Fall is in full swing as we arrive at Jaime’s for the last
of this season Garden Girls tours. It seems like only last week that we had
started our semi-weekly tours at my own garden, and yet months of digging
holes, adding perennials, building compost bins, and planting weather have gone
by. As we gathered on this evening, Jaime had already done a lot of gathering
herself, of herbs and olive branches, and our olive branch wreaths were made for us and
waiting for their adornments. After an all too quick tour of the pumpkin garden
where Kevin has nurtured tiny seeds to humongous proportions, and the potager
that Jaime has been lovingly creating and tending for the last few years, we
placed ourselves around the many long tables covered with everything aromatic
and wonderful that had been harvested from the gardens, and set about making an
herb wreath to grace our front doors. The sunset could not have been more
soothing and relaxing, the clouds filling the sky over the alfalfa field that
stretches for acres to the west. As the sky gathered into darkness we pulled
our chairs up by the fire and filled ourselves with hearty homemade soup and
apple pie made from the harvest of the tree that shadowed us. As the unofficial
photographer/blogger/memory keeper of
these evenings, I like to wander alone through the gardens and see where my eye
lands. I know the hours that are spent lovingly caring and tending to each
small garden that together make up the homestead. Jaime has an abundance of small areas filled with roses for aromatic sensory
overload, pumpkins of all sizes and colors that get delivered to friends
porches for that first surprise of Fall, herbs for tonight’s soup and perennials
for small blasts of color everywhere. As I walked past an area of the potager I
gazed down at a grouping of bricks that were just a small partial area of one pathway.
I saw all of us that gather at these garden tours in those bricks…..how with no
real intent, we were placed together on this small area of the earth, to fill
in for each other spots that were somehow empty. Be it with creativity and
ideas, or support, friendship and love. We just fit...…together. 
