This summer the black-eyed Susans which flourish in a large corner of our front yard were the first to go. Fenced in by a curving row of landscape bricks, these splendid blooms silently proclaim the lazy days of the season with a brilliant display of buttery golden petals surrounding the dark brown and black centers. Alas, this year, however, these glorious heralds of warmth were soon done in by an excess of heat and a shortage of rain.
By the first week of September, smudges of brown stained the petals which encircled the dark center. It was as if the blooms now seemed to be wearing an eye patch. Their season was done.
It is not difficult to remove them. A hard yank or a couple of tugs loosens each lifeless stalk from the ground but it’s the bending, the stooping, and the wrenching that seems to wear on the body before they get dropped into the big blue yard waste bin from Homewood Disposal. That exertion may be the price we must pay when we need to uproot the attractive things of life.
In summer, when we invite friends to our shack on Shabbona and when they ask us how to get there we say, “It’s the house with all the yellow flowers in the front yard.” Now without those brilliant beacons our home is still visible because we now can say ‘It’s the house with a couple of eight-foot plus sunflowers by the front door.” Sunflower blooms reach past the roofline at the Shnay home in Park Forest.
(Penny Shnay) Our front yard garden is an ever changing experiment each ye.