The back-yard feature that I find most exciting in October is the return of the deer. Already dark brown for fall and winter, they begin coming back to browse the high grass in the part of the yard I never have mowed. Kiki loves to see them – a peaceful session on the porch is invariably accompanied by a low, bassoon-like growl just setting the mood for the entrance of the trumpets when she can’t restrain herself anymore and begins frantically barking. The deer seem hardly to mind. Both they and Kiki run about fifty feet and settle again into the previous pastoral scene. The deer seem to sense that Kiki doesn’t really want to catch them, and that her human on the porch has no interest at all in interrupting their lives.

What’s now a deep grass meadow out there was till a few years ago a thick forest of pine, spruce, and hemlock. But six very tall white pines that, if they fell, could reach the house, disturbed my wife’s peace of mind. They could be removed for a fee or, if we let the logger cut the rest of the place up as far as the old beaver dam, they’d pay us. We agreed, It was a serious mistake, from my point of view; but in any event, the softwood forest, along with the towering pines, was gone.

It’s already coming back, and this has been a really good summer for it. Chagrined by the loss of my beautiful forest and aware of the wet ground – water percolating underground from the old dam – I went in search of a source of tamarack trees. Not the Asian tamarack normally cultivated by nurseries, which prefers dry, sandy soil, but North American (Larix laricina), which loves swamps and bogs and covers vast tracts of Canada right to the Arctic tree line.

The nurseryman who brought me a dozen small ones was not, I suspect, cultivating them. I think he dug then out of a swamp somewhere. We planted an arc of them around our old dog’s grave, a few more at the foot of the driveway, and a line of them to hide the view of the leach field from the house. They struggled for a few years, but in the last two summers have sprung up like weeds. Their needles are still green, while the hardwoods around them have flamed, but in the next week or two they’ll fade to a coppery brown and finally drop off for the winter. It’s the autumn copper and unique mint green of spring that set them so beautifully apart.

Then there are the weeping willows. Cognizant of the moisture in the soil, and vaguely hoping to dry it out a bit, I had a couple of them planted in the wettest spots. They were just little shavers. But another reason I’d gotten them was their rapid growth rate. Sure enough, they’re already fancying themselves trees and reaching for the sky. In a year or two they’ll have seen enough of life to begin to show sadness, and will start drooping toward the ground. Their species is named for their affect – dolorosa – but they’re looking pretty peppy and peert at the moment.

I had a line of about thirty small spruces planted along my west property line. All but five, in spite of frequent watering, died in the drought. So I ordered five red oak saplings, grown from local acorns, and the nursery guy duly planted them in wire enclosures. The late frost of 2023 nipped them in the bud, as it were, and one died. Sad, I let it be; and this year it’s come roaring back. It’s now the tallest in the bunch. I toast its resurrection with orange juice and seltzer. (I haven’t been in the liquor store since the flood shut it down. I rarely miss it.)

The popples, savaged by the loggers’ machines, have regrouped and are sticking their heads up above the meadow plants and bushes. A whole row of white spruce, along with one anomalous red spruce, are competing for sunlight and space. The little patch of balsams out behind the barn was extirpated in all the thrashing and has not returned; but a few new volunteers are peeking shyly through the spruces. Along with the bright copper of a few beeches and the blaze of a scarlet maple by the corner of the front porch, they all fill my heart with delight, not only for what they are, but for what they will be, long after I am gone.