when september ends

Summer has come and past
the innocent can never last
wake me up when september ends

Yeah, yeah, I know september ended a couple of weeks ago, but this Green Day song ran through my head as I pulled out my flowers this morning.  Once I let them go until we got a hard freeze and they were all dead, but it was way more depressing to pull them then that it is to just do it now when they are leggy and overgrown and past their prime.

It's not hard to do when they look like that, even if it makes me sad that summer is gone.

But then there's bacopa.  Bacopa is used as a filler plant.  At the beginning of the summer, you can buy it in six-packs, and you use it to fill in the blank spaces in your pots and hanging baskets.  It has a trailing habit, which means six weeks later, long strands of dark green foliage covered with tiny white flowers trail out of your baskets.

There have been years when bacopa was my most successful plant.

Can you see it?  the pink ones are petunias, but the long trailing stuff is bacopa.

The best thing about bacopa, though, is its smell.  It isn't a pretty smell like roses or gardenias, it's sharp and biting and earthy.  It's the smell of summer.  I broke off a bit of it and crushed it in my hand this morning, and that scent wafted up like the last little bit of green.

Apparently it is also more hardy than the other plants.  I pulled out everything else, but I couldn't do it with the boxes that had bacopa.  It's still so alive.  So I watered them and left them.  Maybe they'll last a couple more weeks.  We've already had first frost, but these are so close to the house that it takes a hard freeze to kill them off.

Here is my attempt at an artsy photo representing the end of summer:

I didn't pose that, promise.  After I stuffed everything into the garbage bin, it was just there on the floor.