Ready for Fall

Fall is finally in the air.  The autumnal equinox came as scheduled on September 22, but ever since, the calendar has said one thing and the New England weather has spoken something quite different.  We were still picking the last of our luxuriously sweet yellow corn from our garden just last week.

The last gasp of one of our hostas

Now, though, things are changing swiftly.   In our vegetable garden, the corn has now been pulled and the green beans (and the bean beetles – good riddance!) are just a memory.  Zucchini that grew from a flower to a baseball bat in three days now takes a week or longer to become picking size.  Tomatoes continue to ripen but are no longer growing. Conversely, the cool-weather crops – spinach, lettuce, arugula – are hitting their stride.

Suddenly, our garden is blooming
purple, like these asters

Things are still blooming in our garden… almost all of them purple.  Asters, geraniums, vernonia, callicarpa (beautyberry) and aconitum (monkshood), having been nothing but greenery all summer, have come out of nowhere to declare autumn their private domain. The perennial season is going out with a decidedly violet bang.

Most of the trees on the property still have that voluptuous, late summer look but, here and there, the leaves have started to turn – an omen of the color explosion later this month that gives New England its seasonal distinction.  One of our itea ‘Henry Garnet’ got a jump on the season; it is a brilliant red and orange.  Our amelanchier (shadbush) seemingly overnight went from all green to speckled yellow and rust.  A single branch of one of our high-bush blueberries has turned a brilliant red – a semaphore of things to come.

Beautyberry and
geraniums, all purple

The hummingbirds have departed.  Just a week ago they were dive-bombing one another at our feeder in some senseless ‘if-I-can’t-have-it-then-neither-can-you’ ritual that must be programmed into their DNA.  Hummingbirds know when the fat lady is warming up in the wings.

And, almost overnight, the hostas are turning yellow.  If we do nothing, they’ll turn to yellow mush when we get our first frost (though the ten-day forecast shows nothing lower than the mid-40s).  However, we allow our hostas to go out with a semblance of dignity.  This coming week, we’ll cut them to the ground, the better to prevent any bad bugs from overwintering in their foliage.

Aconitum (monkshood)
with perennial ageratum
for a backdrop

Regardless of the weather, the beginning of October begins a series of ‘lasts’ just as early April was the time for ‘firsts’.  The rain barrels that provided supplemental water for our garden all spring and summer will be drained later this month to give our young trees a ‘big gulp’ to ensure their root systems are as full as we can make them before the ground gets too cold to perk water.  The fence around our community garden plot will get taken down because there will be nothing left to tempt two- or four-footed marauders. 

We pick our first luscious macouns last week from this tree

It’s not a melancholy time – far from it.  Apple picking has started and we've already picked our first peck of macouns.  We'll pick at least one more peck before the month is out.  Autumn brings its own excitement in New England.  I’m ready.

The Return of the Blues

The blues are back in our garden. 

The outer sidewalk bed on
September 21.  Double-click
on any image for a full-
screen view.

During the heat of July and August, perennials with yellow and white flowers dominate our garden.  Except for some heavily watered and regularly fertilized annuals in containers, blue is almost absent from the color spectrum.  Now, with cooler weather, the blues are back.

The convention wisdom says that September gardens in New England are ready to be cut to the ground; the season is effectively over.  As the attached photos attest, that’s not the case.  Late September brings out a different side of our garden.  The most noticeable change is that blue flowers are out in abundance for the first time since mid-Spring.  For another, plants are allowed to play out their natural tendencies, sometimes with stunning results.

These three containers have merged
into one glorious mass of color
and texture

Yes, the first frost will put an end to the annuals.  The coleus that is growing with abandon right now – there are more than a dozen varieties in containers right now - will be the first to go: even a night with temperatures in the mid-30s will cause them to wilt.  But for the present, they are taking over the containers that were once dominated by plants that succumbed to the relentless heat of July and August.

Blue asters running amok.  They've
been hiding in plain sight all summer

The asters have been biding their time, effectively hiding in plain sight.  Now, they are in full bloom, creating carpets of blue and white all over the garden.  Hydrangea are heavy with blooms that are getting preposterously large; their branches drag the ground.  We have three caryopteris at the front of the property.  Each is blooming with delicate blue flowers.  In the rock gardens behind out home, a large patch of plumbago displays a carpet of mid-blue blooms.

The hydrangea are heavy with
preposterously large flower heads

Foliage plants are also in their glory.  We have three varieties of persicaria: Painters Palette, Lance Corporal and Red Dragon.  These are garden thugs that require constant attention to not take over the beds in which they are located.  Now, as their season ends, they are throwing up airy stalks containing red seed pods.  Our goal is to enjoy the foliage as long as possible, then cut the plant back to the ground before its seeds mature.  It’s a delicate balancing act.

In the Manhattan bed, an ipomea
(sweep potato) vine has been allowed
to dominate its container for the
final weeks of its season

Betty is also allowing her containers to ‘naturalize’ for this, their final month.  Throughout the spring and summer, she has carefully trimmed back individual plants in mixed containers to maintain a desired shape or color balance.  Now, the ipomea are trailing six-foot-long chartreuse vines.  Three containers have grown into a single, glorious quilt of color and texture.  Off in a corner of the property, a ‘Big Red Judy’ coleus has ballooned to a height of four feet and a girth of equal size.

This caryopteris is one of three on the
property, each with blue flowers
for September

From mid-September on, New England gardens live on borrowed time.  Each evening weather report brings reports of possible frost or freezes a little closer.  For the present, it is the Worcester Hills – some 40 miles distant – that are the target of nighttime temperatures in the mid-30s.  One unexpected drop in the jet stream could bring that weather to our front doorstep.

And so we are relishing the return of the blues.

A Pair of Autumn Gardens

It’s relatively easy to make a garden look good from mid-May to late June in New England. A succession of woody plants and perennials come out of their winter slumber and burst forth with color and form. It’s a lot harder to create an appealing, visit-worthy property at the end of September when most gardens look tired.
This year, Ellen Lahti, the Garden Conservancy’s coordinator for the greater Boston area, set out to find gardens that met the description of ‘still looks great at the start of autumn.’ She succeeded spectacularly with two properties that were open on September 27.

‘The Garden on Bennington Road’ in Lexington occupies a steeply sloped site backing up to conservation land. At two acres with nothing behind the property but hardwood forest, the location has the feel of something much farther away from a city. Still being fine-tuned, it is also a garden into which considerable money is being spent intelligently. Three terraces step down the hillside to a lawn below, creating a series of outdoor rooms ranging from intimate to grand. The stonework is meticulous and different materials – granite, bluestone and brick – further help differentiate spaces. Unusual specimens - including a Seven Sons tree (Heptacodium miconioides) in full, fragrant bloom – fill these rooms.

We spotted a familiar face at the garden – Tess McDonough of Sequencia Gardens – who maintains the property. She gave us the guided tour with emphasis on the displays of tropicals and annuals in containers of every color and material. The intelligence extends to the perennials, which are a mix of summer- and fall-blooming ones with an emphasis on natives. There are walks down to a small man-made pond that, Tess says, is used for ice skating in the winter.

All in all, it’s a beautiful garden that, rather than being just a showcase, looks as though it is regularly used.

The Gardens at Clock Barn is on the main road from Concord into Carlisle, which is to say it’s a two-lane road thick with venerable homes on large chunks of land. The house and drying barn date back to 1790, the garden has been a work in progress for thirty years. It, too, is a product of a great deal of money being intelligently spent though, in this case, the driving force behind the design is one of the homeowners.

But it is also a garden with its own staff – a property manager, a gardener and an assistant – and the care and long-term plan show. The vegetable and cutting gardens are ripe with raspberries and dahlias, late-blooming tall rudbeckia surrounds a tennis court. A formal, parterred mosaic garden plays in subtle colors and textures.

It is an extensive garden filled with woodland walks, a small orchard and a pond. On this late September day, color was everywhere, provided by the aforementioned dahlias, hakonechloa and unusual asters. Garden manager Guy Doran met us at the entrance with a map of the property (reproduced at left). Rather than being an affectation, it proved to be a useful guide to finding our way around a deceptively large property.

The two gardens were a great bookend to a summer of viewing gardens. Yes, a hard frost will reduce the dahlias to limp greens, but these are gardens that refuse to declare the season over and done with when the calendar turns to fall