Gardens by Kelly Productions

I ask this question every year.  Don’t you?  You’d think after so many years of gardening, the answer would be empirical, at least to an extent.  But it’s far from empirical.  Where did the growing season go? 

Sure I’m wistful, wanting badly to relive the evening of July 7 when my ‘Peppermint Twist’ phlox roared in full bloom.  Or July 10 when that lusty orienpet lily called ‘Shocking’ ruined normalcy in my backyard with its startling, to say the least, flowers.  In contrast, I could go all the way back to June 14, the day after I got home from the Ozarks and recall the sparkling, pristine racemes of foxglove penstemon (Penstemon digitalis). 

I recall more recently the sunset-lit heads of my Northern sea oats (Chasmanthium latifolium), an assured sign of closure in my Midwestern garden.  Maybe then, or earlier, I started to take the hint.  Gardens have a way of signalling change, passing days on the calendar with floral bounty and ripening fruits.  As a timepiece they remind us of the rhythm of the seasons, keeping us in time with a natural clock that has ticked for longer than we can know. 

Leaves fall, the ground freezes, and life retreats to chambers.  But the passion for gardening lacks such a good, steady watch and a place to persist when conditions don’t permit flourish.  Though for many of us in the temperate north where the act of gardening begins to subside, the passion springs eternal through snowflakes and cold.  Where has the growing season gone?  No where too permanent at all.

Autumnal nights come fast. Racing the setting sun, I sped with trowel and bucket in tow around the garden, quickly tucking in the last of my weekend purchases and watering them. Bats buzz bye, darting past my head as they bypass the security light. Though I love fall, I can’t help scorn the last of the light that flickers beyond the horizon shortening the hours I can spend in my garden. It’s an assured consequence of my second favorite season.

Though I disapprove of shortening days, I grimace more when I hear fellow gardeners decry the hardness and dryness of fall. “Oh the garden looks tough,” they moan, suggesting that fall marks an end.  While it’s logical to regard fall as bold and vibrant ending to a well-sung concert, I relish its span of time as much as I did the measures and bars before it.  The end is the best part, right?  So in defiance, I go shopping every fall in search of the best divas capable of hanging on through overture after overture to appear only in a gallant end scene.

This fall I’ve got a few stops planned.  First, I made my way to the coolest plant haven in Iowa, The Perennial Flower Farm of Ionia.  Owners Steve and Caroline Bertrand relish the closing acts too, propagating numerous clones of bush clematis (Clematis heracleifolia), the adorable yellow waxy bells (Kirengeshoma palmata), and giant bugbane (Actaea simplex ‘Pritchard’s Giant’).  I bought some of each, even though I already own several bush clematis and yellow waxy bells.  I’m insatiable, what can I say?  The giant bugbane has been a lust plant for me for years, even though I’ve had ample opportunity to buy one.  Plant geeks have priorities though, and somehow I kept passing up this skyscraping tall boy in favor of something else.  Yesterday, however, was its day.  Even though my photo fails to do the plant justice, imagine the scent with me for a moment.  Bawdy and lusty, bees and all manner of winged pollinators swarmed six-foot tall flower stalks despite my prodding lens and investigative eyes.

My next stop lies 1,200 miles from my fair garden home.  Next Sunday I embark with fellow plant geeks Dan Heims, Kate Bryant, and Bob Pries on a whirlwind tour of North Carolina’s finest, all before the annual Garden Writers Association (GWA) convention in Raleigh.  I’ll post photos and stories of our trek as I do every year from GWA.

In the flurry of fall, I look to my garden for stability, and even though I’ll miss the entirety of the ending this season, I’ll know it’s nothing but the best.

Check out more photos from my annual trip to The Perennial Flower Farm below:

Listed in order of appearance: Giant bugbane (Actaea simplex ‘Pritchard’s Giant’), Clematis viticella (seed wild collected in Poland), Sanguisorba tenuifolia, and a very petite-flowered clone of the unfortunately weedy Clematis tangutica.

I suppose it sounds a bit trite to ask “can you believe it’s August?”  But really?  It’s at this point that I start to get a little wistful and reminiscent, looking back over the season from its March beginnings until now.  I can’t even find the corydalis anymore.  Daffodil foliage has mostly faded.  The seedheads of my Monarda bradburiana stand tall and proud, but I’d rather them be covered in those lavender flowers that I saw before I left for the Ozarks. 

But it’s really just the eve of my second favorite season.  Autumn, by many accounts in garden literature, is the forgotten season.  Folks busy themselves raking leaves, shuffling kids to school activities, and catching up on those must-do cleaning chores before the depths of winter set in.  My Midwest garden reminds me of all this, a calendar of sorts throughout the year.  Have you ever thought of the garden as a living calendar, a timepiece for the progress of the seasons?  In Iowa, I suppose I’m fortunate to experience four seasons (occasionally a fifth one too, called hell), though in mid-January I’m probably not as optimistic-sounding.  But gardening in a temperate climate affords gardeners this primal experience of seasonality that many take for granted or never experience at all.

In each of these seasons, the garden possesses a unique feeling.  Spring looks, feels, and smells different in the garden than summer, fall or winter, and vice versa.  It’s my opinion that this living timetable motivates our gardening endeavors, like today when I’d rather sit indoors looking at the window-high Henry Eilers coneflower (Rudbeckia subtomentosa ‘Henry Eilers’) then actually go outside in the heat and stick my nose in its bevy of flowers.  In the cooler days of fall, I race around pulling back falling leaves for a last look at my autumn crocus (Colchicum spp.) or to clear a new spot for more daffodils.  On days of thawing in winter, I putter around the garden in snow boots hunting for glimpses of ephemeral life surely waiting to spring forth at the onset of warmer weather and longer days.  Aren’t these the moments that add up to gardening, the verb of our passion and the acts that beautify our spaces? 

The garden also shows us when to take on tasks like pruning, deadheading, and dividing.  We chalk-up these to-do lists to past experiences gleaned from seasons before.  Spring is the time to divide late summer-flowering perennials.  Early summer is the time to cut-back shrubs that bloom on old wood.  Summer brings deadheading.  Fall brings planting.  With winter comes planning. 

In my calendar garden grows not only a chart of the seasons, but a constant reminder of my own progress outdoors.  Tell me about your calendar garden and celebrate the beauty of the seasons!

I talk a lot about vignettes, justifiably so considering the rhapsodic nature of my garden.  Like a rhapsody, my garden is a composition of irregular forms with generous freedom of expression.  It employs the full measure of my creativity, at least I hope.  If a garden space doesn’t employ or at least challenge the full measure of our creative devices, what really have we created?  Another median planting with daylilies and barberries, no doubt!

So in this spirit of vignettes united by equal measures of dimension and freedom, let me share with you a few combos that caught my eye this weekend.

Combo #1:  Tightly knit, this merry duo repeats itself throughout my front garden.  Yellowdicks (Helenium amarum), which I’m obviously enchanted with, happily shine in concert with my favorite soapwort (Saponaria lempergii ‘Max Frei’).  Some soapworts have an unsavory reputation for being rock garden thugs.  Not so here.  Mindful and ground-hugging, ‘Max Frei’ brightens up any floor spot in the garden, a colorful filler while nearby and taller neighbors prep for the next round.  This particular vignette has shone strongly for nearly three weeks.  The soapworts just started to go down hill this week.

Combo #2:  I liked this so much I made it the front page photo on the website!  What a startling palette of texture, color, and personality, right?  You’ll recognize the beautybush from earlier posts.  Prairie sage (Artemisia ludoviciana) adds silver to the menu, juxtaposing the glowy chartreuse foliage of the beautybush.  These two alone could seal the deal for me, an unexpectedly compatible interface of opposing forces.  Yet the drama comes from the emergent blossoms on my bush clematis (Clematis heracleifolia) whose dark, pseudo-jade foliage and cobalt blue flowers tactfully grace the vignette with star power.  It all comes together to spell bold like no other vignette in my garden does, a momentary semblance of my personality cropping up in the forms of plants.  As I reflect though on the island bed in toto, similar strokes of boldness grow throughout.  In effect, one vignette forces a reconsideration of the piece at-large, something garden designers would say alludes to thematic development of the garden space.  The power of one, maybe.

Combo #3:  I use #3 to illustrate how the same idea (like in #1) can happen with different plants.  One of the best evening primroses for the home garden, Oenothera macrocarpa ssp. fremontii blooms endlessly from June through early fall.  Many forms sport shimmering foliage in silver tones, the perfect accent as illustrated in previous vignettes.  Here, though, this endless summer bloomer has waded into a sea of cutleaf beardstongue (Penstemon richardsonii var. richardsonii), a perfectly hardy endemic of the Pacific Northwest mountain ranges.  I love sprawling plants.  Their roving tendencies and friendly door-knocking invite serendipity to the garden, precisely the case here.  That improvisational element accelerates a native, natural feeling that’s present in my front garden.  It goes on unplanned throughout the season, versing its freedom.

What vignettes do you have in your garden?  What do they look like and what plants shine?  It’s easy to get lost in the big picture sometimes (I can relate since I consider myself a “big picture” kind of planner).  But the value lies in the details, those little vignettes that add up to the garden at-large.

I’ve said before that, while I love to travel, I hate leaving the garden.  But I relish the return.  The newness, weeds, and occasional surprise delight my senses and take my mind off the mountain of emails that need replies or the phone messages that need return calls.  My stroll with the camera tonight turned up nothing in the way of surprises, but did find me coddling the dangling stems of the long-awaited Gladiolus ‘Atom’.  My grandma shared corms with me this spring from a sampler collection she ordered.  They were marketed as “dwarf” and “hardy”. 

‘Atom’ is certainly not dwarf.  At nearly 3′ tall these towering spires have flopped under weight of their flowers into nearby sedums and irises.  I’m nonetheless enchanted with ‘Atom’, a vintage variety from the 1940s with vivid and emblazened scarlet flowers that sport a foxy white rim.  Another diva plant for sure.  You can order ‘Atom’ from our friends at Old House Gardens.

As alluded to in June, I’m keenly interested in the little vignettes that in concert compose my garden.  I’ve long held that this approach, with a respect for the united work in toto, creates a greater tapestry of expression and interest while allowing the gardener to tastefully assemble a unique collection of assorted plants.  While some might label this as “plant collector design” (a term which others still would call an oxymoron, suggesting that when one collects plants, one cannot also have any design sense), I prefer to think of it as a way in which gardeners can immitate nature without seeming formulaic.  Themes in nature arise from patterns in ecology, geography, and the geology of sites where plants natively thrive.  While the garden, in any way, will never replicate the ecology of native environments around the world, it does possess its own ecology capable of fostering interactions between and among plants, insects, animals, and birds.

So manifesto aside, that’s how I like to pursue gardening; one vignette at a time with an overall appreciation for the total environment I’m creating.  Sure, some people think my garden is a plant zoo.  Others see the beauty resulting from well-considered combos marrying with one another in a unified space.  While all this is merry well and good, I couldn’t help critique myself today while puttering about the yard.  Let’s face it, with good intentions come occasional failure.  Without further adieu I present now a few combos for you to critique with me.

I call this combination groundcover mayhem.  It inspired this whole diatribe.  “Itsa no good!”  If you can even make sense of the photo, this little spot grows poppy mallow (Callirhoe involucrata) and yellow archangel (Lamiastrum galeobdolon).  Lesson learned here: two groundcovers don’t necessarily play nicely together.  They’ve overrun each other, despite my best guess that they might layer within each other, highlighting their departing textures.  Instead this less-than-dynamic duo looks like a Phil Specter bad hair day, the likes of which I never hope to see again.  There’s even a little Thalictrum minus ‘Adiantifolium’ fighting for its life.  Votes for transplanting to somewhere more hospitable?

Here’s “run together” for you.  Lots of cool plants, but clearly overgrown and planted much too closely to be appreciated in the rock garden.  Arguably, the geraniums fouled it all up.  I collected seeds off of the petite cultivar ‘Dusky Crûg’ last fall and sowed among rocks.  You can’t even see the rocks now!  These kids outgrew their parents in one fell swoop!  Perky and petite no more!  They’re getting moved so I can evaluate them.  After this dreadfully damp season, not a single one of them has any powdery mildew.

This next one is comical, perhaps.  I love natives, and despite the fact that most would label my friend Oxalis corniculata (red form) a weed, I adore its serendipitous habit.  I’ve fiercely guarded this “combo” all season.  What do you think?  Great textures, right?

This last one may just be a judgment call, a work in progress, something.  I was cutting back my Solidago drummondii (the one I hacked back a few weeks back, remember?) this spring and accidentally ripped a stem out with roots attached.  Not wanting to throw away a plant, I tucked this cascading goldenrod near the cornerstone of my rock garden dreaming of its pendulous waves of yellow and gold about mid-September, just like in the Ozarks.  But in my fervor I forgot about another favorite rock garden plant, Saponaria lempergii ‘Max Frei’.  This groundcovering character already had dibs on the wall edge and now happily engulfs the goldenrod.  But it doesn’t look all that bad, does it?  Just wait until that goldenrod hulks up in a couple of years.  It’ll be an all-out war.  We’ll see.  Maybe the stress of being in hotter soil will limit the root growth of the goldenrod and keep it in check?  Wishful thinking I bet, but that actually is exactly how it works in the wild.

What all this does, I hope, is encourage y’all to get out there and plant a few mistakes.  Gardens are like little experiment stations for people who like to play God, so long as you can deal with the consequences.  Go on now, be nature.

Every June I get a less-than-welcome seasonal reminder  from my small but feisty feline tribe about which plants in the garden best suit their playful needs and yearnings.  The plus side in all of this I suppose is the marketing spin I’m about to put on an otherwise frustrating and wholly miserable situation (I’m trying to employ the same amount of drama here as the cats feel necessary to use on me).

Organic cat toys.  What a thought?  With such focus and attention on sustainability and the timeless and enduring legacy of Bob Barker, organic meets the pet population, in this case the feline aspect.  And in an otherwise dim economy, why spend so much on overpriced, plastic pet toys when you could just grow your own?  No, no.  Catmint (or catnip depending your regionalism) isn’t on the menu at this house.  My felines deserve the best and demand the choicest esoterica I have to offer.

For casual lying about why not plant a handsome, all-natural, and green faux shag carpet?  Carex appalachica fits the role nicely, forming comely tussocks of soft green grass-like blades.  It really is a great sedge, adaptable to sun, part sun, and shade.  It thrives regardless of the setting (and the lay-down aggressor), seeding politely between other rock garden plants.

If you’re in the market for some kind of attention-getting stick, why not the pliable and readily acquired larkspur (Delphinium grandiflorum ‘Blue Butterfly’)?  With minimal investment you can plant a small stand capable of withstanding feline aggression and onslaught that still manages to bloom!

For the high-rollers in the crowd, maybe you’re looking for something a little more refined–a truly unique cat toy.  I suggest Callicarpa americana (American beautyberry).  This Zone 5 dieback shrub sprouts new, flexuous green growth late in the spring, blooms in mid-July, and bears some of the most gorgeous fruit imaginable on a shrub.  Despite my desire to enjoy this choice accession amid various variegated perennials, a new crop of kittens recently demonstrated the versatility of the central leader as a teaser toy.  Who’d of known?

It turns out that my physical presence with a camera is enough to strike fear into the eyes of my privacy seeking cats, otherwise aware that their actions, however cute and photogenic, are unwelcome.  Photos of these fine products are presently unavailable.

Thanks to Angel, Spidget, Gidget, Annabelle, RD, Tar Baby, Tiger, and Duncan for their assistance with product development.

I’m in love with Veronica, the spike speedwells that make such terrific perennials in my USDA Zone 5 garden.  I probably grow more than a dozen cultivars, but I’ve sort of lost track.  Every time I see one, I grab it.  Plant collecting…what can I say?

This installment will be the first of several throughout the season.  The earlier-blooming cultivars (those that bloom here in late May and early June) have hit their stride.  I’ll showcase later-blooming favorites sometime in July.  So from my garden to yours, here are a few dashing selections that you should rush out and find.  I’ve cited sources at the end of each entry.

Veronica longifolia 'Eveline'

Flying in at number one is the exquisite diva ‘Eveline’.  Born of two unidentified parents, this orphan has grown into one of the best speedwells on the market, in my never too humble opinion.  Showy and elegant, long spires of amethyst purple rise above clean, glossy foliage in early June.  Cut it back after the first round and you’ll get rebloom in another month!  ‘Eveline’ grows admirably from Houston to St. Paul and pairs happily with roses (I’ve got it next to a Flower Carpet®) and Helen’s flowers (Helenium).  Garden Crossings carries this all-round winner, as does your local garden center I’m sure.  If it doesn’t, do some prodding.

Veronica gentianoides 'Variegata'

Number two on the list is a new addition to the garden and a new species to the growing cadre of speedwells in my head.  Veronica gentianoides ‘Variegata’ blooms first in the veronica parade; it goes great with standard dwarf bearded irises in mid-May.  Up-close it definitely looks like a speedwell but from a distance it solicits such eloquent remarks as “what’s that variegated thingy with the blue wands?”  or the stodgier “what IS this?”  The variegation, primarily confined to the leaf margins, so far seems consistent and clean on this tidy, ground-hugging speedwell.  Commonly called gentian speedwell, it doesn’t appear to have gotten much traction in this country yet–a pitiful fate indeed.  I snatched it up last summer on my visit to Wisconsin-based plant-grail The Flower Factory.

Veronica spicata 'Baby Doll'

Number three is also a recent addition, a dwarf selection of the naturally short Veronica spicata called ‘Baby Doll’.  Introduced for its floriferousness, ‘Baby Doll’ was bred and selected by Dutch plant breeder Jan Verschoor.  At only 10-12″ tall, ‘Baby Doll’ prefers front and center attention in the border making friends with Fragaria vesca ‘Lipstick’ (pink strawberry) and Callirhoe involucrata var. involucrata (poppy mallow) in our garden.

This is a view from the driveway yesterday.  Even though I’m hopelessly in love with the road, the new car air freshener dangling from my rear view mirror, and my odometer locked in around 65 mph, I like the slow lane leading up to my garden and the quiet joy that emanates from a respite of my creation.

But I’m also rest-averse when it comes to spending time in the garden.  I feel like I have to be doing something.  Sitting and enjoying is nice, sure, but doing, gardening, and milling about seems more my style.  Yesterday’s chore was to hem back my billowy specimen of Solidago drummondii (syn. S. rugosa ssp. aspera), which happily flopped over everything nearby.  Sedums, dianthus, small peonies, and centaureas, this thing takes no prisoners when it getsa’ growin’.

So it’s time for a haircut.  Don’t ever feel bad about taking early fall blooming perennials back by a third or half sometime in mid-summer.  You’ll get a denser, lusher flush of foliage and likely a better crop of blooms.  It’s hardly a chore either.  Grab a sharp pair of hedge trimmers or hefty pruning shears and you’ll whip up a new do in less than five.

Here’s a before shot:

Now grab the shears and go!

Here’s an after shot:

You can’t even tell it was there!  It’s so manicured looking now and I can see behind it!  I’ll post an update later in the season when it fills back in and another when it starts to bloom in September.  If you don’t have this goldenrod, you must track it down.  It’s simply exceptional.