09/07/2026
My walk through the arboretum today, my daughters wandering ahead of me, found us somewhere between the overripe roses, the darkening greens, and that last great exhale of the garden before autumn arrives.
I love the garden most at this threshold.
Petals are beginning to turn. The roses are bruised and heavy, their heads bowing toward the earth. Herbs have gone to seed and the hedges have begun their slow yellowing. Everything feels a little wilder now, a little darker, and somehow more fragrant for being so close to its end.
Somewhere along the path I found her almost hidden amongst it all. A stone woman standing quietly behind the hedge, holding her vessel while the garden moved toward autumn around her.
This is the season I think I understand best as a distiller and herbalist.
These final weeks of abundance ask us to gather differently. Not the tender first shoots of spring, but ripened fruit, seed heads, roots, resinous leaves and flowers at the very edge of themselves. Plants that have spent an entire season taking in rain, mineral, heat and sun.
Back at the atelier, our work is changing with them. The bright distillations of summer are giving way to slower infusions, autumn oils, roots laid down to steep, and the deeper preparations that will carry us into winter.
Perhaps this is what I love most about working so closely with plants. There is no separating the work from the season that made it. The landscape changes, and our hands follow.
And so, for now, I am lingering here a while longer. Gathering what remains. Watching the petals turn. Letting my girls run ahead of me through the hedges while I inevitably stop to look at one more plant.
Not quite autumn.
But no longer summer, either.
Dominique ♡
