Color at the End of September

Dull in October?  Not our New
England garden!  Double-click
for a slideshow of the garden

There's a truism among certain gardeners that says New England gardens are shot by mid-September.  Pull it out and plow it under because, until the leaves turn, the garden will be a wasteland of spent plants and brown flowers.  There's a rationale for the belief.  Days are less than twelve hours long and the angle of the sun is all wrong.  And besides, an early frost will kill everything anyway, so why bother?

Perhaps our garden is the exception, or maybe it's a product of Betty's thoughtfulness coupled with serendipity, but 26 Pine Street is still barreling along, blissfully unaware that we should have put away our gardening tools on Labor Day.

These purple dome asters add
long-lasting fall color

Take the fall-blooming perennials, for example. We planted a clutch of purple dome asters two years ago, and they've spread quite nicely.  Two weeks ago they were green.  Today, they're a blaze of purple.  We also planted wood asters to border the wetlands at the back of our planted area. They've been a sea of white for the past three weeks and we're beginning to re-think how many of them we want on our property.

One of our Aconitum

Our pod of Chelone (turtlehead) 'Hot Lips' is also on full display as is a growing array of white Chelone 'Glabra' we planted specifically to attract the Baltimore Checkerspot butterfly.  Close by is a cluster of Aconitum (monkshood) with its vivid, and long-blooming purple flower.  The Aconitum is mostly my idea as I used it as a murder weapon in one of my books, Deadly Deeds.

Birds love our bright red
American dogwood fruit

We have berries on display.  The leaves of our Cornus florida (American dogwood) are just starting to turn but, as they do, the tree's fruit is quickly ripening.  In a week or so, migrating birds will see or smell it and descend upon the tree to devour its nutritious berries.  The fruit of our neighbors' Asian kousa dogwoods will fall to the ground and rot, uneaten.  On the rise at the front of the property, our three Ilex have produced their bright red berries.  They'll stay on the shrubs until they've been frozen and thawed multiple times, after which they'll be palatable to over-wintering birds.

Purple beutyberry with a backdrop
of still-blooming geranium

Our Callicarpa americana (American beautyberry) had exploded in its second year and now has arching branches laden with dark purple fruit, which will feed a variety of both migrating and over-wintering birds.  It pairs nicely with our 'river' of Geranium 'Rozanne', which will stay in bloom until the first hard frost.

These woodland asters, backed by
Solidago, catch the eye

Container gardens are supposed to be on the compost pile by mid-September and, indeed, we have pulled apart several that gave out after they stopped blooming in August.  But several are still brilliant with color.  Two are anchored by Alternathera, (one is Purple Prince, the other's tag is missing).  We consider them 'thugs' that crowd out other plants, but two containers in particular have equally aggressive specimens of coleus and Agastache.  The result is two, brilliant potted gardens that look better today than they did in August.  The photo at the top of the page shows one of those containers.

A profusion of Melampodium

Finally, one of our in-ground annuals is putting on a spectacular show.  We planted a short row (eight plants, if memory serves) of Melampodium 'Showstar' last year to disguise the unattractive hyacinth foliage along our driveway.  By September of last year, the Melampodium had turned into a foot-wide row of dense plants with yellow flowers.  The plants died with the first frost and we pulled them out and agreed we might purchase a comparable number this spring.

We needn't have bothered.  The seeds from those Melampodium flowers overwintered and began showing leaves as soon as we cut back the hyacinths in June.  This year, the row is two feet wide, denser, and showier.  They're also blooming prolifically.  Yes, they'll die with that first frost, but we now have a terrific eye-catcher that has earned a place in the landscape.

Mid-September Color

I glanced outside my office window this morning and saw a remarkable sight: our outer sidewalk bed awash in color.  This mixed perennial and shrub border has been in bloom since early May, but seldom has it shown such a variety of color and texture as it does now.

The outer sidewalk bed.  Double-click to
enlarge and follow the descriptions of
what's in bloom.

Looking from the bottom of the photo to the top (double click on the photo to blow it up to full-screen size), the yellow closest to the grass is a second bloom of coreopsis ‘Sunbeam’.  Its main bloom was back in July and, by heavily cutting it back in August, we’re getting a modest repeat performance.  Just above it is a wigela  ‘My Monet’ with its white leaves flecked with pink and green.  It’s not in bloom, but it’s gorgeous.  The pinkish flowers on long stems are Japanese anemone.  They’re nice to look at, but are a garden thug.  Keeping them in check is (except for these few weeks) more trouble than they’re worth.

The great masses of blue you see are asters.  They’ve been trimmed back twice this summer to maximize flower production.  The variety is unknown; they have a yellow center.  Best of all, they’ll stay in bloom for two-plus weeks before fading.  For great texture, there’s also an amsonia hanging over the sidewalk.  It bloomed back in May but its foliage is about to turn a lingering, golden yellow.

Above the first flight of asters is Daphne Atlantica.  This shrub has doubled in size this year and, far more impressive, has been in near-constant bloom since late April.  The white flowers are wonderfully fragrant.  To its left and just visible as small spots of reddish purple are the second bloom of a veronica.

Beyond that are the fading yellow-gold floral remnants of a stand of helenium and, just above that, rudbeckia Goldstrum.  Finally, below the lamppost is the ubiquitous sedum ‘Autumn Joy’.

The character of this bed has changed in the past few years.  Once almost entirely perennials, it is now interspersed with low evergreens and slow-growing shrubs; all part of Betty’s strategy to minimize the labor required to maintain a bed that is eight feet wide and nearly fifty feet long.  She has edited large sections of the bed that were once given over to plants with short bloom times, disease issues or aggressive habits (multiple stands of iris, for example).  This year, we spent a total of perhaps ten hours moving plants.  The rest of the time, we’ve been able to just enjoy this highly visible bed.

October Surprise

I walked out to the end of the driveway this morning to collect our newspapers (yes, we’re dinosaurs who actually subscribe to the print editions of multiple newspapers), and was greeted by our stand of Helianthus angustifolius. It’s part of the ‘Manhattan’ bed and is the penultimate bloomer in that three-season site.



Helianthus angustofolius in October bloom

 This is one remarkable perennial: it blooms after the first frost. Very tall (six-feet plus) on bamboo-like canes, it lies in wait at the back of the bed, waiting for its moment. It is hidden by a tall rudbeckia that blooms from August into mid-September, after which the birds have reduced the rudbeckia to stalks. Meanwhile, low-growing asters at the front of the bed started blooming in early September and are still in evidence.

But the Helianthus takes you completely by surprise. Until it blooms, it is truly part of the tall greenery at the back of the bed. Once it opens up, there’s no overlooking it. There are multiple – up to half a dozen – blooms on each stalk and their weight bends those stalks to a confounding series of graceful arches.

I would like to take credit for first planting this specimen, but honesty forces me to acknowledge that there was a small clump of it growing in the original Old Stone bed. We divided it, moving half out to the Butterfly bed where it would get better late summer sun. It took off (it spreads by rhizomes) and the clump is now about ten feet wide and two feet deep, fully intermingled with the aforementioned rudbeckia. Some years ago, we potted up a single plant, took it to a nursery, and asked for a further identification. Many books and websites were consulted but the nursery was unable to come up with a specific cultivar.

Chelone lyonii

Bees love it, of course. It, along with the asters, is one of the last sources of nectar on the property. Betty spent part of yesterday cutting back daylily foliage and the bees were everywhere.

A handful of other perennials are still in bloom. The pink turtlehead (Chelone lyonii) is holding its own in our lower shade bed even as the rest of the bed turns an inexorable yellow. The two sidewalk beds closest to the house are still a pleasure to look at. In the ‘inner’ bed, a white David’s phlox is in its second month of bloom and a Persicaria ‘Painter’s Palette’ has both the beautiful, multi-colored foliage it has displayed all season plus, now, an abundance of pink spikes.

Persicaria 'Painter's Palette'

In the ‘outer’ sidewalk bed, a clump of balloon flower (Platycodon grandiflorus) eaten down by deer earlier in the season is making up for lost time by flowering long past its usual date. Because we’ve not yet had a hard frost, the cleomes are still in bloom, and probably prolifically self-seeding next year’s crop. Also, there’s a clump of pinkish-white Japanese anemone that, left to its own devices, would take over the garden. We allow this one clump to remain because of its reliable September flowering. To keep it in check, we spend much of the spring and summer pulling out its never-ending runners.

The outer sidewalk bed

The single most striking perennial in the outer sidewalk bed is a Eupatorium ‘chocolate’. Joe Pye weed never was more elegant than this. The foliage is indeed a purple-chocolate brown, but the bloom – huge puffy heads of tiny white flowers – is remarkable. We’ll have those floral clusters until early November.

Finally, although a shrub rather than a perennial, our Daphne ‘Atlantica’ is putting on an autumn show. We nearly gave it up for dead after last winter and it spent much of the spring and summer staked in hopes of strengthening its trunk. Whatever we did worked: the plant roughly tripled in size over the course of the summer and then began putting out fragrant white flowers. It is still going strong.