The whole Park is a garden of a sort, and sometimes over-tended, too manicured for my taste. The antidote can be found in the Wildflower Meadow, where Fall makes up in beauty for its calamity. Everything dies, but not without a final flourish, and fleeting lovely is the scene, even as it all goes barren…



Actually, it takes more gardening to keep an unkempt meadow than it would to merely mow the grass and clear away the fallen leaves with those infernal motorized blowers. The dedication of this little plot to something wilder than the norm is one of the better policies pursued by the Park’s administrators, some recompense for their penchant for overblown “mega-events.”
Fall in the Meadow is an event in and of itself.



Now I learn that David Chadwick, the Zone Gardener responsible for the area in recent years, is being reassigned. This seems to be typical bureaucratic nonsense, and a shame. So far as I could tell, he did a fine job, as has often been documented in these pages. He will be missed, and I will hope, at least, that the premise of the Meadow will continue, but this is the season of rejection.



There’s not much to be done with rejection except to accept it, as we accept the coming Winter.
“Yes,” spoken in the face of “no.”
Therefore, even though the leaves drop, we must turn to celebration. Let's fall to it!