You build a birdhouse and they don't come. Stands Kevin Costner's logic on its head, yet that is just what has happened with this lovely little house. Built by my husband out of scrap lumber a few years back, it hangs near the bird feeders, in a nicely wooded area near the garden, but no one moves in, except possibly mice--and why shouldn't they? It's there for the taking. We have offered it to the world, and someone in the world has taken us at our word. But not birds.

Wrong sized hole? Wrong perch? Wrong type of tree? Wrong materials? We don't know. We only know that it seems anyone should be able to build a birdhouse out of anything, yet that is not true. Fortunately, a friend has given me a book on building birdhouses--fancy birdhouses, at that. Maybe that's where this one went wrong: no cupola, no front porch, no porcelain doorknob perch, no gable trim, no shingles. Then again, maybe it is just that the housing bubble hit avian real estate even before it hit our markets. Foreclosure looms for this house. Rehab is in sight. A fresh coat of paint and it will be good as new. We won't even have to fix the plumbing. Clean it and they will come. Birdhouse of Dreams.

German statice (limonium tataricum) is not the most talked about perennial in the garden. It isn't the tallest and it certainly isn't the showiest, yet it brings forth a small, white fountain of flowers in midsummer. These dry, either before or after picking, into a burst of little white stars that are beautiful, but next to impossible to use for a bouquet or in an arrangement because they are so tough and springy. When put into vases, they topple out. In baskets, they snag on any passing person, pet or dust cloth and shed their brittle little white flowers all over the floor.

My 2009 German statice crop consisted of four large fountain-shaped stalks, enough for me to do some experimenting. Instead of leaving them whole, I broke them up into small, user-friendly parts and found that--voila--they were just the thing for our Christmas tree. I tucked the small sprigs into the ends of branches, places not quite sturdy enough to carry the weight of an ornament. The statice added a wonderful airy quality to the Fraser's famous two-toned needles, but even more important for me was that it brought the garden into the house during one of the snowiest Decembers we have ever had. Not all the flowers grown last summer are out there under the drifts. Some are inside, bringing delight (occasionally falling off from the tree, but then, what else are tree skirts for?) and giving us something to talk about, after all.

Each year, the digging and drying and storing of bulbs is a huge autumn job for me. Each year I look for ways to make it easier. This year I decided that spreading the bulbs out in the back of my trusty Ford Ranger and leaving them there to dry would be a great thing. After an October when it rained nearly every day, I rushed to dig the bulbs as soon as the ground dried just a little. (It had not dried a lot, as you can see from my shovel handle.) I drove the pickup down to the garden, dug bulbs by the wheel barrow full, pushed load after load to the truck and set them in there in groups so as to keep the dahlias separate from the cannas from the callas from the glads, etc. Every clump of bulbs weighed as much as a bowling ball. They were going to require considerable drying, and the back of the truck seemed just the place. When I finished, I drove the truck into the shed, pleased that I wouldn't have to unload the bulbs to dry on newspapers on the floor. I planned to leave them in the truck for a couple of weeks. At least.

Two days later, my husband wanted to use the truck. He did not see the humor in driving down the road with a bunch of muddy bulbs on board. I tried to persuade him that driving down the road at high speed would be great for drying the bulbs, but still no sale. The bad news: I had to unload all of the bulbs. The good news: he helped me. He even cut and disposed of the remaining stems. He helped me haul all of the boxes into the garage for unloading. The whole job took about a half an hour instead of half a day. And that is how this year I actually found an easier way of dealing with bulbs in autumn. I recommend it.

Safe from the backhoe's claw, an apple tree prevails. A Haralson, planted earlier this summer (and still wearing its hang tag, foreground,) has withstood ravenous deer, too--only by the liberal and frequent application of Liquid Fence. The tree will spend its life, which we hope will be long and fruitful, looking out on Lake Superior and basking in a climate heaven sent for apples. Though winters can be long and harsh in Zone 3, the lake sustains a micro climate that agrees with certain plants, especially apples. Superior's South Shore is ringed with abandoned orchards on long-since absented farm sites, and each year the unpruned and sometimes broken-down trees still hang heavy with disease/pest free fruit. Deer feast on them. Unfortunately, deer cannot tell the difference between abandoned orchards and producing orchards--hence the need for repellents.

We planted this tree not out of the need to store enough apples for a whole winter the way people did when the area was settled in the early 1900s, but mostly because we want to see if we can keep it going--and some apples would be nice, too. Testing oneself against the elements is one of humankind's oldest passions. No matter how many generations pass, we seem to need to keep challenging ourselves to see if we can eventually control nature. We keep reading the score as Nature 1, Humans 0+/-. Maybe some year soon we will learn that the world is not a contest--because there is really only one team. An apple tree laden ripe, red/green fruit because of our efforts--or in spite of them--is the living proof.

So much to do in this year's garden, yet already time to look ahead to next year's garden. Garden years link our lives into a bracelet of growth and change. Even if our garden consists solely of annuals, that changing of soil in the containers and remembering what we planted last year, what worked and what didn't, links our years into a chain of gardening experience that transforms our beauty-starved lives into beauty-filled ones. I doubt there is a gardener emptying out flower pots this fall who isn't already thinking about what might be done with them next year--how to make them prettier, more bloom filled, less expensive, more unique--or maybe more well behaved.

This year I under planted my three potted rose trees with American ivy sprigs in May. By July, the ivy had draped itself gracefully down the sides of the pots, but by August it was covering the pots (and the deck) like a carpet, completely annihilating the plants in nearby smaller pots. And yes, I could have/should have/would have pinched it back and kept it under control, but I was gone a lot and was content to let it thrive. As I moved the roses out of their clay pots and into plastic pails to store in the garage for the winter (I move them so that the clay pots don't break during the Minnesota -30 nights that freeze even things in our attached garage), I realized that the ivy roots were really stealing nutrients from my roses, and so I'm already planning not to put them back there next summer. Maybe some impatiens. Or maybe I'll just let the roses be themselves. But that is next year.

Next year I will transform this pile of rubble that used to be the floor in our cabin into a garden pathway or wall. Next year I will get these newly purchased shrubs set in their proper place. For now, I will set them in the ground in their pots and hope for the best--our landscaping, unfortunately, isn't ready for them yet. Gardening does not always fall into a neat order. Sometimes it is like a bracelet that lies in a pile in the corner of the jewelry box--tangled, but waiting to be picked up and worn, to be clasped around our wrists and tickle our hands with its many charms. Just so, we are linked to the earth--one year at a time.

Destruction and construction. Built on the same root word, the two words have such different connotations. Destruction always makes me think of a child pounding a precious glass vase into a million pieces with a toy hammer--or, in the extreme, of bombing that destroys whole cities and lives. Construction has all of the positive attachments: new buildings, new ideas, creativity. When construction grows out of destruction, do we have "restruction"? Recycling, I suppose, is the right word--no root word connection, sorry.

In the destruction of our old cabin, whose walls were begging to divorce themselves from their foundation, the seeds of the construction of next summer's garden pathways were sown. Jule, the expert operator of the big backhoe that accomplished the demolition, broke up the old concrete slab into user-friendly pieces so that I can create some paths when we begin landscaping. He picked up several of the larger pieces with the giant machine's claws, then set them down in the approximate place I want the path to go. Others were piled nearby for easy access.

As my heart sorrows at destruction, it is cheered by the simple act of recycling--no landfill for my former floor! Next spring I will face the challenge of construction. And I will, no doubt, be wishing I had my own backhoe.

The days of daisies are coming to an end. Black eyed Susans are not really daisies, I guess, but they are fresh faces in the garden in late summer. Mine are already done blooming and only the black stems and cones are standing, spreading seeds all over the garden. By summer of 2010, I will be chiding myself for having let those seeds spread. Ah yes, we are moving into a decade that will be easier to talk about--it seems easier to say "twenty-ten" than "two thousand nine" Anyway, no matter what the year, people delight in daisies. They aren't the most perfect flower in the garden, as evidenced by the shrivelled petals on some of these, or the way some petals lift up and some hang down. It is their simplicity, I suppose, that we like, just as famous rosarians often favor the single rose over the most heavily petalled hybrid tea. A bright, cheery color doesn't hurt, either. Even plain white daisies have a happy yellow-green center which always seem to be smiling back at us. The profusion in which daisies bloom shouts that they are happy to be alive. Well, aren't we all? We just need to show it. Though the days of daisies are coming to an end, why not smile at someone today?