For years, I’ve recommended bringing house plants indoors by Labor Day. The system has always worked for me; the plants have settled into their winter quarters without dropping leaves or gone into cool-weather dormancy.

This year, so many plants grew on my porch that I left most of the geraniums just where they’d spent the summer. Days have grown shorter and sometimes colder, but the geraniums looked fine, blossoming or no.

I did remember a long-ago New Year’s Eve party when we entered our host’s unheated summer room. Geraniums had lived there for several years and had insisted on growing so tall and stout that supports held them up, even to and across the glass ceiling. Days and nights had been none too warm, but the plants kept flowering. They were almost like vines. Would that happen to mine?

December 2013 came and I took pity on the geraniums. Now they’re all indoors, newly watered and set in east windows. They’d grown wildly toward those windows, although the glass had been closed for weeks.

Before going to their winter quarters, I’d pruned those vigorous stems back so they wouldn’t lean out of their pots far enough to topple. Those tips went into a jar; will they set roots or will they stand like extra greens on the dining room table?

So far, the trimmed plants and their tops are holding their leaves well, though they do look a bit surprised at their new surroundings. Now they’ve come into warmth, with much the same east light that they enjoyed on the porch.

Have I been wrong, all those years, to bring in all the house plants before autumn began? Time will tell.

Meanwhile, I found a perfect Christmas tree lurking among gift poinsettias in the market: it’s a full rosemary plant, carefully pruned to a cone form. It will be happy on the now-almost-empty porch, until Christmas, when it will come indoors for the day. I’ll spritz it with water now and then and keep it on the dry side.