Summer Blinks

Sep22

For a minute it was summer and then not. Our warm weather has faded and we’re getting a taste of autumn, with chilly nights and dewy mornings, and temperatures which make a gardener think about what’s to come.

The bulldozer path to the back of the house is fading away as new lawn sprouts and the new daylily border fills in. A purple mound of Lespedeza ‘Gibraltar’ fits in nicely with the pink and purple theme.

What’s to come? Snowdrop season of course, but not until a thousand things get done and a million plants move indoors, and a billion weeds get pulled.

I went to a snowdrop gala in March and of course ended up with a daylily, in this case ‘September Sol’, off the sales bench of Matthew Bricker. It does indeed come into bloom during September and brings a nice shine to the purple verbena masses.

So those are the good intentions, and hopefully they still amount to something because although I need more hardscape in the garden, I don’t want my paths to be paved with the good intentions which never became. Walking down that path would not make for a nice garden tour and I’d rather just stick to gravel if that’s the case.

The new grass path behind the potager is officially over-run with verbena bonariensis. I think this is far nicer than lawn would ever be so obviously I’ll wait until November at least before running the mower through.

Perhaps it’s obvious, but thankfully this will be a brief post rather than the usual babbling on about all kinds of unrelated topics. These photos were taken last week, and I hate to not remember these last joys of summer just because I was too distracted by other nonsense to get a post up. So come February hopefully a thrown-together post from a lush September will at least be better than nothing.

The potager has officially gone to seed. We’re down to a few rotting vegetables and the flowers have completely taken over.

For obvious reasons my garden never reaches the well-tended, beautifully curated stage which many of my friends’ gardens become at this time of year. There are no clumps of shapely mums and vignettes of asters and ornamental grasses, instead it’s a weedy wave of viny tangles and seedy remains… and it really suits my tastes 🙂

The ferny tendrils of cypress vine (Ipomoea quamoclit) go from soft and innocent to smothering within days if the heat and humidity are there for it.

Or perhaps it’s possible I’ve convinced myself over the years that this is how I like my garden to look by September. There’s just no time for immaculate care when thoughts are turning to the bulbs which need planting and the cuttings which need taking, things end up getting neglected, and for the sake of the gardener’s sanity it’s better to just think all is as it should be.

This year the ‘Terrace’ was almost tame in how many pots ended up there. A summer of dirt-moving has a way of dampening the urge to pot up hundreds of cuttings…

So with everything going according to plan maybe a few considerations towards the future are in order. Lots of things should come in for the winter… but there’s only so much room…

Fuschia ‘Gartenmeister Bonstedt’ does very well in the cool winter garden but needs to be watched for spider mites. Blue Streptocarpella will also come in, and is carefree if kept on the dry side.

Going around the garden and making a plan for it all is a terrible idea. Better to start small and ignore the scope of it all until a sudden cold night forces your hand. Nothing like going around with a flashlight on a 33F night and making on the spot decisions about what you can and can’t live without. The desire to lug in a 100 pound pot filled with sharp agave foliage drops quickly when your fingertips are numb and your pajamas are soaked.

Maybe the passion flower ‘Kew Gardens’ deserves one more year. The flowers seem to only open in the evenings and I often miss them, but they are pretty cool, and I always have a weak spot for vines.

Coleus cuttings in water will be first, and then maybe I’ll drag a few caladium pots in closer to the house so they can dry off a bit. Maybe. Some lantana cuttings is another option. Eventually…

For all the effort some things get, it’s often a stray seed or corm in some leftover potting soil which does best. A handful of Bessera elegans corms were carefully potted up and then promptly rotted. Here a stray corm in some re-used potting soil is thriving.

Bah, it’s still the middle of September, there’s plenty of time. Let me just enjoy the summer flowers while I can.

This ‘Sun Parasol’ “original dark red” mandevilla or whatever they’re called right now is surprisingly easy to overwinter. Cool spot, some light, easy on the watering, and it will even try to flower all winter… unlike others (do you hear me ‘Alice DuPont’?) who promptly drop all their leaves and go dormant…

Enjoying the lingering summer flowers is even better when you can enjoy a few colchicum blooms at the same time. This month I started an incentive program where the gardener gets to transplant a few colchicum on each day he reaches his to-do list targets. To-do list targets are obviously less fun than transplanting colchicums, and they include debris hauling, concrete setting, and the endlessly boring task of lawnmowing. I think it goes without saying that my teenage children are essentially worthless for everything on the to-do list…

The always fun, tesselated flowers of Colchicum x aggripinum. It’s a neat and long blooming smaller type and I wish I had as many as I used to, but one year they decided they didn’t love it here anymore so far I’ve been unsuccessful in winning them back over.

Here’s just one un-glamorous view of the colchicum progress. The no-rocks rockgarden along the house is becoming a rocky colchicum bed, and before each new clump gets moved and planted the truck ruts need digging and loosening, and the rocks which were dumped in the ruts so the trucks could make more ruts, needed prying out and hauling off. Just to be clear, this is the reward part and not part of the to-do list, so having this fun has been a slightly drawn out process.

After division and some compost I’m expecting great things from ‘Nancy Lindsay’ and her friends. I hope to get the whole bed mulched this autumn, and maybe in the spring add a few sedum and thyme starts to fill in the bed while the colchicum go dormant.

The colchicum project seemed much more innocent when the first bulbs were getting their new spots, and it still seemed fun after the second and third clumps, but today while replanting ‘Spartacus’ a little tinge of concern came over the gardener. There appears to be a colchicum collection developing. For years I’ve been adding one or two, just to see how they compare, and as you know one or two little bulbs really don’t amount to much, but one day they do… assuming (and this takes me out on a limb) they don’t die, and apparently enough haven’t. Maybe a more honest confession would be excitement rather than concern, but let me just say next autumn should be colchi-rific and that’s a good thing, not a medical condition.

Hope your September days are full of good things and you enjoy the weekend!

Down to 48

Oct25

The ten day forecast looks miserable. All I see is rain and clouds and more rain, and at the moment rain predictions are between three and four inches for the week. But… this weekend was supposed to be a washout, and it kinda was but there was enough dry in between to get a few fall jobs done… if not entirely the ones I should have done 😉

I stumbled across some 50% off ‘Green Giants’ and now the backbone of my berm plantings is mostly complete. Over the last three years I’ve planted about 30 and I don’t think I’ve spent more than $300 which I think compares well to the $550 each Norway spruces the Industrial park planted. We will see what happens as things grow…

One thing which I did need to get done was the planting of the ‘Green Giant’ arbovitaes which followed me home. They were an excellent deal at about $15 a piece and I think they’ll just take off along the berm. Maybe in a few years they’ll completely cover the bare lower branches of the crappy spruce which are there now, and hopefully I won’t even know there’s an industrial park back there anymore… assuming I also lose my sense of hearing and miss the endless vroom… crash… beep… beep… beep… which goes on all day.

Most of the caladiums were thrown into the garage to finish dying back and drying off. New containers from elsewhere in the yard have taken their places. A rough count left me at 48 more pots which still need attention…

For some reason I love ‘Green Giants’. I love arborvitaes in general, but the common and I’m sure soon to be overplanted ‘Green Giant’ is just perfect in my opinion. They’re fast growing and the ‘giant’ part of their name should raise alarms, but just about everything I plant is part of some poorly thought out, regret it later, “plan”, so at least I have friends with chainsaws is all I’ll add.

A second bank of lights is up and running in the winter garden, and a third will be tomorrow. I of course went ahead and made more cuttings, hence the third light, and my wish that you realize this is already the ‘before’ photo.

I probably could have pulled a bunch more containers into winter storage, and cleared myself of any threat of dragging the last stuff in the night before a big freeze, but… suddenly I was convinced I needed to make my coldframe into a sand plunge. The “cold frame” is really just an old shower door set onto a wood frame, and making it into a sand plunge was really just filling it with sand and taking mostly hardy things and sinking their pots into the sand, but they’re cool things. Things which would probably be just fine in the open garden but just wouldn’t be as easy to fuss over. I’m thrilled with the change. They’re so much nicer to fuss over now and I can sit on the edge and just pick leaves out and turn the pots around slightly, just so they look even more special. Obviously it was super important that I got this done today.

Hardy cyclamen, hardy camellias, hardy agaves, and my most recent treasure, a pot full of hopefully-hardy dwarf palmetto palm seedlings (Sabal minor ‘McCurtain’).

So my sand plunge is filled with things which would probably do just as well planted out and just covered or mulched a little. The cyclamen for sure do just fine planted out, but I really like my sand plunge. Maybe next year I can repot everything into the same sized pot and have it all neat and super organized like some garden that pays gardeners to be all neat and super organized. As usual I’m sure that would be the most necessary thing this garden needs. That and a lawn mowing. Who has time to cut grass when there are sand plunges to build?

Hardy cyclamen doing just fine without sand or any kind of cold frame protection. I love seeing the new foliage sprouting up as the temps drop 🙂

So anyway… this long, stretched out autumn is obviously getting me into trouble. Too many cuttings, too much time to drag things in, too many shenanigans in general and on top of all that I bought tulips in a clear violation of my ‘no-new-tulips-this-year’ rule. Just forty. That’s nothing considering a couple hundred are sitting in the garage awaiting replanting, but it was a clearance sale. I’m sure I saved at least five dollars and knowing I won’t be starved for tulips in May is practically priceless.

Have a great week.

Before the Freeze

Nov17

Looking out the kitchen window this Saturday morning the sunshine is beautiful, and to be honest it was similar yesterday and I even enjoyed the ride to work because of the brilliant light. I wish we could start late every Friday, if only for the chance to remember what it’s like to have sunshine lighting the way to work rather than headlights, but it’s a rare treat this time of year. I won’t say it’s unlikely to happen again until February or March, but those familiar with the calendar and seasonal changes in day-length might already suspect that.

In spite of the sunshine there is still a bit of lingering snow from Monday’s Arctic plunge. Cold weather does that, and it’s been cold. I briefly considered a few snowy photos, but with only an inch or two it wasn’t enough to cover up all the garden’s flaws so rather lets go back to last weekend when the last bulbs and newly purchased shrubs and tree seedlings and clearance perennials and surprise plant packages and whatever else went in to the ground and the last half-hardy pots and tubers and bulbs and cuttings and offsets came indoors in one last, desperate weekend of procrastination comeuppance.

The cannas have left the garden. As part of my “new” laziness I’ve used hedge shears to chop up the canna tops and left everything in situ after the roots were dug and brought in. It looks better than before and that’s my new gardening mantra for my 50’s.

No one wants to see the mess all the tuber filled tubs and overflowing shelves of plants have created indoors so let me instead celebrate a major garden milestone. I hesitate a bit to share, because a story comes to mind which Chloris at The Blooming Garden related not so long ago, but I don’t think people hold me to as high a standard so I think I’m safe. My foggy memory seems to recall Chloris mentioning some surprise over several negative comments given regarding a newly completed project she had revealed. I expect and perhaps deserve a few less than enthusiastic observations, but her projects are always a little crazy and over the top and turn into amazing spaces, so the fact readers were able to find flaws surprised me but it gave me pause none the less. Just for the record, I know my reveal still faces an uphill battle. A lukewarm reception is expected.

Several years of neglect have left the leaky garden pond as an overgrown sludge-filled pit of lost toys and random garden waste.

I don’t have enough time to bring you up to date on what a failure this part of the “garden” has been. A more optimistic time would be 2013 when this pit was first dug, but looking back at the post(s) even then the title should have been a clue for where this would end up. >Here’s a link< Needless to say a timely article by my friend Pam at Pam’s English Cottage Garden on fall pond building reminded me that a decade is a long time to look at a muddy failure.

Deep but small meant cinder blocks for three of the four sides. Pond fabric went down first to cushion the liner.

In all I’m not sure why it took so long. The hole was already there and I didn’t really have the ambition to make it much bigger… plus the liner I had on hand… for years (oh my God that’s a whole other story) wasn’t much bigger than the hole, so it was just a matter of reshaping things and getting the blocks in.

Liner, second layer of pond fabric, position a few rocks and layer in some bags of gravel, and it already looks 90% better.

Construction began about a month ago but then it sat for a few weeks until I could figure out the edging. The back has a bit of a gravelly, sloped beach, but the sides and front are steep and unnaturally squared. I browsed around but eventually called a landscaper friend who hooked me up with some scrap and leftover stone stair treads. He said the thicker cut would look good, and he was right. I love it!

Done for the winter. I’ll likely take up all the sides, re-level and cut the stone for a proper fit next spring but for now I’m happy with it. Various footprints have already shown it to be quite popular with all the most destructive wildlife.

So in my usual tradition I’ve almost finished another project and have convinced myself that I’ll finish the rest at a future date. I may not have learned that lesson yet, but I did learn one interesting thing about my garden, that being the reasons behind my less than stellar drainage. I had assumed the layer of shale fill that surprises the shovel four to six inches down is what keeps the yard a mudpit after it rains, but surprisingly if you chip and pick your way through that, bedrock lies another six inches below. So much for the inground pool plans, and hence the reason for the pond being slightly elevated.

Some last flickers of fall color. Each passing season brings a little more winter interest.

The garden has been neglected sine last weekend. I’d like to haul a little more compost in for some last minute mulching, but all I’ve really done is order an unnecessary amount of clearance bulbs which now need to get in the ground before the frosts really set in. Maybe I’ll just hope for a warm December.

Looking towards the foundation. For some reason I really like the dried tan of the asian spicebush (Lindera glauca v. salicifolia). Thoughts?

In any case blowing off Saturday blogging and gardening and journeying down to Philly to enjoy some fall snowdrops doesn’t help my case at all. Maybe today I’ll find some motivation to get all the new jobs done.

A fat verbascum has found a niche in the foundation bed. I love verbascum in general but I hope this one is something more interesting than the plain roadside version. We’ll see next year.

Motivation through the week hasn’t even brought me outside. Late nights and cold weather can do that, but at least things look halfway decent for the winter, even if all I do is take a glance while pulling in to the driveway.

Amsonia hubrichtii next to the mailbox is showing some of the fall color it’s known for and the frozen miscanthus has fluffed up nicely. I’ll still need to chop down the miscanthus, it makes a mess when it crumbles and blows all over in February.

Another thing which may look halfway decent for the winter is the indoor winter garden. In a rare bout of preparedness I did a summertime cleaning of the room and when things started trickling indoors they actually had a place to go this year. I’m excited for it and have already spent a night in there picking pots clean, arranging plants, repotting a few things… all the unnecessary things which define the slower pace of puttering indoors.

Cyclamen confusum indoor under lights. It should be hardy but of course having it indoors is more fun, especially when you want to visit at night.

As soon as this posts I’m off to secure another batch of mulch. It’s now Sunday morning but hopefully late enough that Godless doesn’t come to mind when I’m seen filling tubs with compost behind the town hall building. I promise this will be the last of it, and it really needs to be since I should be addressing the tray of new cyclamen which may have followed me home from yesterday’s Philly trip. There will be more on that later, so for now let’s focus on the money I saved by not shipping directly and at least I didn’t buy any more snowdrops.

Happy Halloween!

Nov1

Surprise of surprises the month of October has passed and there still remains a general air of pleasantness and overall contentment with the autumn season. Even as the wind and rain buffet trick-or-treaters, the gardener has yet to mention death, gloom or futility, in spite of light frosts and dropping leaves and various ghouls and other undead wandering the neighborhood.

Fall color seems especially bright this year. The view towards the tropical garden doesn’t really seem all that tropical anymore but it’s not bad at all in my opinion.

To be honest I’m not 100% sure a ghoul qualifies as undead but I am sure that the garden still has plenty of life in it. Last weekend was excellent weather for outdoor labor and even this gardener got a few things done. Mulching was probably the most rewarding job and being that I love mulching, and free mulch is even better, it was almost a struggle to wait until a respectable 9am before making the first run to the town’s free mulch pile.

The new hellebore garden is finally fit to show. Stepping stones have been leveled, mulch spread, and now all that’s missing is a nice blanket of leaves on top. Nature will oblige I’m sure.

Free mulch around here isn’t the fanciest thing, but I’m still thrilled my friend Paula inspired me to go looking for it again. I can head out, fill a couple buckets and an old trash can, and pull back into the garage in eleven minutes flat, which isn’t all that unreasonable and compares very favorably to the time I would have been sitting around “resting” anyway. In all I made four runs, which quickly adds up to forty minutes, but since two of the trips included picking up or dropping off children I still think I’m not doing too bad.

Orange is the color of the week. Tonight’s wind and this weekend’s frost will change the picture but for now I love it.

Besides mulching and mowing, a few other things were checked off of the to-do list. Stage one of tender plant triage includes cuttings of the most cool-weather sensitive things such as coleus, and that was completed a couple weeks ago. Stage two is dragging all tender potted things closer to the garage and off the deck. Stage three will be the end to procrastination, and means dragging them all in when frost threatens (Friday night), and then Stage four will be all the hardier things such as potted geraniums and rosemary which can handle a frost, but resent a freeze. It’s kind of late for a hard frost this year, so I’ve been enjoying a nice drawn out process where things are a little less hectic, and a lot more organized.

Some late season blooms on the Tatarian aster ‘Jindai’. A delay in a hard freeze means this slowpoke has had enough time to put on a nice show this year.

A beautiful fall, a relaxed pace in the garden, projects getting done. It all still seems so remarkably positive that I almost hesitate to bring up a dark cloud, but it’s there nonetheless. Deer have made my garden a regular stop on their nightly forays. It’s not unusual for them to come through as they grow restless in the autumn, but this year they really seem to like what they’ve found. The little piles of ‘pellets’ seem to tell me they’re spending quite some time here at night and the stripped leaves and beheaded chrysanthemums tell me what they’ve been doing.

I love this tender salvia which went in as part of the autumn upgrade to these containers, but I also loved the purple oxalis that used to fill the front. Stems are all that remain.

This gardener hopes they move on during the winter. Maybe the colchicum flowers they ate will upset their tummies enough to make them wander off to greener pastures, or maybe the cyclamen flowers left a bad taste in their mouth… but I really suspect they just liked adding a bit of exotic flavor to the diet. In any case you can probably guess who has been encouraging the neighborhood hunters to shoot local this year…

There’s been some activity on the berm. A close close look may reveal the small green sprays of new ‘Green Giant’ arborvitae as well as a few other tiny things. In about 15 years maybe I’ll post another picture to see if it’s amounted to anything.

Don’t let a few deer nibbles give off the wrong impression. It’s still a remarkable autumn and I’m quite pleased with the progress and with the garden… even if the days are becoming rudely short and time outside is becoming annoyingly limited. With that in mind I’ll leave you with something exceptionally positive.

The first snowdrops are up. The fall blooming Galanthus reginae-olgae ‘Tilebarn Jamie’ looks fantastic amongst the autumn leaves, and it’s just one of a few which are in bloom this week.

The first of the little snowdrop treasures are too precious to run the risk of facing the elements outdoors, so of course they’ll have to face the risks of a fickle gardener indoors and hopefully that works out well. A few fall and winter bloomers did survive outside last year but not enough to give me the confidence to gamble with these, so in another two or three weeks these will also migrate to the winter garden alongside other plants too special to give up. I’m sure I’ll enjoy the company while we wait for the garden to thaw out again 🙂

A lull in the storm

Nov15

I promise this is the last time I will complain about the brutal freeze which ended our growing season. I’ll also not mention the weeks of warm weather which followed, and I won’t show a picture of the dahlias which are resprouting due to some misguided notion that winter came and went. Instead I’ll focus on the mellow colors of autumn which are slowly winding the year down, and I’ll just enjoy the warm lull we’ve been having until winter returns again in earnest.

The front border is about as tidy as it will get prior to winter. Whatever’s left will hopefully hold the snow nicely and keep things interesting until spring returns. The golfinches approve of the leftover coneflower and sunflower stalks.

Last weekend I finished up the last of the leaves and tried to wrap up the last of the fall planting and weeding. I have to admit I like the way the gardens open up and empty out this time of year, and I love the way the fall rains have left a lush green lawn to set off the emptying flower beds.

Earlier in October the pink muhly grass (Muhlenbergia capillaris) finally came through and put out the airy pink flowerheads which look so nice in the low autumn light.

Three years after transplanting, my pink muhly grass has finally bothered to bloom. I’ve come to accept that I’m just too far North to enjoy this plant. It looked pathetic until August, finally put out enough leaves to look alive by September, and then for 12 days in October it impressed with it’s pink seedheads…. and then was promptly browned out by the first freeze. The effect is still nice enough, but I wouldn’t have minded a few more weeks of the pink.

Pink muhly grass after a freeze. Still nice, but not the amazing, glowing pink you look for in this plant.

I’m going to give the cultivar ‘Fast Forward’ a try next year. It’s supposed to be a good month or so earlier than the straight species and also shorter and more compact… although for me the larger size would have been preferable. I’ve actually already got my hands on one but since it was a small plant and just planted last week I’m not too confident it will make it through the winter. Fall is not the time to plant anything borderline hardy or more of a warm season grower…. speaking of probably not making it through the winter, my cardoon seedling is really starting to put out some nice leaves. The freeze didn’t bother it, but as a zone 7 plant I’m really hoping for some serious El Nino luck in getting this thing through the winter. Any protection suggestions are more than welcome!

If this cardoon plant makes it until next year I’ll be thrilled. Bigger leaves with artichoke-like fluorescent purple flowers would be the highlight of 2016 I’m sure 🙂

Something which will have no problems this winter is the Virginia creeper. This year brought on a good crop of the grape-like fruits, and I’m sure they’ll be sprouting up all over as a gift from the birds…. just like this plant was.

Parthenocissus quinquefolia berries Virginia creeper

Virginia creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia) minus it’s bright red fall color, but still interesting with its raisin like fruit.

The rest of the garden is clearing out. Leaves are mulched, the vegetable garden is tucked in, and there’s already interest in spring flowers. I love how good hellebores look at this time of year, they love the cool temperatures and extra moisture and if all goes well this spring I may have my best hellebore show yet.

Hellebore seedlings showing promise for next year. Hopefully we’ll see a few blooms next year since these are supposedly yellow seedlings and haven’t yet shown their true colors.

Back towards the meadow garden things are just waiting for snow. I’m glad I left a bunch of the little bluestem since it’s gone through such a nice color change from green to yellows to reds to tans now. With the rest of the yard mowed, it keeps things somewhat interesting back there. Something I’m not too glad I left is the littleleaf linden (Tilia cordata) seedling which showed up among the phlox. I’ve been ignoring it for years, but at six feet I think it’s time to make a decision. The mother plant is so popular with the bees and so fragrant I just hate to weed it out…. but a second linden is one more than this yard needs.

Mid November in the vegetable garden. Yet again the phlox have not been divided, and there’s a huge linden tree weed, but at least I’m getting some mulched leaves down to save on next year’s bed prep.

There’s little chance of dealing with the linden this fall. It would do fine with a transplant at this time of year, but with 14 pounds of crocus and daffodils sitting in the living room I have other things calling for my attention. I should have no problem getting a few in tomorrow… unless I first deal with the dozens of daffodils and tulips which I already had from this summer’s bed renovation.

Whoever said November was a time for gardeners to kick back and relax obviously didn’t procrastinate planting spring bulbs nor succumb to early clearance sales. Hopefully your autumn is much more relaxing 🙂

sorta like suburbia

more than you ever wanted to know about my garden

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