Embracing the Beauty of Entropy
You may not have woken up this morning and thought about the second law of thermodynamics, but when you walked out into your mid-September morning, it would have been there: the Law of Entropy—When left alone in natural states, everything eventually goes into disorder. In nature, and in floral design, this can be the most beautiful of things.
Nature in autumn, to the human eye, can appear messy. After all, leaves are withering and turning brown, flowers disappear, replaced by spiky, spiny, crunchy and chaotic seed heads. The wind blows and the seeds go with it, willy-nilly, you might say. The carefully-tended gardens of summer grow leggy and floppy, or munched-through by insects until the leaves are as ragged and bedraggled as an old, torn dress in a moist and musty abandoned house. Nature in autumn, in other words, starts doing its own thing. That can be startling. After all, didn’t all that composting and watering and dead-heading and weeding mean something? Shouldn’t the plants be, well…grateful? As in, staying looking like we want them to, and acting in ways we expect?
Yet Nature, confident maverick that she is, is all about staying true to herself. In autumn, that means allowing herself to transform and look any way she needs to look in order to do the more important work of regeneration. To our eyes this can just look so….disorganized. Disordered, you might say. And of course it is, and yet it entirely isn’t, as nature has its designs and follows them to a “T,” if allowed to do so.
Our job is to allow her to do so.
That can be so hard. It demands we make trade-offs: we can collect seeds to plant next year if we allow the plants to go through their entire life cycle; their leaves yellowing, browning, drooping, crisping, then their flowers evolving into their crackling dry seed encasements. Giant rhubarb leaves yellow and sink down, down toward the earth until they’re lying flat in the soil, growing slimy in their not-quite-decomposed state. The sword-like leaves of bulbs fade slowly into beige, demanding to hold their space in the garden for months even as their flowers are a long-ago Spring dream, in order to funnel nutrients to their bulbs for next year. Some of these leaves and seedheads are pretty: some are architectural and statuesque, even. But many are the mousy brown underside of what used to be a rather spectacular show of life, glitz and color.
But it’s this very transformation that can make the entropy in autumn so special, and so spectacular. It’s what excites me about floral design, too—not always the tidy, healthy, highly-colored and ordered flowers and herbs of spring and summer centerpieces and arrangements, but rather the woody, the brown, the seeded, the gnarled, the yellowed and dried and crispy and crackly and tendrilled and nearly-spent and weedy and wonderful. To me floral design is an announcement of season, and a celebration of that time in nature’s seasonal life: what’s happening in this wild world of nature—which can include our gardens—right now, in this moment, as we go about our day? What pollinated flowers are transforming into hard kernels of future life outside our windows this very second? How big did that dogwood or verbena or viburnum get during the previous season; how far was it allowed to stretch its long green fingers before they were frozen in place, in woody brown, like recipients of a death stare from Medusa? What is nature up to? What magical mischief is she performing, pulling the green out from under us and replacing it, seemingly overnight, with an entirely different sort of scene?
Embracing the beauty of nature’s entropy can mean acceptance of change, of how things are and what they’re becoming. It can mean allowing ourselves to broaden our definition of nature’s health and beauty. It can help train our eyes and brain to see that nature is both much more than beauty, and at the same time that every stage of its life is beautiful.
As always, Nature teaches us many lessons, if we’re open to them. I’m filled with gratitude for having such a patient, consistent, dynamic and grounding teacher. Right now, as I sit here at the computer, a little bit cold, unshowered, slightly sleep-deprived but happy to be writing to you, I’m getting the itch to go outside and bring in the paper-dry and seedy, the rattling and crunchy, the long and giant and twisted things of nature’s wild, disordered—and perfectly designed—autumn. While I’m doing it I’ll try to remember to allow and see my own entropy, too, for the beautiful thing that it is.