It just doesn’t seem fair. This is the very best time for the purple Cathedral Bells (Cobaea scandens) that I’ve been waiting all summer for. Yet it’s the end of the blooming year. We’ve had a couple of light frosts. The raspberries, which are still producing bless their little hearts, are looking decidedly peaky, and the basil has about had it. Yet the Cathedral Bells are acting as thought it's high summer --spilling all over the back fence, the bale of straw I left there to spread and didn’t get around to, and the ancient horse-drawn plow that we used to hook to the ancient tractor to plow the garden, something I managed to put a stop to by fencing in the entire space. A few more moments and they’ll be taken with the frost. Meanwhile….

I love the Cobaea, especially the purple ones. Massive, demitasse-sized blooms have flamboyant anthers inside that arc out enticing the bees into the flower’s deep hollows. The calyx, a gorgeous smoky blue-green is like a sculpted Russian orthodox priest’s hat, an art form in itself. Cobaea, whose flat dark seeds are sometimes hard to germinate, is a wonderfully decorative climber that, when it takes off, can cover a pergola – something it’s done here in other summers. But this year was cooler, greyer, as I was trying to get them started, and by the time I had a few little hopeful plants, the moonflowers (Ipomoea alba) had taken their place on the pergola. Instead, I planted the five little burgundy-stemmed vines along the back fence thinking I’d find some more prominent spot once they’d grown. But they took forever. They didn’t look like they’d do anything at all for most of the summer -- I had to keep explaining to my husband in extravagantly descriptive terms why he shouldn’t weed them out -- though I was really not convinced they’d amount to anything. And then, boom! They took off. And it was too late to transplant. Instead, I let them go –up over the fence, across the gap and onto the plow, down along the flat tires, flowing up the all-but-useless composter, into the hay bale. The bees love it. They meander along the vines and into and out of those huge cups as though they had all the time in the world. Of course, soon the heavy frost will take them. It’s all ephemeral in the end. Meanwhile, I go out in the morning, marvel at the silvery frost that covers the calyxes like a spangled veil, and give thanks.