Summer is a burst of tomato juice running down the chin, the perfume of fresh fruit in the kitchen and the feel of cool grass between toes on a long afternoon.

Summer is the purple satin skin of eggplants, fuzzy down of blushing peaches and topographical maps of cantaloupe hides.

Birds and breezes sing summer's praises.

Soft, warm and sweet, the sensual festival called summer never grows old.

But complaints always arise about heat and humidity.

Instead of fretting, we should use those torrid days as an excuse to slow down -- or stop altogether -- and then savor this season of abundance.

We should "surrender ourselves to the symphony of crickets and to homework by firefly light," writes me Hansburg, an English teacher at Columbus School for Girls who occasionally shares her poetry.

Recently she sent me Memory, Mindfulness and Momentability.

Teachers seemingly have all the time necessary to savor summer during their long vacations. Hansburg, however, reminds herself to enjoy its fleeting weeks.

"So many times the simple moments go uncelebrated. . . . No other thunderstorm will shatter the summer night like this one. No other black raspberries will taste as sweet as the ones from our bushes. No other pale, yellow day lily will grace a humid midmorning, as stunning as this one."

There's your homework -- celebrate the wonders that are summer.

Not-so-secret garden

One place to appreciate summer is the Topiary Garden in Deaf School Park at E. Town Street and Washington Avenue Downtown.

The spot is a hit with readers of The American Gardener, the American Horticultural Society magazine.

It is among 48 "secret gardens" across America that readers consider gems well worth visiting.

The garden of clipped yews, accented with perennials and waterlilies, depicts Georges Seurat's painting Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte.

Wonderful weeds

A number of gardeners, like me, harbor Queen Anne's lace, mullein and other outlaws that some consider weeds. Several e-mails came with confessions.

"Nothing pleases me more than to pass by a field of free-growing, (maybe) native vegetation, doing its own thing; swapping genes, promoting biodiversity and biological health, and sheltering animals," wrote Maria Sciacca of Columbus. "I don't know if it's arrogance or a sick human need to control every life form that causes people to do 'ethnic cleansing' against self-promoting plants."

She described a field near a place she once lived.

"One day I was studying the clover. I noticed that almost all the clover was pink but intermingled with the pink was a small number of white clover and garnet clover. When I contemplated it, I realized that the white and garnet must be manifestation of recessive genes! This field was so alive!"

The field was lost to development.

Dan Headapohl of Columbus is always on the lookout for outlaws.

"My flower gardens have a strange collection of weeds that I grab whenever the opportunity presents itself."

Weed is in the eye of the beholder.

"I originally thought only the Japanese eat burdock but later found the English eat stems of burdock like asparagus and use the leaves for medicine for back and hip aches," wrote Sho Nakamura at Ohio State University. "The Chinese use seeds as tea for the same medicinal purpose. I tried but it is too bitter."

Nakamura has successfully grown another wildling from seed, Digitalis gigantea, after having nursery-grown plants last only a couple of years in the garden.

"You have done a great service to wild green things and to you I doff my weedy chapeau," wrote Wes Williams of Reynoldsburg. He included this quote from Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Victorian English poet:

What would the world be, once bereft of wet and wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; long live the weeds and wildness yet.

Michael Leach can be reached at 614-461-5035 or by e-mail at mleach@dispatch.com