
I found out that winter cover crops are essential on the West Coast, where the winter rains can wash good garden soil away if there’s nothing to hold it in place. Now I plant a cover crop every fall, and if I leave a bed planted over the winter with cool-weather crops like leeks and beets, I give it a rest in the spring by planting gorgeous, flowering crimson clover, which attracts bees all summer, draws the first of the migratory monarchs in October, and replenishes the soil with nitrogen when I till it under just before winter.
My favorite winter crop is fava. There is something so appealing about the smooth brown seeds; they are large and comforting, and I’ve come to associate them with the fall. I buy about two pounds of seed, which is enough to cover five hundred square feet. I pick a chilly day in late October, after the first rain, to push the beans into the wet ground with my thumb. Within a few weeks of planting, they sprout fat green stalks, and all winter I watch them grow tall and dense, crowding out the oxalis. In the spring I turn most of them under as soon as they bloom to make compost, but I can’t resist keeping a few around so I can harvest the young pods for an early spring pasta made with fava beans, kale, and shaved romano cheese.