Autumn sonata

September's garden is bittersweet.

Its mounded annuals are brighter, fuller than ever, a spirit-lifter every day. They stand on strong, green legs next to brown stalks of spent perennials, an odd couple in the garden light, which is astonishingly beautiful this time of year.

Muted gold in the daytime sun, all silvery shadows under the moon, the changing light helps Liz Ball of Marple Township literally see her garden a different way now than she did in June.

"I tend to see not so much plants as individuals, but in a more holistic way. It's the blends," she says.

Spring and summer showcase "the prima donnas, the big flashy this, the great color that. When fall comes, a lot of the big in-your-face stuff is past, so what you get is this nice blur of texture and color punctuated by some of the dead, dried stuff.

"It's a whole different look," says Ball, author of several garden books, including Month-by-Month Gardening in Pennsylvania.

Thus the garden becomes a sweeping aria, a soft color wheel, rather than an iconoclastic chord or chromatic blast, everything enjoyed in its own time.

This week, the time quietly slipped from summer to fall.

The roses are blooming again, although with less fragrance and vigor. These old friends are most welcome back. They endured relentless spring and summer rains, developing sickly, polka-dotted leaves that fell away and turned feisty climbers into stick-plants.

The season's last tomatoes are hanging on, though there are precious few of them amid the thin, browning branches. And those once-robust reds look more like pink, deepening slowly.

Some plants, as Ball has discovered, are at their most radiant before winter sets in - Cornus florida, for example.

This is the native flowering dogwood. It's everywhere, part of the local wallpaper. In early spring, its snowy white blossoms are so lovely, we sing their praises and bring their branches inside and celebrate the end of blossom-starvation.

We'd barely notice if they bloomed in summer. Too much else shouts for attention. And they're on the small side for a tree. Like the youngest kid in a large family, easy to ignore.

Come fall, they're wondrous once more - if you've the eyes to see.

Ball and her husband, horticulturist Rick Ray, have a flowering dogwood outside their screened-in porch, which, though on the first floor, sits about 10 feet above a sloping backyard that melts into a floodplain.