“In our everyday lives, we may accept change grudgingly. In the garden, however, we nurture and celebrate its stunning beauty.”

— "Sanctuary – Gardening for the Soul," Lauri Brunton and Erin Fournier

How so very true. The changing of the seasons; the blooming, fruiting and dying of the annuals, the planting and the harvesting — change and evolution are what it’s all about. Change can be large or miniscule, desired or dreaded, wrought by our hands or by Mother Nature’s. But as inexorable as the seasons, change is inevitable.

Change in the garden is probably most visible in the spring, as we move from snow cover to mud season to bare ground. Just as dramatically, we change colors from somber brown to vivid greens. The slow changes happen when we watch too expectantly: watch for the first shoots, watch minute by minute for growth, wait for the soil to warm. The fast changes happen when we turn our backs for a second. The budded daffodil explodes into bloom, the new peas unfurl out of the ground, the trees suddenly cast a shadow of shade under their new leaves.

In the summer, the changes slow but continue: the clematis climbs by gradually wrapping a long-stemmed leaf around a support; the beans grow leaves, then blossoms, then lengthening pods for their ripening seeds; the daylily forms a blossom, flares open its petals, drops it from the stem within 24 hours, then begins again. Change in the summer is rarely all for the good. Japanese beetles assault the roses and reduce a gleaming yellow Graham Thomas blossom to tatters; weeks without rain change verdant lawn to crisp brown blades; or slugs change a hosta from a mound of blue-green leaves to a stubble of bare stems. Change can be as predictable as poppies going dormant or as unexpected as a sudden thunderstorm. Change is the progression from columbine to roses to lilies to phlox, from spring greens and radishes to carrots and tomatoes to fall kale and winter squash, each in its own time and according to its own schedule.

Change in the autumn is a slow march toward ending — ending bloom, ending fruit, ending even growth and sometimes life itself. It is the fast change, in the blink of a degree drop, from green beans to hanging black rags. It is the slow change in growth rate as a cabbage reaches its promised size. It is the long-awaited change to massed blossoms of dahlias and chrysanthemums from a summer of greenery. It is the change of color from green to orange on the pumpkin, the change of fragrance in the ripening melon, and the change of size in the lengthening corn. Fall about ending the weeding, ending the picking, changing to pickling, canning, hoarding and storing. Fall is the change to colder nights, shorter days and languishing in the garden instead of laboring.

Winter is a series of barely perceptible changes, evolving from the earthward plummet of the fall leaves through frost reaching ever farther into the ground to the ever-deepening snow. It is the red osier dogwood bark changing from gray-brown to mahogany-red and the deer changing from shy and hidden to ravenously bold. Change is both unseen, in the tulip bulb preparing its blossom for spring growth, and seen, in an ice storm snapping off a birch trunk that once gave structure to the yard. Change is heard in the owl’s mating season hoots, and sensed in the lengthening days. Winter sees a gradual change in the gardener’s attitude as well, from lassitude and patience after the garden is put to bed, to excitement and impatience as the seed catalogues start to arrive in the mail—an eagerness to be out playing in the dirt.

We may want our jobs to be predictable, our relationships to be stable, and perhaps our flower borders to be perennially at perfect peak. But understanding the cycles of change and feeling oneself as a part of them is part of the adventure of gardening.