Spires Basket Flowers at www.japanese-home-gardens.com

While shoofly plants are decorated with shriveled leaves and ripening soft-brown seedpods, and corncockles show only a bloom or two, the 3-foot spires basket flowers of basket flowers, admittedly bedraggled, are still bright with pastel colors. And the front edge of the border boasts the orange and satiny petals of star-of-the-veldt daisies, punctuated by the sparkling yellows of the last of the California tidytips.

The buttresses topped by tapering pinnacles dramatize the vertical movement that reaches its apex in the towers of the front. These towers were designed to carry spires basket flowers that point to heaven, though spires basket flowers were not always built. Chartres Cathedral has two, but Notre Dame in Paris, Reims, and Amiens cathedrals have none.

The Bottle gourds, bushel basket gourds, and powder horn or penguin gourds (Lagenaria sicemria) are all variations within one species. The flowers are large, sometimes up to 5 inches across, with white paper-thin petals. They are sweet-smelling, and bloom at night or on gloomy late afternoons. Vines can reach up to 25 feet in a good growing season. Leaves can measure a foot across. I have in the garden at this time a powder horn of light, pastel green that is hanging down 15 inches from the vine above its head, a Bottle gourd 8 inches wide at the bottom and 10 inches high, and a bushel basket gourd that is meant to be the size of its namesake and weigh about 100 pounds. With our climate and luck, the bushel basket will never make it to maturity. The snake gourd (Trichosanthes Anguina) is unusual. The flowers are small, little over an inch wide, with petals that are incredibly fringed. The fruit grows like a snake, long and coiled, and the warmer the climate the longer the serpent. In Handbook of Tropical Gardening (published in Ceylon), H. F. Macmillan writes: