A Gardener’s Habits in High Summer: Laziness, Long Days, and Childhood Routines

July 21, 2020

Summer, in its fullness, changes more than just the light—it reshapes our rhythms.

The garden grows wild, afternoons lengthen into reverie, and the pace of life softens under the sun’s long gaze. Even our habits—small, daily customs—shift to match the mood of the season.

The poets and thinkers who wrote of summer often reflected on this quiet transformation: how the heat teaches us to slow down, savor more, and do less with greater joy.

Writer and philosopher Sam Keen once observed this change with an indulgent smile:

Deep summer is when laziness finds respectability.
— Sam Keen, American author and professor

It’s true.

The very word “lazy” takes on new grace in July. What would seem idleness in winter becomes wisdom in high summer—the art of resting deeply, of letting time unroll like a hammock in the shade.

The garden itself preaches it: even the flowers lean into the heat rather than resist it. To be still, Keen reminds us, is not to do nothing, but to join in the rhythm of the season.

For Robert Louis Stevenson, the habits of summer struck from a child’s point of view bring both longing and wonder.

His classic poem “Bed in Summer” captures that universal frustration of early bedtimes amid endless light:

In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.
I have to go to bed and see
The birds still hopping on the tree,
Or hear the grown-up people's feet
Still going past me in the street.
And does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?
— Robert Louis Stevenson, Scottish novelist and writer, Bed in Summer

Here, childhood’s honesty shines. The world is alive, golden and awake—how cruel, then, to be tucked away indoors while the light still lingers.

Stevenson’s verse catches that sweet ache of summer evenings: the envy of the still-waking garden, the half-heard laughter in the streets, the impossible allure of daylight beyond the curtains.

Together, these reflections offer two sides of summer’s coin.

From Keen’s mindful indolence to Stevenson’s restless wonder, we find that the season urges both slowing and awakening. We sleep later, walk slower, linger longer.

Summer rearranges our days not by discipline but by delight.

And in that warmth, we discover the finest habit of all—simply to be present, while the world hums softly in the long light around us.