Round Robin: Whirly-Birds

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Signal Mountain, Tennessee—The fresh scent of nasturtiums is for me the defining scent of October, as coolness and moisture revive a fragrance smothered in the summer’s heat. The rest of the summer annuals are doomed, and they know it. The fat canopy of impatiens foliage thins, and the ceaseless white and pink flowers grow small and sparse, revealing an embarrassing spraddle of gawky, near-translucent stems of murky green.

The fuzzy blue ageratum, so billowy in August and September, is turning mostly to beige ghost-tufts, and what remains of the marigolds and dahlias persists among leaves browned off by the ravages of mildew or the inevitable summer blight. They know what’s coming, and they’re losing their spirit. The perennials, sensibly, have already abandoned the scene. At the feet of their dead stalks, they are preparing promising rosettes of growth for next year.

Nasturtiums, on the other hand, behave as if there were no tomorrow. Planted throughout my garden to ward off the aphids and other pests from the roses and the tomatoes, the nasturtiums bloom early, then sulk through the hot, dry late summer, only to revive and take off when the cool, moist weather arrives. Now they are swarming up into the thinning rose canes, and they blanket the spaces vacated when I unceremoniously plucked out the zinnias and cleome that had stopped blooming.

Called Whirlybird, these nasturtiums sport a variegated flower capable of all sorts of gradations on the same plant. A flower may be basically yellow, cream, orange, pink, or near rose, but each color shows streaks and blushes of the others. The effect is like a generous tablespoonful of marmalade set off among plump, round green leaves. Another kind, a bit more polite and tidy, has bluish leaves and intense, velvety red flowers, as well as a dreamer’s name—Empress of India. I like to drop a few of these into a clump of Whirlybird and try them in the cobalt blue bud vase or the cut glass decanter or the silver Scottish grog cup. In every setting, they look delicious.

October evenings, when the taste of frost is on the wind, I make my rounds, picking great fistfuls of pungent blooms in a lovely mournful nostalgia, as if these were the last flowers left on Earth. Eventually, I have to brush away fallen sweet gum and oak leaves, and then—for this year at least—one bouquet is the last.

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