Late Incongruity.

You often hear TV garden pundits enthusing about flowers which bloom late into the year. I don’t see it that way. To me, there’s something incongruous and unsettling about the plants which bloom at the end of summer under grey and glowering skies, with a chill wind blowing and the dusk falling early. It seems unfair somehow, a travesty of the optimism and opulence so apparent in spring and high summer. They look like an unnatural bridge between the time of bees, butterflies and flowers, and the time of fruit, berries, and the beauty of decay. Maybe I was designed to live in the tropics.