As is usual, I’m learning, at this point in the year here in north Texas, though I do have a tolerably alive outdoor property (thanks to probably over-watering it), it looks a bit tired and stressed. Everything plantlike is wilting gradually before the season-ending genuine drop in temperature will give it a short revival. Assuming everything continues to go as usual.

In the meantime, I will let our mowing crew change their usual routine this week and dig up some of the lawn they ordinarily mow, putting in a stone-lined gravel path from porch to road so that guests don’t have to traipse quite so far out of their way in the dusk when heading from their cars on the street to the dining table on a visit. But I’ll still feel a little bit wistful when I look at my fainting ‘nursery’ of clearance-sale plants, where they huddle in stolen bits of shade and get thirsty for their next watering an hour after the last one because of the continued high temperatures.

So I will cheer myself up with a little imagined wandering through the garden at earlier and cooler times by sharing with you a few vignettes of some of our plants in happier, hardier moments. If I can’t quite ‘stop and smell the roses’ without them or me getting roasted to a crisp, I’ll inhale the memory of their sturdier selves and hope to nurse them back for a smaller second-coming before winter actually arrives.