The pride of summer is gone. Fittingly so, one supposes, since summer too is long gone. Gardens, their views, their very existence enabling those of us who enjoy working in them to appreciate how they add so much quality to our lives with their vibrancy and beauty. They grip us with their aesthetic offerings from day to day, season to season. Until the final season of the year arrives and they slip away.

The garden that I took so much pleasure in is no longer. Still there but a wan resemblance to what it had been throughout the spring, summer and fall months. When it called to me to enter and minister to its needs. In fact, its needs were mine as well. That feeling of fulfillment in being in the garden, noting its condition and what it required at any given time and then setting about doing your best to help it give us the benefits of its sublime appearance.

The architecture of it, the colour, shadings, fragrance, texture, all of it as close to perfection as nature can entice it to become. And we gardeners like to think we are nature's handmaidens, as it were, doing our utmost to supplement the critical needs of the garden. With nature providing the warmth and brilliance of the sun, the gentle stirring of breezes, and the blessing nurturing of rain, our task is but to coddle the garden, tidying up.

At any given time glimpses of the garden from the house interior, as you leave the house, as you arrive back home can be so compelling it takes one's breath away with admiration and pride. That's the story of gardening, along with soil amendment, snipping, planting, fertilizing, and no end of softly uttering blandishments, encouraging compliments to the garden's many ears.

Where's the garden now? Receded, forlorn. It's there, all right, but become very private and removed, much of it now hidden under the surface of the soil, awaiting that opportunity to reawaken from its long winter sleep, a sleep which has just begun. In a way it doesn't seem all that long ago that it teased and tempted us with its insouciant liveliness.

In another sense, it seems so long ago -- though it most certainly is not, not yet -- that it began the sad process of fading and ultimately withdrawing. I cut back the last of the roses still stubbornly setting out exquisite little buds with great regret, and removed the last of the annuals that still persisted in blooming, because hard frosts overnight have entered the microsystem environment of the garden.

Now it looks bleak and rather miserable. Latterly, lightly covered with the snow that will soon drift heavily atop it as the months of winter commence and bury it until spring.