Rainbows and Falling Leaves: Annie Dillard and Longfellow’s Garden of Heaven

November 5, 2019

On this day, the garden gleams with decadent excess—leaves heaped like golden coins upon the lawn, every breeze scattering riches with careless laughter.

If spring is nature’s promise and summer her performance, then autumn is her grand finale, flinging petals and foliage with glorious abandon.

The season tempts us to tidy, to gather and trim, but as Annie Dillard reminds us, nature has never concerned herself with moderation.

Nature is, above all, profligate. Don't believe them when they tell you how economical and thrifty nature is, whose leaves return to the soil.

Wouldn't it be cheaper to leave them on the tree in the first place?"

– Annie Dillard, author

How deliciously irreverent!

Dillard sees what gardeners often overlook: that extravagance is the law of life. The falling leaf is not waste—it is generosity in motion.

Each swirling drift of gold and russet is nature’s investment in her own future, a compost of abundance.

So we may as well join her in her recklessness, letting the leaves lie a little while longer, admiring their artistry before they merge back into the dark nourishment of soil.

Leaves decay, seeds sleep, roots grip tighter—it is this cycle that makes every gardener both poet and pragmatist.

Dillard’s jest reminds us to see the garden not as a ledger of chores but as a sequence of miracles, none of them tidy, all of them extravagant.

Saw the rainbow in the heaven,
In the eastern sky the rainbow,
Whispered, 'What is that, Nokomis?'
And the good Nokomis answered:

"Tis the heaven of flowers you see there;
All the wild-flowers of the forest,
All the lilies of the prairie,
When on earth they fade and perish,
Blossom in that heaven above us."

– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Song of Hiawatha

Longfellow, ever the romantic, offers a celestial continuation to Dillard’s daring earthiness.

Where Dillard sees fallen leaves as lavish waste turned wealth, Longfellow envisions a gentler transfiguration—the spirits of flowers rising to form a rainbow’s arc.

Together they reveal nature as both mischievous and magnanimous: scattering beauty below and bestowing it above. Every petal that fades, every leaf that falls, is not lost but translated.

For the modern gardener, this is consolation and lesson alike.

Do not mourn the waning of color or the clutter on the ground—revel instead in nature’s profligacy.

Trust that what falls will rise again, that what fades still glows somewhere unforeseen.

In both heaven and humus, she spends without measure and yet is never poor.