I can’t imagine anyone, especially right after a holiday meal, tossing the leftovers. No matter how full we are, how satisfied and sleepy, we know we’ll get hungry for sandwiches. I feel the same way about the growing season. If there are any crumbs to be had after the feast, I won’t let them go. Some gardeners (most?) belong to the clean plate club and prepare for winter by cutting their gardens to the ground, sending every stem, every leaf, every seedhead to the curb or compost heap. I can understand the desire for tidiness but prefer to defer clean plate membership to early spring after the garden’s wildlife and I have had our fill. You know what they say about one person’s trash. To me, summer’s ripe abundance, brown and brittle now, is a collectable. Not compost. Not yet.

Weird weather robbed us of fall’s usual spectacle but I’m trying not to mope. There’s plenty of beauty in curled leaves that refuse to let go, puffs of seeds topping wind whipped stems, and the lacework of branches. Don’t get me started on the loveliness of bark. (I’ll save that for later when I’m ravenous, say February.) I am generally disinclined to decorate for the holidays but found myself scavenging the yard today for pretty bits and wiring them to a wreath frame. If you follow the trends on Instagram and Pinterest you’ll see that anything goes; evergreen boughs aren’t the only festive element. Seedheads, pods, and dried flowers are all the rage, as is asymmetry. Call the trimmings “foraged” and yourself a local artisan. (Always ask permission before collecting from any property other than your own.)

This year the wreath on my plantry door is light on evergreenery. I used what I had: Hinoki cypress and grey owl juniper, and threw in some northern bayberry, which almost counts as evergreen some years. It’s heavier on my garden’s supply of red twig dogwood stems, hosta, honesty (a.k.a money plant or silver dollar), anemone, clematis, aster, and rudbeckia seedheads, winterberry, and crispy hydrangea flowers. And as an experiment, I included tree twigs. The enormous star magnolia I thought was a dwarf when I planted it never has good fall color but it does drop every leaf almost at once to reveal kitten-fur buds. It needed to be pruned out of the path and don’t those buds look sweet in the mix? Flowering dogwood’s tiny knobs are cute too.

I’m envious of great plumes of miscanthus grass swaying stiffly and catching the low light in everyone’s front yards. Until I remember what a beast mine was and how tough to divide. The showiest grass in my garden these days is native purple love grass (Eragrostis spectabilis), which probably looks like a runty roadside weed to most people. Because that’s what it is. I love its low muffin tops (it’s only a foot or two tall) and how the fizzy seed sprays break away through the fall and winter to tumbleweed around the yard. I tucked a couple bunches in my wreath. The rest I left to seed themselves here and there. The more the merrier.

That’s generally true of anything I leave standing in my garden. If a plant’s seeds can find a bare patch of soil, and I have the physical strength to edit seedlings that come up where they shouldn’t, it can stay to feed my need for leftovers and provide forage for winter arrangements. But I don’t leave the garden standing just for my own amusement. I leave it for the birds to hide in and eat from, and the beneficial insects and pollinators to overwinter under. My garden is their feast too.

The finished wreath isn’t round, but not asymmetrical enough to look intentional, and might very well fall apart tomorrow. But for the time being, my door is prettier with summer’s leftovers than without. Just like the garden.

Kristin Green is the horticulturist at Mount Hope Farm and author of 'Plantiful: Start Small, Grow Big with 150 Plants that Spread, Self-Sow, and Overwinter'. Follow her blog at trenchmanicure.com.