The glory of high summer

Jill Severn

Photo by Anna Schlecht

It’s time to revel in the glory of high summer – this annual peak experience of beauty and abundance in the garden, on the barbecue grill and at the beach. It’s time to call in (well, take days off) and watch giggling kids roll down a grassy hill in the park.

By this time in the growing season, the living is easy. The garden chores have become lighter. In the vegetable garden, we’re in transition from knees in the dirt to hands in the kitchen as we freeze, can and dry food for the coming winter.

Among the flowers, we can pick bouquets rather than fighting slugs.

Picking flowers is one of the signature pleasures of summer and includes a bit of an art education as a bonus. I have learned a lot about color contrasts and harmonies from picking flowers and the foliage to set them off. (Parsley has joined spirea at the top of my list for this purpose.)

You may notice that I am avoiding the term “flower arranging,” which to me connotes a more formal effort than “making bouquets.” I am not a fan of the stiff, tight arrangements that come from most American florists. I am also not high-brow enough to aspire to imitate the floral arrangements in Egyptian, Italian Renaissance or Impressionist paintings, as some people apparently do. If I create something resembling ikebana, it’s by accident. I just like wandering around the yard with a pair of scissors, picking what’s blooming, looking at what goes well with what, noticing what’s just coming into bloom and what is fading, and breathing warm summer air.

Then I enjoy the puttering in the kitchen. First I choose from my carefully curated shelf of jars, small bottles, vases, and old half-pint milk bottles. This collection is chosen to hold flowers well, something many vases don’t do.  I mostly make fairly small bouquets for the kitchen table and even smaller ones for the windowsill. If I’m using foliage, I put it in the vase first, then the flowers, trimming the stems to the right heights as I go.

Even if you have no flowers in your garden – you poor dear – Queen Anne’s Lace and other blooming roadside plants will do nicely. 

I tell you this to encourage you to try it, but also to invite you to think about other relaxed, purely pleasurable summer activities: lying on your back under a tree and watching sunlight in its leaves; poking around a tomato plant to see if there are any ripe yet; spending time in a green place with a dog, a book, both or neither.

This year, high summer in our lucky locale is the world at its best and brightest, and it invites our full attention and enjoyment.

But as July wanes, we can also feel time slipping by. The Seattle Times seems eager to turn this into a sense of dread with a front page story on “The Big Dark” in our future: “Summer’s hardly started, you say; the hottest days are still to come. And yet, we’ve already had our last 9 p.m. sunset of the year, and as of Saturday will have lost an hour of light since the summer solstice.” 

While we can’t argue with the facts, we can decline the invitation to dread the next cycle of the seasons – but only if we spend as much time outdoors as possible during the coming week.

Like the man said, be here now.

Jill Severn writes from her home in Olympia, where she grows vegetables, flowers and a small flock of chickens. She loves conversation among gardeners. Start one by emailing her at jill@theJOLTnews.com