In Her Nature is a year long exploration into the healing power of the natural world. Season by season, setting out to awaken the spirit, and rekindle joy. The weekly journal of a neighborhood, its plants and birds and creatures — and how they are helping repair a heart and rebirth a soul.
No one warned me about the summers.
Almost six years ago, when we flew from California to consider Boulder as our new home, I spent the entire visit mentally preparing myself for winter. Could I handle real cold? Would I survive actual snow?
We deliberately chose to visit in November, we needed to know what winter actually felt like before we committed to this place. We walked the neighborhoods in the morning chill, breath visible in the air, testing ourselves. The cold had a serious nip to it, real cold that made my then California lungs catch. The kind of cold that reminded me of Europe, a place we’d left far behind us. But then the sun came out. That relentless Colorado sunshine changed everything, and by lunchtime we’d peeled off our coats and were walking in shirtsleeves. Boulder gets over 300 days of sunshine a year, someone told us proudly, and I could see why they bragged about it. Even in late November, the light was generous, powerful, warming everything it touched.
The locals just smiled when I asked about winter. “You’ll be fine,” they said. “It’s not what you think.”
They were right about that. Winter here is a revelation - bright, blue, manageable. The snow melts quickly between storms. The sun is powerful even in December, even in January. I can walk outside on a winter morning without my California bones protesting, sometimes without even needing a coat. Yes, February and March can be brutal. The cold that lingers, the snow and ice that won’t quit, but even those months have their bright days, their sudden thaws, their moments of unexpected warmth.
But August? No one mentioned August.
No one told me about the days when the thermometer pushes past 100°F and the air turns to something solid you have to push through. No one explained that the nights would stay hot. Truly hot, so there’s no reprieve, no cool morning to water the garden before the sun climbs high. The heat doesn’t break. It accumulates, day after day, until everything and everyone is simply enduring.
I’m learning, though. I’m adapting. Maybe I’m becoming more native.
The garden certainly is. Or rather, the plants that were always native are showing me how it’s done, while the ones I brought with foolish hopes are teaching me hard lessons about belonging.
The Russian sage doesn’t even seem to notice the heat. Its silver-gray leaves, covered in fine hairs that I used to think were just decorative, are actually tiny parasols. Each hair creating shade, trapping a thin layer of cooler air against the leaf surface. The plant looks like it’s been dusted with frost even in 100-degree heat. Its deep taproot, the one I cursed when I tried to plant it because I had to dig so far down, is somewhere cool and damp while everything at the surface bakes.
The lavender has curled its leaves into tight scrolls, reducing the surface area exposed to the punishing sun. When I first saw this, I panicked. Was it dying? But no. It’s conserving. It’s waiting. It knows something I’m becoming more accustomed to: that survival sometimes means getting smaller, doing less, holding on until conditions improve.
The penstemons, those true Colorado natives, have already set their seed and gone dormant. They flowered in June when I wasn’t paying close enough attention, too excited about the lushness of late spring. Now they’re just brown stalks. I used to think plants that went dormant in summer were giving up. Now I understand they’re succeeding. They’ve completed their whole life cycle before the worst of the heat arrives. They’re not dying. They’re done. They’ll be back next spring while I’m still shaking off winter, ready to go again.
I understand this now, in my body. I’ve stopped trying to work in the garden during the heat of the day, learned to stay inside between noon and six the way everyone here does in August. I move through the morning in slow motion, doing only what’s essential.
I water deeply when I do, slow soaks that reach down to where the roots actually live. Even the native plants need this in August. I’ve learned that “native” doesn’t mean “no care” - it just means they’re playing the same game as me, adapted to the same impossible conditions, speaking the same language of survival. They still need help. We all do.
The bees know too.
When I checked the hives last week, as early in the day as possible; the only bearable time, I expected to find them full of honey. August should be a time of abundance, the final big nectar flow before fall. But the frames were lighter than they should be. Not empty, but not full either. And the hive was loud with the sound of thousands of wings beating in unison.
They weren’t out foraging. They were working together to cool the hive.
Worker bees stood at the entrance, fanning frantically with their wings. Others were making trip after trip to my neighbors pond for water, bringing it back to spread droplets through the hive. The temperature inside a hive needs to stay around 95°F for the brood to develop properly. Outside, it was already approaching that by mid-morning, and the real heat of the day hadn’t even begun.
Every bee that spent the day cooling the hive was a bee that couldn’t gather nectar. Every drop of water they carried back was a trip that didn’t bring pollen. Survival first. Abundance later. I hope.
I’ve been doing the same thing, I realized, standing there in the early light watching my bees work so hard just to maintain. I’ve been in survival mode all month. The creative projects have stalled. The long walks with my dog which I love have shortened to quick loops before breakfast. I’m not gathering much either - not experiences, not inspiration, not even tomatoes from the garden because I forgot to water them deeply enough and they split in the heat.
I’m just trying to keep everything cool enough to make it through.
There’s something humbling about this. Something honest. When I moved here, I thought adaptation meant toughening up, learning to love the cold, becoming a skier or a snowshoer. I didn’t realize it would mean learning to go dormant. To do less. To stop fighting against conditions I can’t change and instead just... wait.
The landscape here itself seems to understand this - the whole Front Range holds its breath in August, waiting for September’s relief, for the golden light of fall, for the first snow that will reset everything.
Each summer I continue learning this language - that a brown garden in August is a realistic garden, an honest garden. That some years, keeping the hive alive matters more than filling the supers with honey.
But for now, we’re all just surviving. Maybe this is what becoming native means. Not thriving in every season, but knowing which season is for thriving and which is just for enduring. Knowing when to push and when to curl inward. Knowing that survival itself, in conditions like these, is a kind of flourishing.
The Russian sage could have told me this on day one. But I suppose I had to learn it the way everything here learns it - by living through an August. By feeling what 100-degree days really mean. By understanding in my bones that sometimes the most sophisticated response to difficulty is simply to wait it out.
—> What moments of natural wonder caught your attention this week? Please share your stories and photos in the comments below. Let’s experience nature’s gifts together.
As always, thank you so much for reading and supporting me.
Love,
Jane