The Good, the Sad, and the Ugly

 My garden is officially toast.  A killing frost last Thursday or Friday night spelled the end of even the toughest of blooms.

About the only thing that still looks good in the garden right now are the hydrangea blooms, like this one on the 'Limelight.'   Oh, if only I could age so gracefully!

It's hard to find anything photo-worthy in my garden right now, but a few days ago Nancy at "Leaping Greenly" (formerly "Soliloquy") posted a photo of her poor shriveled coleus and challenged other bloggers to post the ugliest thing in their garden.  Now that I can do!  Fall clean-up chores here have been put off while I have been busy doing other things, such as planting bulbs and doing some lasagna gardening to create a flowerbed, so there is no shortage of brown, shriveled plants here.

I guess I was too optimistic or maybe just not paying enough attention to the weather, assuming these geraniums would last another week so that I could pot them up and overwinter them as I did last year.  Last week's frost proved too much for them, though, and now it's too late to try to bring them inside.  But I wouldn't call this "ugly," would you?  No, I think they look rather sad instead.

The barely recognizable pineapple sage might qualify as ugly with its brown leaves, but I'd definitely call this sad as well.  This plant had barely begun to bloom when the deep freeze hit.  Last year I was so happy with this plant, a highlight of the Butterfly Garden in the fall when everything else was fading that I made sure to plant another one this spring.  I'm not sure why it bloomed so late this year, but it made me sad that it never got a chance to show off its bright red blooms.

The pots of plants may or may not get cleaned out before winter--I like to leave a few plants, like the purple fountain grass and the helichrysum in their containers because they actually look good covered in snow.  But the sweet potato vines like this one will definitely get pulled.  This is beginning to qualify as being ugly, don't you think?  But the pansies--now that's sad again; in fact, it's downright pathetic.  Pansies may like cool temperatures, but they don't like not being watered.  I deserve twenty lashes with that limp sweet potato vine for this sad state of affairs.

As I've matured as a gardener, I've begun to appreciate the beauty of dried seedheads and even the yellowing foliage of plants going dormant for the winter.  But there's nothing beautiful about these dried-up zinnias.  Now we're approaching ugly.  These did get yanked up, but only because I needed the space for planting spring bulbs.

Nor is there anything attractive about a sweet potato vine past its prime.  Another candidate for ugly.

But for true ugliness we have only to look in the vegetable garden, still waiting for someone to clean it up.  At first glance, this red pepper looks pretty good, but one touch, and it turns to mush.

But one look is all you need to know that these tomatoes are the ugliest thing in my garden.  It didn't take
last week's killing frost to do these in; the first light frost caught me by surprise, turning the tomatoes to sauce before I even had a chance to try to save a few.  Now that the days are getting shorter, I really had better get busy and get this fall clean-up done, or I'll be showing snow-covered vegetables soon!

What is the ugliest thing in your garden right now?