Now we enter the home stretch of summer, when all the push and pull of weeding and seeding and clipping and hovering over the tomatoes comes to fruition.

Yeah, fruition’s a good word for this time of year. And lately I have been feeling a bit drowned in news and commands for my attention and money, and I bet you are too so we are going to take a garden break. Hope you don’t mind.

We are feasting on cukes and fresh green beans directly from the gardens to our table. We eat cukes with abandon at this time of year because you can’t put them aside for the winter. And my husband and I both agree that nothing frozen beats fresh-picked green beans so those are a table staple in August as well.

It occurred to me when I was out watering early one morning that my gardens are akin to a scrapbook. So many of my perennial flowers were originally gifts from family or friends.

My 30+ years of gardening by the river started with pretty much a bare lawn. There were two beds of garden phlox on either side of the front door, a lonely iris adrift in the yard, and one forlorn patch of crocus.

So my scrapbook begins with the garden phlox left to us by the former owner of what we call “Fiddlehead Cottage.”

I did nothing about a garden the first summer we were here, just watched how the sun moved across the yard. With no vegetation except for grass, it was hot. So that had to change.

The second summer, my friend Ruth was thinning her own gardens of orange day lilies. Did I want some? Sure.

I know lots of folks eschew them for home gardens but I would urge you to think twice about that. Those few day lilies have proliferated in a hedge of sorts across the front of our yard, and over the course of the whole month of July, we revel in their orange explosion. And those lilies are impervious to the road salt and sand that accumulates during the winter.

Armed with not much more than a potato fork, I gradually carved out new beds, removing the grass, and adding more flowering plants like peonies from a neighbor up the hill.

And then there was some purple dragon lamium from the backyard of my friend Carrie. (I have a weakness for variegated leaves and these are spectacular with their silver and dark green.)

And then there are the purply/blue columbine grown from seed gathered by a former yoga teacher.

And several types of iris from the garden of a friend who was moving, and then our daughter-in-law planted “just a few” anemones (wind flowers) that grace our autumn here. They glow in the late summer sun as August ambles into September.

And then as the leaves fall and Halloween pumpkins appear, the last flowers—monkshood—finally open. Also known as wolfbane and aconite, they show up in murder mystery novels with regularity because in quantity, every part of the plant can be a nerve toxin. Rather appropriate for that holiday, don’t you think?