Overwintering Pots, Redux

Sometimes, a photo says it all.  Back at the end of January, I noted that we were overwintering a large quantity of containers with well-established perennials.  In the ground, such perennials would be expected to come back as a matter of course each year but in pots, their survival (not to mention that of the pot) was much less assured.

Beginning with the January Thaw, I've carted our containers outdoors on warm days, taking them back in at twilight.  There have been roughly ten days in February and March when the temperatures rose to at least 45 degrees and another spell of such weather (along with some rain) is due this weekend.

Does it work?  The picture at left is worth a thousand words.  Here are four of our perennial containers taken this afternoon.  There's perennial salvia and snapdragons, dianthus, and a hydrangea that's leafing out nicely.

These containers (and 25 of their brethren) will continue to come out on warm days until spring is firmly established in early May.  It will be an interesting comparison to see how these flower versus their in-ground cousins and the new perennials we buy for the 2010 season.

I'll try to continue to photograph this foursome ever few weeks.  The trick, of course, is to remember to a) keep them out of direrct sun while their foliage is tender and b) not to forget to bring them in at night.  Temperatures here are still reliably below freezing every night.

Deconstructing a Vision

What took three and a half days and two dozen people to build was dismantled in a few hours this morning. Paul Miskovsky’s exhibit at the Rhode Island Flower Show (and, for that matter, each the other entries) was reduced to a gigantic pile of dark brown mulch by a small crew and some large pieces of equipment.
A flower show exhibit is a transitory dream. It is intended to exist for a few days, then to disappear, leaving only a pleasant memory of what was. If it is executed properly, a landscape exhibit will please almost everyone who passes by it. Many will pick up the brochure outlining the exhibitor’s credentials. Some will linger, hoping to speak with the garden’s creator. And a few will be sufficiently moved by the landscaper’s vision to say, ‘let’s talk…’.

Landscaping is Paul Miskovsky’s livelihood. Shows such as the just-concluded Rhode Island Flower Show and the upcoming Boston Flower & Garden Show are an important facet of his business. No one wakes up one morning and decides that they ‘need’ to scrape their property bare, re-contour the land and install a series of garden rooms. Instead, they visit friends’ homes and see things they like or they go to shows and get stopped in their tracks by a stunning exhibit. Miskovsky’s vision was indeed capable of causing jaded flower show-goers to backtrack, circle the exhibit and begin talking excitedly to one another. (It took the blue ribbon for best large landscape at the show.)

When Betty and I arrived at the show late Sunday afternoon, we found Paul in discussion with a couple whose appearance and demeanor intimated that, if they elected to start a landscape renovation, it would be a serious undertaking. We gave Paul a wide berth until his conversation with the couple ended with a smile and a firm handshake. It was, I hope and expect, a ritual that occurred many times over the show’s four-day run.

When I arrived this morning at 9 a.m., the garden still looked as it had the day before. But in less than an hour we had stripped the exhibit of more than a hundred campanula, twelve dozen painted ferns, and ten dozen tulips. The campanula, still in glorious full bloom of blue and white bells, were unceremoniously sheared of their tops and placed in boxes. They and the ferns will go into greenhouses either for clients or for the Boston Flower & Garden Show in March.

Also in that hour the stunning tropicals that had enlivened the two patio scenes were placed into climate-controlled trucks to return to the greenhouses where they have wintered.

Next came the grasses, ground covers and small shrubs. It had taken nearly a day to install them. It took less than an hour to remove them and load them in racks on one of Paul’s large trucks. Before noon, the exhibit looked like the accompanying photo - stripped of everything but its trees and hardscape. We took a break for pizza, then tackled the task of tying up the branches of trees so that they could lay flat in enclosed trucks. Paul’s full-time crew were handed the assignment of pulling out the stone wall that encircled one patio and the dozens of bluestone slabs that comprised the two seating areas.

The first section of kickboard came down around 1 p.m. Paul, manning one of his beloved Bobcats, rode over hills of mulch to begin retrieving more than a dozen trees located around the 900 square foot garden. Before 2 p.m., it was all done. The garden sprang from a pile of mulch last Sunday; eight days later, it returned to that same mulch, now enriched with some fifty bags of compost used to top-dress the exhibit.

Larry LeCain, a fellow volunteer, told me as we moved rocks that it seemed sad to see the garden come to an end. I respectfully disagreed. Paul’s exhibit was a kind of Brigadoon experience; an ephemeral event that was made all the more special because it was so deliberately transient. It was created to provide enjoyment for 35,000 people in the middle of a bleak season. For a few hours, those people could shed their winter coats and smell spring. Even tough New Englanders deserve that kind of a break. It was a pleasure to be a small part of helping to provide it.

Flower Show Fever

It was about noon yesterday afternoon that I realized I’m getting too old for this stuff. But then Paul yelled over to me and asked if I could give a hand pulling out a birch tree by its root ball. Of course I helped. And then I pulled out two more birches. After that, I moved rocks for an hour.

At least I got a neat tee shirt and some great pizza for my efforts. Oh, and a top-drawer horticultural design seminar.

The Boston Flower & Garden Show you’ll see walking through the Seaport World Trade Center next month will be the product of a lot of very talented people channeling their knowledge of horticulture and landscape design into a few hundred square feet of eye-pleasing color and form. Assisting that talent are the efforts of several hundred people who, over the course of three or four days, physically assemble those exhibits under the watchful eye of the designer.

For the past four years, I’ve been part of crews that help build exhibits. My aching back and I are here to tell you that what looks so effortless when you admire a flower show from the aisles is anything but. It starts with a literal mountain of mulch and a stone or wooden frame (called a kickboard) that holds the mulch in place. Then, in go trees, shrubs, perennials, annuals, rocks, water and whatever else the exhibit’s designer chooses to throw in.

Some exhibits are carefully designed months in advance with every tulip pre-positioned. But the best exhibits, in my opinion, are just ideas in the mind of the designer until he or she arrives at the flower show site with truckloads of plants. Designers start in December or January with a greenhouse full of material to be forced into leaf or bloom. In the week or so before the material is to be moved, the exhibitor goes through the greenhouse, looking to see which plants performed best. Those plants get loaded onto a heated truck and become the focal points of the exhibit. They’re augmented by hundreds of annuals and perennials supplied by professional growers.

Landscaper Paul Miskovsky has exhibits this year at both the Rhode Island Flower Show, where I worked this week, and at the Boston Flower & Garden Show in March. He invites in friends, Master Gardeners, landscape students and even customers to help with the ‘build’, as the crash three- or four-day construction event is called. Along the way, he provides, in addition to the tee shirts and pizza, a horticultural education.

Paul also reserves the right to change his mind about things as the build progresses. When they were in the greenhouse, those three clump birches looked like they’d be in full leaf by the time the show opened. They were installed on the first day on the forks of a Bobcat. As things went in around them, their scant leaf coverage began to annoy Paul. Yesterday, the annoyance level reached full boil and the birches were yanked out by their two-hundred-pound root balls… by hand in order not to disturb completed parts of the exhibit In their place went in six huge pots of bamboo. The graceful bamboo in turn caused a dozen leucothoe to be rearranged which meant half a dozen hosta were left homeless awaiting reassignment.

At 900 square feet, Paul’s ‘palette’ in Rhode Island show is large by that show’s standard. For the Boston Flower and Garden Show, he expands to 1,080 square feet - 20% more space. He’ll also oversee the building of a 600 square foot exhibit for the Heritage Museum and Gardens and a 240 square foot parcel for the Massachusetts Horticultural Society.

If I can find a few free hours, I’ll pitch in building the Boston exhibit. Most of my time, however, is already spoken for. But more about that later.

The January Thaw

It is a myth wrapped in hope, buttressed by observation, but ultimately nothing but serendipity. The January thaw came this morning and temperatures are headed into the fifties. Coupled with an inch of predicted rain, the blanket of snow currently on the lawn will soon be reduced to a few stripes of white thrown by the snow blower.

As a naturalized citizen of New England I come to the January thaw as an observer and not necessarily as a true believer. I am well aware that for the past thirty days the temperatures have seldom crept above freezing. I also have in front of me the irrefutable evidence that I retrieved the newspapers this morning in nothing but a robe. So, indeed, because the Boston Globe says January, this must be the January thaw.

I first heard of the January thaw when I lived in North Carolina after college. A co-worker who had grown up in Schenectady, New York, told me that when the Capital District enjoyed its one- or two-day January thaw, people drove around in their convertibles with the tops down, in tee shirts and bikinis. This happened despite the fact that temperatures would top out at around 40 degrees. I didn’t believe him; it was too preposterous. But then, I didn’t believe the tale of the L Street Brownies descending into Boston Harbor on New Year’s Day, either.

The January thaw begins a three-month-long ritual of shifting plants. Last month, I wrote that the tropicals which summered on porches and patios came indoors for the winter to glean sunlight through south facing windows. A contingent of perennials and quasi-hardy plants made do in the garage where they jostled for the feeble light through a single window.

This morning, those plants rode on wheelbarrows outdoors for what is expected to be at least two days of January sun. They are encamped in rows on the driveway where the asphalt will provide additional retained heat. That there is snow just a few feet away does not matter. The rain will wash their leaves and provide their first moisture in weeks.

This year we are wintering over approximately twenty containers (another twenty-plus were cleaned and are stacked in the basement awaiting the 2010 gardening season). Some of those containers hold cultivars that are hardy to Zone 5, but it is the terra cotta containers that cannot take the freeze-thaw cycle. A few are hardy in more southern climates and find the just-above-freezing temperatures in the garage acceptable. These days outdoors will help replicate the warm spells and lengthening days in their natural habitat, the better to ensure early blooms. There is a pot-bound hydrangea that already has swelling buds and a perennial snapdragon with a lone, bright red flower.

It takes about twenty minutes to wheel out the plants and set them up; another twenty or so to re-group them in the garage. Last year, a smaller number of containers made more than a dozen such excursions. Some were as short as a single day but in March and April, the outdoor respites stretched to three and four days.

If my math is correct, that means I’ll spend eight or nine hours over the course of this winter running a plant shuttle. It’s a modest price to pay for early greenery and to see old, reliable plants come back stronger each year.

Finally, as a side note, the accompanying photo of overwintering plants out for their January sun also shows our efforts to protect a Thuja occidentalis, or western cedar from the depredations of snow blowers. In November, we pounded metal fence posts into the ground around the Thuja, then placed burlap roughly five feet high between the fence posts, strung with wire. As of the end of January, the burlap is tight and the tree untouched. It is both decorative and effective.

The Jungle Moves Indoors

I write these words a few days before Christmas with a large, unruly bougainvillea brushing the top of my head. To my right are lush orchids and more bougainvillea. I’m not spending the holidays on some exotic Caribbean island, however. There’s a foot of snow outside and the temperature is in the low teens. This tropical jungle is in my own home.

From May to early October, the gardens around my home sport a profusion of containers and our porch and deck are awash in greenery and flowers. This year there were more than forty container gardens ranging in size from 14-inch pots to 30-gallon behemoths. In our screened porch, dozens of individual plants were arrayed on trays and benches. On our deck, more containers and heat-loving tropicals provided color into September.

But when overnight temperatures dipped into the 40s, the tender plants began migrating indoors. The tropicals were the first to make the move, followed by hardier succulents, cyclamen and herbs. As annuals succumbed to frost, the containers that bore them were washed and stowed in the basement. The property has been bare of containers since early November.

Indoors, though, is a Noah’s Ark of the plant kingdom. They crowd in front of every window, especially those with a southern exposure. I share my office (above) with a rack of sun-thirsty plants plus two hanging bougainvillea. (You can see them in the topmost photo in their 'summer quarters'.)  The aforementioned orchids are in the hallway where there is a triple window. There are half a dozen neomarica, better known as walking iris, that were cut from a mother plant in late summer. They will grow through the winter, and be given away in the spring. Down in the basement where a bank of ground-level windows allow in feeble sun, a magnificent papyrus – rescued from our water garden – stands four feet tall and brushes up against the ceiling. Nearly a dozen spathiphyllum, commonly called the peace lily, are scattered around the house. There seems to be one in every room and all of them are currerntly in bloom.

It is out in the garage, though, that the extent of our plant asylum becomes apparent. Betty mixes perennials and annuals in containers, often with dramatic results. When she pulled apart those containers in October, many of the perennials showed well-developed root systems. She made the decision to winter over the best of the plants.

However, we do not have a greenhouse. What we have, instead, is a large, well-insulated garage that stays above freezing and has a large, southwest-facing window. There, up against the glass are huddled more than a dozen containers. There is an enormous, cattail-patterned concrete urn where a fern is going through its dormancy period. A white Italianate container holds a now-well-established trailing herichrysum petiolare, otherwise known as a licorice plant, that has found its hibernal equilibrium. Various salvia, verbena, and gaura have been sharply trimmed back but are holding their own and seem poised to survive a New England winter.

Logic says we should consider our plants disposable; chuck them into the compost pile as we do hundreds of annuals. But logic isn’t the be-all and end-all of gardening. Strange as it may seem to some people, many of these plants are old friends. The bougainvillea over my head (which also sheds leaves onto my keyboard) is more than a decade old. I know it well. Come February it will bloom a pale purple, much to my delight. The bracts will linger into late April. I could no more imagine leaving it out on the porch to freeze than I could do such a thing to our family cat. (Then again, plants never have ‘accidents’ on Oriental rugs.)

Being sentimental about a plant is, in my view, a very good trait. They bring us pleasure and prod our senses. They invoke memory. Sharing a window with a bougainvillea is a small price to pay for the reminder that spring will come again.

Oh, Christmas Tree

I grew up in Miami which is Christmas tree hell unless you consider decorated Norfolk Island pines to be festive. Back when I was a kid, as nearly as I can reconstruct events, a truck that probably left Nova Scotia sometime in August made its way down U.S. 1, shedding needles all the way, finally dumping a load of scorched Scotch pines in supermarket parking lots around the city on Thanksgiving day. We would go to a lot in our town, run by the Lions Club, and pick out a pathetic, five-foot-tall specimen. Its remaining needles would be brown long before Christmas Day, let alone New Years. (It should go without saying that this was long before Harry and David would ship you a fresh tree overnight.)

One of the benefits of moving north was to discover the joys of cutting a fresh tree and discovering that Fraser firs smell different than Balsams and that long-needled pines have plusses and minuses. Having been deprived of such things for so many years, I have sort of gone overboard for the past few decades, opting for ever-larger specimens. In Virginia, I once unceremoniously landed in a mud wallow trying to pull a ten-foot-diameter tree through a baler.

In Massachusetts, presented with the unlimited potential of an 18-foot-high ceiling in one room, I confess I went wild. (Although it must be pointed out that I was ‘enabled’ by Betty who, though she is a native New Yorker, is no less enamored of fresh trees.) We would make a day of it; hiking for hours across a hundred acres of trees arranged by type. To me, it was heaven.

Our tallest topped out at more than 14 feet, had a 25-foot circumference and was steadied by three guy wires to keep it upright in a stand that was seriously over its rated capacity. We found the tree in southern Rhode Island, 70 miles distant, and brought it home in a borrowed pickup truck, the tree strapped to and overhanging both ends of the truck. Rumbling up I-95, our truck with its cargo bore an uncanny resemblance to a Boeing 747 ferrying the Space Shuttle.

This year, we are in Giant Christmas Tree withdrawal. Because of a back injury, cutting our own tree was not a realistic option. Instead, we perused a lot in our town (run by the Lions Club, naturally) as well as commercial ventures that spring up for a few weeks each December. Further, we agreed ahead of time that decorating a tree off of a pair of eight-foot ladders as we have done in past years was not in the cards. Our 2009 tree would be no taller than eight feet.

What I discovered was that a) cut Christmas trees look a heck of a lot better than they did fifty years ago, and b) the cost ranges from reasonable to astronomical. Big John’s, the cut-your-own tree farm in Rhode Island that has been our source of yuletide greenery the past two years, charges $35 for any tree. Add in gas money and the price is still under $50 for that ideal tree, regardless of size.

The starting price for trees in the Lions lot was $45 for short-needled balsams that were guaranteed to start shedding needles as soon as we strapped it to our car. Fraser firs, our preferred trees, were $65 and up. A seven-foot one was $85 and had a gaping hole in one side.. While five dollars of the purchase price went to the Medfield Food Cupboard, we thought the cost too high.

We had heard that trees at Home Depot were fresh and realistically priced. Realistically priced, yes, but still packed so tightly from shipping that we felt we were choosing a dehydrated specimen to which we would need to add water. We passed. A ‘family’ tree lot in an adjacent town offered Bruce Springsteen carols (I had no idea) and great trees… for a hundred dollars. We passed again.

Our fallback position had always been to drive down to Big John’s and avail ourselves of one of the fresh-cut specimens they keep on hand for those in a hurry. Last Sunday morning we packed tea and cookies for the trip south but thought we’d stop at one more seasonal lot that appeared to have a large selection and a big turnover. To our amazement (and my wife’s back’s relief), we spotted a seven-foot Fraser fir that had no holes and looked quite fresh. And, at $40, it was more than fairly priced.

The tree is now tied up in our side yard, its branches fully extended. It isn’t as wide as one we’d cut for ourselves, but I’ve looked at it from every angle and I can’t find a hole or a bad spot. On Friday, as is our custom, the tree will be decorated. And, unlike previous years’ trees, this one won’t need guy wires to prevent a cat-induced tree felling.

The Long Goodbye to the Gardening Season

We had fresh lettuce as part of our Thanksgiving dinner last week. It was wonderfully crisp and almost sweet to the taste. It was picked, hours before we sat down to dinner, from the cold frame outside our garage door.
It is also possibly the last fresh lettuce we will see until next April. We may get lucky and pick a few dozen leaves in early December but, eventually, sub-freezing temperatures will render the cold frame inadequate against the onslaught of a New England winter. When the lettuce is gone, it will officially end the gardening season.

We relish our growing season and put aside that which can be stored to savor into the winter. There are carrots in the refrigerator and butternut squash in the basement and, if the last two years are any yardstick for the latter vegetable, we will scramble in February and March to give away the last of our bounty before age renders it inedible.

There are green beans; blanched and flash frozen, then placed in sandwich bags to be parceled out at meals between now and next June. There is okra, an underappreciated vegetable in the north that will nevertheless grace our jambalayas and stews for the next six months. And there is corn. The same, miserable weather that decimated our tomato and pea crop gave us the best corn ever. Because all the corn came at once, we blanched, de-cobbed and froze the kernels from dozens of ears. Remarkably, it is as sweet from the freezer as it was fresh from the field.

With the end of November we should put out our driveway markers and forget about plants. Perversely – and sometimes aided by our own hand – nature conspires to give us reminders of the season past and of the one to come. There is a Daphne along the sidewalk leading to our front door that continues to bloom though it has been hit repeatedly by freezing temperatures. There are Hellebores across from the Daphne that will bloom until covered by snow – and then stubbornly thrust up flowers when the snow melts.

When I go out to pick up the newspaper, I see a patch of Delosperma reliably putting up purple flowers. Now, I know why it’s called the ‘Ice Plant’. Nearby, a clutch of Galliarda, planted last year, is still flowering prolifically. There are Heucheras, no longer flowering, but still displaying leaves with bright palettes of color.

The first heavy snow will put an end to much of this late-autumn display. But for now, with the sun setting at 4:30 and gray afternoons more the norm than the exception, I take delight in these small reminders of the season past.

We live in New England by choice. There are parts of the country where November is just a slightly cooler month in an eternal summer. I grew up in such a place and, frankly, I don’t miss it. The changing seasons are mileposts to be noted and savored. Winter, even one that lasts four or five months, is just another of those mileposts. And, each year, it gives me a better appreciation for the spring that will follow.

All Gardening Is Local

(Note:  In her October, 2010 newsletter, Janet Macunovich addressed the issue of burning bush as being regionally invasive and gave credit to 'Massachusetts Master Gardener Betty' for calling attention to the subject.  Please read this entry with Ms. Macunovich's subsequent change of opinion in mind.)

There are some truly great gardening speakers out there, and one of them is Janet Macunovich.

Ms. Macunovich has been a horticulturalist for close to 40 years and has nine books to her credit. When she stands up to give a talk, she unwinds a long story – or series of stories – that resonate with her audience. She delivers a truckload of information along the way and has the presence of mind to provide her audience with an outline that can run five pages.

She is a classic, ‘first-person’ speaker. By the time she has finished, you know as much about her family as you probably do about some of your neighbors and you have gotten a time-lapse view of her back yard that stretches over two decades. She is also a ‘first-name-familiar’ speaker. When discussing projects she has undertaken for clients, it’s never ‘a property in (name of upscale community)’, it’s ‘Bob and Millie’ or ‘Jerry and Judy’, regardless of whether it’s a split level on a treeless lot or an estate.

Her presentations are also rich in photographic support. This is in part because her husband is an accomplished photographer, but also because Ms. Macunovich recognizes that, especially in landscape renovations, photos fill out a story and leave a more indelible impression on an audience.

I had the opportunity to hear Ms. Macunovich twice in the past few weeks. She spoke twice in the same day on two topics and, to her credit, there was remarkably little overlap between her two presentations. It’s the sign of a great speaker when they can be as bouncy and energetic at seven in the evening as they were at ten in the morning.

But I also heard a loud, clanging noise at two points in her talk. The first was when she said that it was too wet to plant xeric gardens in New England. The second was when she dismissed concerns about burning bush (euonymus alatus) as an invasive species.

Janet Macunovich comes from Michigan and most of her projects are in that region. She also has some clients in the Boston area, including a wonderful garden on Beacon Hill. But she has chosen to speak to groups around the country and, on this day, her audience was comprised of New Englanders.

I could almost let the first comment pass. Perhaps, by ‘xeric garden’ she had in mind strictly cactuses and yuccas and, if that were the case, then yes, New England is a poor site for such things. But ‘xeric’ means ‘dry’ and not ‘arid desert’. One of Betty’s most requested subjects is ‘water-smart gardening’ and a major component of that talk is xeric gardens which, to her, means a garden that, once established, needs no water beyond what Mother Nature provides. In an era of dwindling water resources, homeowners need to think before they plant.

We have a ninety-foot-long demonstration garden in the front of our property that is build around xeric gardening principles. Alas, for all of their admiration, none of our neighbors have taken us up on our offer to help them replicate our project.

However, calling concerns about burning bush ‘overblown’ was a case of failing to understand what is being wrought around New England. As trees lost their leaves this month, the extent to which euonymus alatus has insinuated itself into the forest floor is too visible to be ignored. Driving the back roads of Medfield, Dover, and Sherborn, the distinctive pale red shrub is everywhere it shouldn’t be.

Burning bush, a native of China and northeast Asia, has a root mat out of science fiction – a thick, fibrous tangle that captures every ounce of moisture and allows nothing else to grow. There were three burning bushes on our property when we moved in. Ten years later, I am still digging out plants that have sprung up from the pieces of root left behind.

Most burning bush comes from seed. Birds eat the shrub’s berries though they offer no nutritional value. The seeds pass through the birds and grow where they fall. Perhaps in Michigan the climate is wrong for burning bush to spread unchecked. It certainly isn’t the case here. Massachusetts and Connecticut both have the plant on their invasive species list and ban their sale.

The lesson I take away is that all gardening is local. Ms. Macunovich is a terrific speaker and writer and she has a lot to offer an audience. But, when a lecturer ventures outside of his or her home turf, a little research is in order. I don’t think that’s too much to ask.

The Garden Benches

We put away the garden benches yesterday. They’re handsome things: two have blacks, cast iron ends with cedar slats painted a rich green. Those benches would not be out of place in the Tuileries in Paris. The third is metal, cast in the form of a profusion of ferns. It’s in a style that reached its apex in the Beaux Arts period and, as furniture, it’s a gem; a loveseat that’s as much an objet d’art as it is a seating area.

And that’s the problem. As we carried the benches from various points around the property to their resting place under the screened porch, away from the elements, I had the disappointing realization that I never sat on any of them this year. Two are strategically positioned to provide viewpoints across lawns and gardens. The third offers an elevated point from which to contemplate Danielson Pond. I never admired the vistas I helped create. I never took the time.

I know I’m not alone in this predicament. Last year we were at a wonderful garden and I admired a rustic retreat set in the woods. I asked the owner how often the little gazebo was used. The response was a rueful shake of the head. “I never have time.”

Often, it seems, such appurtenances are meant for the enjoyment of visitors. When the Medfield Garden Club held its August ‘backyard get-together’ at our home, the benches were both admired and well used throughout the morning and into the afternoon. We had the pleasure to attend a party this summer at the home of a Cape Cod landscaper, who has studded his beautiful property with seating areas large and small. When we had been his lunch guests a few weeks earlier, he allowed that he mostly enjoyed sitting on his deck during the rare times he was not working. That evening, though, his guests made use of every available space, sipping drinks and enjoying the views.

This is an admitted small sample. But I suspect that we buy ‘garden furniture’ with all of the best intentions of using it, then employ it more as ‘visual destination points’ for the eye rather than as functional places to park our behinds and relax.

Perhaps the reason is rooted in the possibility of enjoyment. If there were no bench – or gazebo or whatever – we could never sit back and taking pleasure in our gardens. The presence of the benches means that there will at least be an opportunity… if it ever stops raining (or if the mosquitoes go away, the humidity breaks, or any of a dozen reasons we give for staying indoors).

As we put away the benches yesterday, I made a vow that next year will be different. I will make it a point, at least once a week, to go out and sit on those benches. I may take a book or a newspaper, but I will also make certain that I allow adequate time to enjoy the view. A lot of effort has gone into that garden. The least I can do it see it the way visitors do.

Big Red Judy

Big Red Judy died last night. She froze to death, succumbing to a merciless New England autumn that saw pre-dawn temperatures at our home fall to the upper twenties. She was, by our guess, about six months old.

Big Red Judy was a coleus, a Proven Selections specimen that came to us in a four-inch pot from one of our forays to Andrew’s Nursery in late April. We were attracted by its brilliant, crimson foliage and large leaves. Even before Big Red Judy got home, Betty already knew which pot she would go into: a massive white one with bas relief garlands and swags (fortunately made of foam). Big Red Judy was accented with some trailing light blue flowers and was awarded a highly visible spot at our driveway turnaround (that’s her on the right in mid-July).

Her dainty companion gave up the ghost with the heat of August but, by then, Big Red Judy was so large that she no longer needed an escort. She was soon twice as wide and twice as high as her container, but the foliage just kept looking magnificent.

Her lone problem was that she tended to topple in the wind. In late August, Big Red Judy was moved to Rock Garden 4 where she occupied a space left vacant by the annual mid-summer disappearance of a Dicentra spectabilis, an unusually large bleeding heart. There, protected from the wind, Big Red Judy attracted even more attention from visitors, a lone burst of color in a bed that is relentlessly green at that time of the year. She was the first thing your eye saw from the deck and she glowed in the late afternoon.

Starting in the last week of September, we began bringing annual-bearing containers close to the house in the evening, shuttling them back out to their customary positions only when the morning temperatures rose above 40 degrees. That way, we figured to keep our thirty-plus containers going for another month. It worked, up to a point. Several brushes with frost were successfully avoided.

This morning, though, there was ice on the turtle bird bath. I went out to inspect Big Red Judy. Her leaves were limp and drooped, a sign that the water in the veins of the leaves had frozen. A few leaves at the bottom of the plant were firm, but it was clear that her time was passed.

We buy annuals in New England with the full knowledge that we will be able to enjoy them for six months or less. We keep them on a diet heavy with fertilizer because we know there is only season to admire their flowers, color, or texture. But there is also always next April. Big Red Judy has earned a place in our garden repertoire, along with other coleuses like Inky Fingers and Alabama Sunset.

And that’s one of the joys of gardening: meeting old friends every Spring.