Resolution

My garden is my mother's garden, too. In her memory, I am making a vow to post weekly about what's growing.

Today is fresh and bright after much-longed-for and much-delayed rain. We got 2.2" last night! I am reminded one more time about the stalwarts of the garden, who have taken our summer drought in stride: epimediums and more epimediums...parsley... begonia grandis...iris tectorum...hellebore (though the gigantic one under the oak tree does tend to splay out when it's really dry)...the perilla, of course...geranium 'Rozanne' and its kin...amsonia...baptisia...asters...lysimachia...balloonflowers

What fades away: hostas and day lilies (though I'm never sure how much is due to the late summer ripening and how much to drought)...astilbes (they are doomed in my garden, maybe I'll dig them up and give them to my sisters)...hydrangeas and viburnums, of course...gooseneck loosestrife, which flops about looking parched but never really dies...

At the moment, the garden in front features the pale purple lysimachia and the darker purple aster, early color in the amsonia leaves, and sedum 'Autumn Joy.' In the back, it's all about begonia grandis and the container plants.

The tail end of summer is a hard time of year - summer plants are dying, but it's not yet cool enough to get into the garden, lifting, dividing, edging mulching... I'll give it a couple weeks, and in the meantime will work on my bulb orders.

A walk downtown

The weather was beautiful last week, filled with Sunapee days, so I took a walk downtown at lunchtime.

These garlic chives were thriving along a wooden fence at the Wheelers' house.

 

Are these fatsia leaves growing in the Mary Washington House garden?

 

The Brown Turkey figs are thriving at Kenmore.

 

Kenmore features the classic boxwood and brick edging of a colonial garden...

 

...but it also had these enormous Joe Pye weeds (eupatorium). The Japanese anemones were beautiful, though I didn't get any good pictures with my phone's camera.

 

This garden along Hawke street had a particularly fine grass billowing over the white picket fence.

 

Someone had been gardening at the Kenmore Inn, as I could see from the piles of brush everywhere. But this yellow rose and its hips were left, perhaps the real last rose of summer.

 

I'm lucky to live and work in such a beautiful place.

"Our Life in Gardens"

This is a haunting garden book, because so much of it is about the passage of time, in a garden and in a life. Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd have been gardening in Vermont for more than thirty years, and these short essays - from Agapanthus to Xantorrhoea quandrangulata - chronicle their experiences. A few quotes:

No real garden should ever show bare earth, much less a sea of bark mulch, which always represents both an opportunity lost and a failure of horticultural seriousness.

We can...offer some comforts to young gardeners - or to gardeners of any age who are just starting a garden...a major part of the pleasure of gardening is in the act of gardening itself...For simply to plant that tree or shrub or vine and see it gradually take hold, getting larger each year, finally surprising you by its size, even though you knew it first as a tiny thing in a black plastic nursery pot, this is where the real pleasure of gardening lies.

If the management of any garden does not fall into a rhythm of comfortable routines, there will not be a garden at all but only an embarrassment and a reproach.

Gardens by their very nature are fragile beings that live in the two dimensions of time and care.

I am certain that my garden would not measure up to their high standards - a sense of humor is not a major part of their style - but I found their book inspiring and thought-provoking, giving me a long list of plants to try. More important, their wisdom and experience offer another way to look at gardens. I will even forgive them a glancing, disdainful reference to White Flower Farm, for which I have a family feeling.

Begonia Love

The other day I mentioned the odd spotted begonia with sweet little blooms, and as I walked around the garden I admired the other begonias, too. There's the pink begonia grandis in the oak tree garden. Here it is with the late afternoon sun behind it. I love what the light does to its leaves...

 

and the white one by the shed...

 

and the pink ones in pots...

 

 

and the glossy-leaved houseplant I got from Mom years ago. It's on the small side right now, but in years past the leaves have been twice this size. When it's happy, they are big, glossy and dark green. I think this is 'Gobe.'

 

I've even had pretty good luck with this tuberous begonia that I bought at the farmer's market. It doesn't look quite this good right now, but it's still blooming. Here it is in its glory days in June.

 

Then of course there are the dragon wing begonias that I put in hanging pots in hopes of attracting hummingbirds. This year they must be visiting while I'm at work...

I could see going mad for begonias. Here's a site with a nice collection of the tropical begonias that make good houseplants.

Verrucosa arenata and her kin

Emma remarked during our Darwin week that it was really hard to identify insects in the wild, even with a good guide, so Darwin's work during the Beagle expedition was even more impressive. My voyage around the back garden turns up lots of spiders this time of year, and without Google (sorry, library databases), I don't know how I'd identify them.

This one is pretty certainly an orb spider, according to the Neararctic Spider Database, which has a pretty good picture on their site. She's quite beautiful. Notice how she posed with the golden triangle on her back clearly visible.

 

Zoom in to see the little insect she has bundled up for her lunch.

It's hard to get good pictures of spider webs, since they appear and disappear depending on the slant of light, but here are a couple recent examples.

 

 

Speaking of critters, earlier this summer some kind of cricket visited me and ended up checking out my blog (I guess).

 

Late summer survivors

The wet spring turned hot and dry, with barely any rain for six weeks in July and August. Who survived? This begonia ('Bubbles'?), a bit odd-looking but with this darling hidden bloom. Planted in a clay pot but never showed any sign of drooping.

 

The hostas did just what they were supposed to do. As summer marched relentlessly on and the summer sun beat down, they became more golden. They're particularly beautiful in the early morning or on a cloudy day, when their ripening foliage glows.

 

The volunteer morning glories did extremely well this year, I can only think because they had sufficient moisture in the early months, for once.

 

 

Who had trouble? The new hydrangeas, of course. 'Little Lamb' has some crispy leaves, but I think it will do fine next year. 'Annabelle' was kind of a mess - big and droopy and suffering terribly from the drought. I hope these were not a mistake. The kirengeshoma kept promising to bloom, but when I looked at it yesterday, even the last few days of rain couldn't save it. It's lost most of its leaves, and the promised buds are now tight little dried-up husks. Here it is in its glory days in mid-July:

 

And here's how it looks after a drought:

 

Sad, isn't it.

A few others that didn't make it: two of the tiarellas that I loved so much this summer. At first I thought they were drooping from lack of water, but I soon realized that the evil voles had been at work again. When you pull up the plant, you get nothing but dead leaves on the top, and no roots. Death to all voles! Here are the horrible remains.

 

After all, not everything in the garden is beautiful, not by a long shot...

A trellis

Smith & Hawken is going out of business, sadly. Yes, their things were expensive, but I got my leaf trellises from them on a good sale, and they had a small collection of things at Target. Being up in Arlington today, I went to their McLean store (no web purchases any more) and ended up buying a twining leaf arbor at 30% off.



The plan is to position this at the beginning of the cutting garden and cover it with annuals next year until I'm sure it's in the right place - then grow a climbing roses and some clematis on it.

I did resist a beautiful metal and wood potting bench, partly because it is not really designed to live outdoors - I would use this in place of the picnic table if I did anything - but the store expects to be open through early November, so maybe it will call to me again before they go under.


Buying this would be part of the upgrade of the compost area. Want, want, want - want shall be my master!