Now summer is really over. It turns out fall is somehow better than summer – sunny, warm, and sometimes the wonderful fall wind springs up.  Beautiful leaves are tugged off the trees.  The grass is a magical green because of all the rain we had.  The garden was mixed.  Kale a great success, potatoes not bad, the novelty of the blue ones adding an exotic note.  The tomatoes were a disaster.  Swollen and tasteless with rain, sometimes rotting on the vine. There were only a few peppers, onions not bad. The garlic simply disappeared but the onions were fairly good.

And here are these wonders.  Great sunflowers grown on a whim from a few seeds found in an old package that had been shoved into the back of a drawer.  Strong thick stems are still not equal to the task of holding up these great heads.  We stuck one up into a small evergreen as a makeshift bird feeder.  The others, their heads hanging down wait for the first frost.

I love the mysterious geometry of the pattern of the seeds. Look how they spiral around perfectly.  I don’t know why but it reminds me of the complexity of quilting or embroidery.  So much effort in our worlds to create such a pattern.  So effortless in nature.