There is endless procrastination when you look at the gardens and though deep in fall, with frosty nights and cold, wet, windy days it still struggles to present itself as fresh and beautiful as it was when it enthralled you throughout the summer months, and you know you've got to discipline yourself to continue preparing everything for the inevitable. The snow will fly, the nights will dip well below freezing, the winter winds will howl, and freezing rain will cover the snow in a blanket of ice.

Before that happens, you hope there will be sufficient accumulation of snow to blanket the garden and protect perennials sound asleep deep within the garden soil. And after too many months of hidden promise, spring will arrive to rouse sleeping bulbs and corms and roots to awaken and slowly present themselves to eventually poke through the thawing snow-freed soil and entertain thoughts of emerging in full glory and colourful, textured presence.

So the job of responsible gardening, cleaning up the summer's bounty of flowering shrubs and perennials, the potted annuals that so delighted us awaits completion. And you determine that the weather and the circumstances beckon, and you respond. Time to get serious, to get out there with secateurs, spades, forks and composting bags.

Neighbours stop to comment what a shame it is, and how it looks to them like awfully hard work, and don't believe it when you say it's invigorating and even pleasurable to you for after all, it's garden work and it's productive in its own way. Their credulity is strained; they enjoy the look of the garden in full, rich bloom but seeing the work involved in maintenance aren't too sure they'd think it worth the trouble.

You do, though. And though it takes days upon days to accomplish, eventually you reach the point where most of the work is done. You've taken down the vast network of morning glory vines, cut back the clematis vines, tidied up the honeysuckles, snipped the roses, cut back the Annabelle hydrangeas, taking care to leave the others as is, and the Monarda, peonies, Black-eyed Susans, lilies and irises, along with all those marvellous hostas are cut back to ground and composted.

And the pots, goodness the garden pots, large and small, the stone urns and the ceramic and clay pots all have to be dredged of their annuals, the dracaenas struggled with, the petunias and the lobelia, the fabulous begonias and the hard-working impatiens, the trailing ivies and the potato vines, all of them to be composted, the begonia bulbs overwintered for re-planting next spring, along with the canna and calla lilies. There's an orderly progression and before all that long, it's almost completed.

And then you contemplate the dull, barren appearance of the garden, a startling change accomplished in the space of a week or so's dedicated deconstruction, and you sigh.