Gardens for Night Owls

Writing about evening gardens seems like a pretty silly thing for someone who is night blind to attempt. And yet, evening is my favorite time in the gardens, and I have always wanted to expound on this magic time.

But I thought about it. My cats, navigating as easily as if they had miner's lanterns attached to their little foreheads, can navigate easily after dark; maybe they can see and enjoy all the nuances and delicate points of each flower within eyeshot - but very few people can - even those with good vision. Fortunately, that's not the point of the evening garden.

Gardens at night are about fragrance; they are about sound; they are about textures, about light and shadow play - all things that even the night blind can enjoy to the hilt.

Most summer evenings when dinner is done my husband leads me across the stone path to the gazebo and we sit in the quiet evening and just listen and feel. Often as not, I have my eyes shut.

I can hear the rush of the waterfall into the pond across from me, and the leaves rustling all around me. Sometimes I count the chirps of the crickets and try to guess the temperature. Sometimes I just amuse myself by trying to hum along to the wind chimes. Occasionally I can hear a sleepy bird cheeping. Then a car goes by and shines its lights into our garage. I can hear the rooster, who sleeps on the garage door opener crow, probably thinking that he has just experienced the shortest day on record.

Something about evening seems to magnify sound. Unfortunately, it also magnifies the sound of trucks and tractor/trailers roaring on the I-81 overpass that runs nearly directly overhead, which is why we created a waterfall that was as noisy as possible. That's probably why my husband insisted on installing a stereo system with quad speakers in the gazebo, but he now knows better than to turn it on when I'm around. It is, I have discovered, quite possible to focus on the water and crickets, and shut out the less desirable intrusions altogether, but quite impossible to mentally eliminate the drone of Leonard Cohen at the same time. But with the stereo off, and my eyes at half mast I can hear the grasses rustling in the breeze, and the wind making the tree limbs shudder gently. In autumn I can hear the gentle plop of apples falling from the tree, and sometimes, to my dismay, the thud of deer hoofs racing across the yard after dining on something which I am thankful I won't have to know about until daylight.

The sheer bliss of all these wonderful nature sounds inevitably causes me to sigh in appreciation; that very sigh brings double pleasure because on the inhale I catch the whiff of the nicotiana I keep planted by the gazebo steps, and the honey scent of the buddleia. Usually. This week we are trying not to sigh, or even breathe through our noses since my husband's dog (who has been named, after several years of debate, "The Idiot") proudly caught and killed not one, but two skunks a few nights back. One skunk we might have been able to handle. Two - and the dog stands alone.

I usually open my eyes when I catch that whiff of scent, (The flower scent - the skunk spray simply makes them water) because the bright white of the nicotiana is one of the few things visible in the night garden - that and the sculptured shape of the huge fountain grass across the pond and the white variegated miscanthus beside it. We have lights around the pond, and if I stand up I can see the reflection of a weeping Japanese maple and clumping bamboo reflected in the mirror of the water's surface.

Sometimes I have ventured solo into the walled garden in the wee hours, long after the low voltage lights have gone out. At this time it is a garden of shape and movement. The grasses dance. The waving tentacles of roses escaping from the arbor can look downright menacing. If I am in the garden in these wee hours it is probably because, for some reason or other I feel menacing too and have escaped the house to think. But in the dark, watching the shifting shapes and the negative and positive spaces in the garden beds I soon forget whatever was troubling me - only because it has been replaced by a new problem. Gardens in the moonlight appear in black and white - and robbed of color soon reveal all of their design flaws. Too much bulk here. Too many fine textures there, not enough balance over here. It all makes me very tired and quite ready to end my night owl's sojourn. I head back to the house (very slowly because I can barely see the house, much less whatever it is I might be walking on) so that I can get enough sleep to tackle the design problems in the morning.

That's the best thing about night-owl gardening. Not only is the garden enchanted at night, but doesn't involve any physical labor. You can't do what you can't really see.