My Weeds Are Very Sorry

I am back from visiting other worlds. It felt like that -- to go from my green, leafy suburban garden in the forested east to the dry brown vastness of the west is like going to another planet entirely.

Not only have both of my sons settled in landscapes so different from where they grew up, they both live now in completely urban settings, one in downtown Denver and the other in L.A. To go from my quiet, secluded enclave to their vibrant, crowded city lives is head spinning.

In Colorado the sky and horizon and mountains along the front range are humbling. This was the scene from Red Rocks Amphitheater the night we went to a concert there.

In Los Angeles it's the outsized scale and bustle and flash and artificiality that overwhelm.

I loved every minute of my time with both of them in worlds so strange!

As I mentioned in prior posts, I had a lead on getting a 'Kintzley's Ghost' honeysuckle to replace the plant that was mis-marked and came up as a trumpet honeysuckle despite its label.

And I got it. We drove up to Fort Collins, 45 minutes north of Denver, to the nursery that introduced Dr. Kintzley's unusual vine, and I saw beautiful large pots of them. No mislabeling here; I can see for myself the leaf shape and the whitish round bracts forming.

But putting a plant that size in my carry on bag was not an option. So this is what I brought home, stuffed in my computer bag, x-rayed by TSA and no worse for it all.

I can't wait to get this little plant going in my garden (after I figure out what to do with the very nice but unplanned-for red trumpet honeysuckle.)

When I returned home and reoriented to the greenery and lushness, I was surprised at how the garden had exploded in just the week I was gone. Black eyed Susans filled in, late season panicle hydrangeas are blooming, and the pretty pink fall anemone has towering flower stalks now.

Even a row of marigolds in little pots lined up at the edge of the gravel area grew. They have been blooming all summer, but in their little containers they were small and tidy. Now they are suddenly big and fat.

The 'White Chiffon' Rose of Sharon outside the porch is blooming, and for the first time I can see it through the windows. The porch remodeling proceeded apace while I was gone, and now taller windows have been installed. I am liking this development as much as the new blooming specimens in the garden.

It's always nice to go away and come back.

It's my birthday today.

When I was a kid I disliked having a summer birthday since my friends were all away at summer camp or visiting relatives and I thought if they were around I would surely have a party with 50 people and it would be so awesome. If only.

Now I like having a late August birthday. All the prettiest flowers show up and the party is grander than any I could stage.

Even the roses and clematis that faded after June have come back now to help me celebrate. They are reblooming. Not as profusely, but beautiful and delicate.

The dahlias are a little tattered now, but they have hung around blooming all summer long, just so they would not miss my special day.

And what is a birthday without fireworks? The cardinal flowers timed it so they would go off fiery red just in time for this day.

Except for the fact that I'm getting older, it's a grand day.

You know he loves you when he gets you awesome power garden tools for your birthday:

Here it is -- our back porch remodeling is finished and it came out great.

The space is small and narrow, 14 feet long by 7 feet wide, right off the kitchen. It had vinyl siding on the walls and a cement floor. The windows were too high to see out into the yard when sitting down, which made it feel like being in a railroad car.

I tried to make it more inviting than a freight car by putting lots of plants around. In the cold months I put tender plants there to overwinter. But with all that junk out there and with the utilitarian look, it was a storage closet off the kitchen more than a porch. Just a place to put stuff.

Now, with deeper windows, stained wood beadboard on the walls and ceiling, and a beautiful brick floor, it is no longer a storage area. It's a room. A sunroom / sitting porch.

I don't have to cram plants in there to hide anything, and that makes it more open and inviting.

The brick floor is rich and textured, and quite dark. It's actually 2 x 8 brick tiles, Datile Union Square in Courtyard Red. Beadboard wood on the kneewall and ceiling and around the large windows has a natural stain, which is a light color to contrast with the dark brick.

The room flows into the kitchen, through the sliding glass doors. It really does feel like a sunroom off the kitchen.

The big plus is that I can sit on the porch now and see out into the garden. The outdoors comes in, making not only the porch seem bigger, but the view from inside the house more expansive too.

The new windows are 18 inches lower. The newly installed windows are on the left, compared to the old ones still on the right, in this photo taken during the remodeling. A drop of less than two feet made all the difference.

Before, I was able to see just the top of the 'White Chiffon' Rose of Sharon outside the window. Now its pretty blooms come right inside. The hummingbird visits the flowers in the morning and doesn't realize I'm right there through the screen.

This small area is tucked into a corner of the house. From the outside it doesn't look like much of a porch, but the new windows do give it a nicer look even though the space did not change.

Morning light streams in, so it is my favorite place for coffee early in the day. By afternoon it is completely shaded and cool on a hot day. The rustic couch is surprisingly nap worthy.

There are some subtle things that made a big improvement. The original cement floor was a step down from the kitchen. That doesn't seem like anything, but the sunken feeling made it feel like you were stepping down into an area that was not part of the house.

The new brick floor is now level with the interior of the house and it makes the area flow much better.

Another subtle change: the old windows had no sills. The new windows have a shallow sill above the knee wall. It's a small difference that looks much dressier. It means I can put a jar of Jane's hydrangea blossoms by the window, and I found Becky's forged metal HF Bar boot ornament and propped it on the ledge. Good memories.

And the hot air balloonists in the copper balloon who have followed me from my first apartment in 1971 to every place I have lived, are now drifting overhead, looking out the transom and throwing things down on me where I sit.

Naughty ones.

The work was done by Linn Taylor Remodeling.

He did a fantastic job. Jim and I stained the walls and ceiling, and painted the white window trim, but all of the tear down, installation, tile work, and finish carpentry was done professionally by Linn.

Why didn't we do this years ago?

The first time I saw this doodle by Andre, I cracked up. The weeds were very sorry. They promised not to do it again.

It so perfectly captured the remorse of the weeds in my garden. Those downcast faces, those shifting stems . . .

My own weeds hang their heads, they are forever sorry, and they really, really promise not to be so bad ever again.

Well.

Every year they get worse.

Do these weeds look apologetic to you?

No they don't. They look happy and thriving and proud to be weeds. Queen Anne's Lace does not look anything but regal and queenly and definitely not remorseful.

Timothy grass is tall and noble and has a certain reserve.

But goldenrod has no elegance. The forests of giant six foot tall goldenrod that explode in August are anything but demure. They tower over all, lordly and loud.

Other tall weeds have established their territories -- stands of milkweed built like fire towers and thistle that could support cell phone antennas.

Feverfew waving about over everything, showing off its delicate daisy-like flowers.

Bindweed wraps around anything upright, mostly the other weeds. Its frilly blooms do not look at all contrite. Not at all.

A big stand of pale curlytop knotweed (persicaria) is blatantly faking being a garden plant, growing as it is at the edge of the lawn.

And of course the ragweed and purple loosestrife do not even pretend. They own the space.

These proud, unapologetic plants are in the unmowed area that surrounds my yard. I have an agreement with most of them. If they will stay out of my gardens, I will let them grow as they wish in the surrounding area and call it a meadow.

They like that. They don't always like being called weeds.

But when they make a play for my garden beds, which they do all the time, I make sure they are very, very sorry about that kind of behavior.

On a trip to southern Wisconsin with my sister and her husband in 2007, we stayed at a bed & breakfast that was a working cow farm. It was charming, although it took five years for the manure smell to leave my car.

The farmer had restored several acres of tallgrass prairie on his farm, and he took us for a tour to show us what the original prairie looked like before farmers and settlers and civilization plowed it under or built over it.

One impressive plant he showed us was cup plant, Silphium perfoliatum.

It's a yellow daisy-like plant that grows quite tall, up to 8 feet.

It gets its common name from the cups of water that pool in the leaves around the square stems. Small birds and insects can drink from these puddles.

A few years later a friend gave me some cup plants that she had dug up. They survived a car trip from her garden in Kentucky, and I was happy to have a little bit of the Wisconsin / Kentucky original American tallgrass prairie growing in my New England garden.

But an 8 foot tall perennial was a little too big for my cultivated spaces. And then I started to read that cup plant is quite invasive here in Connecticut. So reluctantly, I took it out.

Well, here it is, growing in the unmowed meadow where I had tossed it when I took it out of my garden. It survived being chucked out with its roots in the air, and happily coexists with a stand of swamp milkweed.

I want to leave it to grow. After all, it reminds me of the trip we took to Wisconsin, a nostalgia tour to places my sister and I had gone to as children. And it reminds me of my good friend in Kentucky, a gardener who shares plants and so much more with me.

But will this be a mistake? Will growing an invasive plant in an unmowed area be a garden oops, or GOOPs as Joene calls them?

On the first of the month Joene sponsors GOOPs, where we post about mistakes we have made in the garden. You can visit her blog for more.

How can this be an oops? It's a native plant, a remnant of the bygone American wild prairie. It has strong family and friend connections for me. It's pretty.

It's also supposedly invasive here. Will I regret letting it go wild in my meadow?

At the end of August I decided to do something about the browned out mess of thyme that was draped over a little rise at the top of the driveway. It had to be removed, but how to hold back the dirt in the raised bed above from washing down onto the pavers?

Another creeping groundcover? I got some good suggestions from commenters when I posted asking for ideas to replace the thyme.

Or . . . how about a dry stacked stone retaining wall? It would only need to be a foot high. A low rustic wall, more ornamental than functional. Yes, that's it. Off we went to the stone store to buy rocks and hire a contractor.

This is where it all went wrong.

The man at the stone store said a wall one foot high and 20 feet long was too small a project for a contractor. He looked at us, a gray haired couple in our mid 60s driving a sedan, and without blinking said "you can do it yourselves. Easy. Just put down 3 inches of crushed gravel and line the rocks up so they are staggered".

He sold us a pallet of rocks and sent us on our way. The pallet was delivered the next day.

Thus began our disaster.

First, it took us the better part of a week to hand dig the strip where the wall would go. The pennisetum at the far end would not come out, that clump of grass just would not budge. That took two days, but Jim finally got it hacked out with the crowbar and shovel.

Then digging up the thyme and removing the dirt turned out to be a huge effort. Who knew we had to remove a yard of soil by hand and put it somewhere? Aching bodies. Jim's back snapped, and we broke the bed on the John Deere lawnmower trailer hauling the dirt away.

Finally the area was dug out, the stone dust laid and leveled, and we began sorting rocks by size.

Did I mention we are both in our 60s? Did I tell you about Jim's back? Pick up rocks, put rocks down. Sort rocks. Move rocks. Exhausted, and the wall building had not yet started.

(All of my pictures are terrible because it was either overcast or drizzling each day we worked. It kept us cool and wet, but clear photographic evidence of this debacle is wanting.)

On a damp, muggy day, already sore and tired from the week's prep work, we began to build our wall.

As soon as we started to lay rocks, the painstakingly leveled gravel base was demolished. You have to rock the rounded stones into place, you have to scrape out a depression for the uneven sides to sit in, and then you have to move each one multiple times to try it out, rock it level, then try another, then try a third stone, squishing the crushed gravel every which way.

Apparently the whole rock laying thing is 99% art and only 1% careful preparation and measuring.

Jim discovered that one of the stones was shaped like a heart. I know nothing about wall building technique, and so far the whole thing looks like stacked rubble, but that heart had to be set in as an accent somehow. It took hours of jimmying and wiggling and it falls out each time I put a new stone anywhere on the wall, but you get the idea.

It's almost done -- I'm not showing you how the right side trails off awkwardly at an angle. That needs to be fixed.

And we still need to backfill behind the wall, somehow get level cap stones on top, and figure out how to stabilize the whole thing.

I am beyond confused about how to get these stones stacked at all, much less keep them from toppling over. It's impossible to put any piece on top of any others without it rocking and tipping.

Because I am constantly reworking what I build three and four times or more, I can't get the hang of mortaring stones in the back for stability where it doesn't show. That would mean I'd have to commit to the placement of at least two stones. I can't commit to any two, I keep moving every stone around.

I thought there would be more flat(ish) rocks to work with, but about 3/4 of the whole pallet, small and large sizes both, have uneven topsides and very rounded irregular bottom sides, so they will not stack on top of each other. They rock. I've already used the flatter ones I could find, and now am trying to fit increasingly rounded tippy rocks over them.

The shapes have so many corners sticking out at odd angles, that I can't place them side to side. I am not trying to get a fitted look, I just don't want the wall to wobble and teeter so much.

I shim with small stones underneath the wobblers, but there's a limit to how much chunky rubble you can stuff under every stone and I am already running out of small stuffer stones.

I have no idea what I'm doing. I am incredibly frustrated, Jim's back is very painful, and I am sore all over from bending and kneeling, and lifting and shifting rocks.

This is not a project for two older homeowners who have never laid stone. It simply isn't. What was the guy at the stoneyard thinking when he looked right at us and said "You can do this yourselves." WTF?

Stay tuned. I will post a picture of the finished wall if my painkillers and patience hold out.

I am pleased with how my first ever attempt at building a dry stacked stone wall came out. Not happy with the process, and we were awfully naive about the amount of physical labor and technical skill needed, but here it is, and it is more than ok.

We backfilled with all the dirt that we had previously spent days hauling away, and that has given it some stability. We never did figure out how to use mortar to affix pieces along the way, so we skipped that part entirely.

It's done now. The Advil is back in the cabinet, my knees are healing over.

Apparently I bought a pallet of "wallstone", which are fieldstones. They are irregular and not as flat and even as flagstones, and that explains a lot of my frustration -- I kept envisioning a more fitted, easier to stack, low and tidy wall, but the materials wanted to be a chunky rough wall.

Well, next time I'll know.

It does what I want -- holds back the slope of dirt from the raised garden, offers a sense of enclosure to the space behind it, defines the edge of the pavers.

Eventually the young smokebush in the garden above the wall will become large and fill the open space. I transplanted some lambsear that had been struggling in too much shade to the corner just to fill in a little.

I am very pleased, but I do have a few critiques.

First, I am not sure why the wall does not span the width of the pavers. The left corner stops short, making an odd hillock of dirt between the corner of the wall and the metal arbor. Why didn't I build it right up to the arbor's edge? That was the point -- not to have a little hill of dirt sloping down to the pavers.

I'll have to figure out how to hold back those few inches of dirt, but wasn't that what the wall was supposed to do?

And the right side ends in an odd curve under the dwarf blue spruce. I think I can fix that, but again I am puzzled why the wall doesn't go all the way to the corner.

There are other defects that only the builder would see, so I'll spare you those, and try not to see them myself.

Overall, for a first time attempt, using the wrong kind of rocks, this came out great.

I have more blooms and pretty colors in my late summer garden than I do in the spring. Not planned. I thought it would be the other way around, but I only live here; the plants are in charge and do their own thing.

Sweet Autumn Clematis draped over the deck railing, which I may
regret some day as it overgrows the railing and eats the deck.

Thunbergia 'Blushing Susie'. I think of pale peach as a
spring shade, but here it is in late summer.

Amethyst jewels on this caryopteris lure bees into drunken stupors.

Anemone 'Robustissima' hums with pollinators. It sounds like a zither concert.

I was surprised to see that this 'White Chiffon' Rose of Sharon
attracted hummingbirds. They spent more time inside these
flowers than at the feeder I hang for them.

Chocolate cosmos. Velvety, rich and sinful but calorie free.

'Tardiva' panicle hydrangea, looking stately late in the day.

I think of pinks and purples as spring colors, but the late summer
garden, seen here on a rainy day, is all rosy shades.

It's always a delight when the garden turns out differently than you expected and completely out of sync with your careful plan. It happens every year, and every year I am surprised.

Some plants just never showed up this year, totally in contradiction to the plan. I have grown the very aggressive evening primrose, Oenothera berlandieri, which spreads and takes over. It was pretty but a worry. This year it did not appear earlier in the summer and I missed its delicate pink booms. Where did it go?

Evening primrose in prior years made a large spreading patch. But it disappeared this year.

Physostegia 'Miss Manners' is the better behaved version of Obedient plant, not so aggressive as the species. I had a lovely stand of it going in my garden, but it never came up at all this year, it just went missing when it should have shown up in summer.

What happened to my stand of Obedient Plant? Here it is two years ago, but I never saw any of it this year.

Mysterious disappearances.

Oh well, even though I miss these plants from prior years, there are pretties enough now to keep me entertained in the late summer garden.

From Whitetails in Our Backyard

The single biggest reason for the loss of new trees in my garden and on the hillside behind us over the past seven years has been damage from antler rub.

Not browsing of young leaves, not voles chewing the bark or rabbits eating the small saplings down to nubs, although all of those wreak some havoc on new trees too.

Not disease, or bugs, or storm damage, or hot dry summers when it was hard to keep them watered. Those calamities have been worrisome, but rarely killed my new trees.

I have lost more trees to deer using the slender trunks for scratching posts.

In late summer the male deer come by and use the trunks of young trees to rub the velvet off their shedding antlers.

At first I did not think it would be such a problem, and seeing a stag prancing through the yard on Thanksgiving morning was pretty awesome.

The bark on several trees looked shredded after an attack, but not like a fatal wound. But after a few years I found that sometimes the trees healed over, but more often the wound did not heal the following year, and by year two or three after the injury, the tree died.

The spring following rubbing by a male deer the wound
didn't heal and this beautiful linden died.

I lost a beautiful large linden in the front yard, a yellow flowered magnolia, a katsura tree, several maples on the back hill, a tuliptree in the meadow, and others.

The stags prefer smooth, thin bark against their antlers, and they like small caliper trunks about two to four inches that they can wrap the curves of their antlers around.

The big established trees, and trees with shaggy or peeling bark like river birches or paperbark maple are not targets, but new maples and lindens are sought out eagerly, and rubbed right down to the core.

So now every September I know I must put protective wrap around the trunks of most trees in my yard and in the meadow, and leave it up through winter. Faithfully, with no exceptions! I missed one young maple one year and of course it was the only tree in the whole area that got rubbed raw.

Worse, I had actually wrapped the trunk of the poor linden in fall, but took the protection off on Christmas Eve, as the tree was in the front yard and I wanted the decorated house to look nice for the holiday.

Christmas morning the fatal shredded bark was evident.

I use green plastic mesh fencing from Lowe's which is easy to cut with scissors (I tried hardware cloth and I have tried chicken wire, but that stuff is awful to cut into shapes, and just as awful to bend into a cylinder).

I make a tube around the trunk, and to fasten it together I use plastic clips. They are technically called orchid clips, I guess for florists to hold potted orchids on small stakes. They work just like hair clips.

These are the kinds of orchid clips I use.

They are easier and quicker to use than tying the mesh together with twine or twist ties -- that was too awkward for me. I just wrap, clip, and go. They hold all winter.

I hate the way it all looks, especially in fall when the trees color and come into what I think is their best season.

Here is my blackhaw viburnum, V. prunifolium, which I limbed up rather prettily. The mesh cylinder had to be large enough to go around the multi stems. It isn't terribly obtrusive, but it's there. Ugh.

This year I have another worry. A Japanese maple 'Bloodgood' that has grown into a lovely shape over the past seven years now has a terrible looking wound at the root collar. It has some kind of canker at the graft point but not above.

You can see the sharp division line where the graft and the tree meet.

The area is weeping and wet, but not soft or rotted in any way. The tree looks great -- leafy and full, but a severe canker can kill it.

How I would hate to lose this tree now that it is so fine looking.

In fall the 'Bloodgood' maple is coppery but in spring the leaves are a gorgeous garnet red.

Over the years I have learned to protect all the young trees I have planted from antler rub, but I am not sure how to protect this Japanese maple from a graft canker.

Why is growing trees to maturity so hard?

For the longest time I wanted a Viburnum bodnantense 'Dawn'. It has fragrant pink blooms in April, and grows upright and narrow for a viburnum.

I found a good sized 15 gallon container plant in early 2011 and put it right next to the house, where I could open a window on a warm early spring day and smell its fragrance.

It has bloomed beautifully, although the fragrance wan't much to detect. It's still young, and I hope for more scent as it gets bigger and more floriferous.

The pink blooms were certainly pretty and a welcome sight outside the window when there was not much else to see in April. There is a lot to like about this tall shrub, and I am expectantly waiting for it to mature, flower profusely and fill in.

But this summer a couple things have dawned on me about 'Dawn'.

First. . . . is it supposed to look like this?

It is growing fast, as viburnums do. But really, is this its form? Does anyone else grow Dawn viburnum and can you tell me it is simply immature and will outgrow this awkward stage? The way this plant is growing is bizarre.

Here it is from the other side, just as rangy. I have pruned it extensively, cutting off the wilder arching branches, only to see them regrow in exactly the same direction and exactly the same goofy way.

Second . . . it has dawned on me that "tall and upright" does not mean you should plant it within a foot of the house. From inside the dining room it looks a little scary, with those probing branches angling to get in the window.

I have no excuses. I need to be supervised when there is a shovel in my hands and I am anywhere near the foundation of the house.

This is where any gardeners who have a Dawn viburnum can leave a comment saying Viburnum bodnantense 'Dawn' will grow into an elegant shape next year, the flowers will develop a delicate but intense aroma, and the final form of this shrub will be decidedly narrow, no more than three feet across at maturity.

We have been away. We took a driving trip to visit Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's home and garden in Virginia, and we went to the Biltmore Estate in North Carolina to see not just the ostentatious house the Vanderbilts constructed, but the glorious landscape created by Frederick Law Olmsted.

Those created scenes and tended gardens paled in comparison to nature's glory on display as we drove up the Blue Ridge Parkway and Skyline Drive, through the Great Smoky Mountains.

Something about those layers of misty mountains rippling in the distance makes my heart stop. I have seen the Rocky Mountains and I have traveled through the Swiss Alps. I have ridden horses in the Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming and I have spent a lot of time in the Green Mountains of Vermont, but those smoky blue ridges of the Appalachians make my soul ache. I don't know why.

Upon our return after a wonderful week on the road, I discovered fall had arrived in my own patch of the world. It is now late September and autumn wants us to know it.

White wood asters, wild purple asters and goldenrod announce the season in the meadow. This past summer the normally rampant Queen Anne's Lace was nowhere to be seen for some reason, and that was odd, but the asters have not disappointed. They are appearing everywhere.

Shiny black jewels of seedpods have formed on the blackberry lilies.

The flowering dogwood now has red berries and the leaves are turing russety. Later in autumn the leaves will be fiery red all over the whole tree.

Rosa glauca has lost most of its gray blue leaves, but now, in early fall, it has big candy orange hips on its spindly branches.

The seedpods on false indigo are odd. In early fall they turn shiny charcoal black, and they rattle when you shake the branch, with a satisfying clatter. This baptisia is a vase shaped, arching white one, Baptisia pendula 'Alba'.

'Orange Dream' Japanese maple is very coppery bronze colored when the leaves emerge in spring, then turns light green all summer. But when fall arrives, it goes all orange again, and you can't beat the combination of the leaves against a blue sky on a September afternoon.

The pretty pink fall anemone, 'Robustissima' finished blooming while we were away on our trip. When I got home, all I could see were the spent flower stalks, but I like the way they look.

It's always good to go away, see awesome new places, and then return to the place that is home. So much is familiar after the exotic new sights, and yet so much changes in that short time.

Welcome, autumn!

I am still getting strawberries in late September. Nothing like the prolific crop that was producing in June and July, but I get a bowl like this every few days now and they still taste summer sweet.

These are everbearing 'Mara des Bois' strawberries, but I never thought everbearing meant they would be giving me such juicy big fruits in late September. They are starting to make me think of Christmas ornaments.

While I expect bold flowering asters and mums to grab attention in fall, it seems unseasonable to see begonias and clematis blooming now. They look delicate and springlike to me, not like autumn at all.

These hardy begonias (Begonia grandis) are from a plant that Lee May gave me last year. I am stunned at how lush and full this row is, all from a couple of dug-up divisions that he brought over.

They are unusual -- a white flowered Begonia grandis, rather than the more common pink. So un-fall like and a delight, both for their delicacy and for the reminder of a gift shared by a special gardener.

Thanks, Lee. I think of you every time I walk by this grand grandis display!

The white clematis 'Henryi' is re-blooming, It does that in fall, after taking the summer off, but it still seems unseasonable. Is it really autumn here?

Another white clematis, C. viticella 'Alba Luxurians' is also re-blooming. This clematis blooms its head off into early summer, and then I cut it down to the ground in July when the flowers have gone by and the vine starts to look tattered. By late September it has fully regrown, and blooms again.

And here is a completely unseasonable sight: Christmas in autumn. This beautiful huge specimen of a spruce caught our attention at the Biltmore gardens in Asheville, North Carolina when we were there last week. It was lit by the morning sun, decorated more festively than any garlanded holiday tree.

A very unseasonable surprise indeed. Merry September!

So, I was sitting on the patio admiring the trailing blackeyed susan vine, thunbergia alata 'Blushing Susie'. It hadn't done much all summer, but now in fall it is tumbling over and is finally looking pretty. About time.

But wait. Look above the Blushing Susie vine. What is that spot of red color over there in the distance? At the curve of the walk?

Must go investigate. Aaah. . .

That pop of red is sourwood, Oxydendrum arboreum. Sorrel tree. I have shown it many times on this blog, and will show it many more times. I love it.

I planted it in 2007, originally next to the patio wall, but moved it later when we installed the gravel area around the bend of the walk. Even in its first summer it bloomed with droopy lily of the valley white blossoms and it turned its characteristic deep red its first fall.

You can see from the picture above in 2007 that my tree has grown, but not by much in six years. Oxydendrum is a very slow grower. A mature sourwood grows in our neighborhood a few streets over, so I know that mine will be tall and narrow some day way in the future. This one is multi stemmed, and mine is a single trunk, though.

I think this pretty tree is not planted around here very often because it is such a slow growing tree. It takes more patience than most landscapers or homeowners want to invest.

And it can be tricky -- not reliably winter hardy in zone 5 until after its roots get established, but once it has a good root system it is hardy in our winters. It needs acid soil, which is usually not a problem in New England.

Sourwood was one of the first trees I planted in my garden. I don't mind waiting for it to gain size and grow in its slow way, because it is so colorful, so elegantly shaped, and so interesting even as a young specimen.

Our compost pile is behind a row of spruces at the back edge of our property. Beyond the compost area is a weedy open meadow and then a forested hillside. Behind the trees a busy road runs.

When I looked up from my chore at the compost pile, this is what I saw recently. All those trees in the near distance were planted by me over the past seven years to screen the road behind. They are filling in, and now in October they are beginning to color. I am startled at the sight when I look up.

That stiffly tiered tree in the center right is a sassafras. I planted several at the same time, and this one is the only tree that has this open, tiered form. It turns orange weeks before the other sassafras trees even think about it.

Zoom in, and you can see it, starkly horizontal, right in front of a partner sassafras, still green and leafy and quite full. I planted both at the same time. Why is one so different?

Zoom in to some of the red trees that are coloring up, and it is evident that red maples, Acer rubrum, are quite shameless. This one is pinky blue red, very gaudy up close, but from a distance quite richly colored.

The overcast skies broke for a short time while I worked at the compost pile, and for several moments the sun was bright. The red maples made the most of it, posing in front of blue sky. I told you they were shameless.

But when the sun went in and the skies grayed over, all the red shouting toned down a little.

I finish my work and turn around toward the spruces. This is what I see. The spicebush, Lindera benzoin, is kind of a nondescript shrub all summer, but in fall it drips lemony yellow.

To my left the hillside is coloring up in russets and orange. I did not plant these trees, they run along the opposite side of the road by a neighbor's house and are a wild stand of red maples, Norway maples, sugar maples and other trees.

I'm done with the compost now, and wander out into the meadow. I absolutely love my blueberry farm this time of year. These vaccinium plants are new, just planted this spring, but how vivid they are in October, all spindly and scarlet. I got a ton of blueberries in July, even on these brand new shrubs.

It's not all pops of red out here. As I wander through the meadow, bright purple asters jump up out of the weeds and surprise me.

I leave the meadow, cross over the little arched bridge and walk out in front of the spruces on my way back to the house. I turn around for a last look at the area behind the spruces, and it does not disappoint.

When you make a trip to your compost pile, you take your camera, don't you?

We had a wet, cooler summer this year and almost everything in my garden loved it. It all looks wonderful, healthy, and beautiful. Plants that were nice enough in prior years have just bloomed and bloomed all season long this year, and filled in where they had not before.

I've already told you that my strawberries and blueberries were abundant. They loved the early spring rains.

I did not know how good it could all look, with just a few extra inches of rain early in the season.

But not all plants loved the wet, cool weather.

I noticed this summer that the wild Queen Anne's Lace was largely missing. In other summers the lacy white wildflowers were everywhere, all along the roadsides and running riot in the meadow behind my yard. This year there were only a dainty few. They must need drier, hot conditions to be at their best.

And this year bush clover Lespedeza thunbergii 'Ido Shibori' was a medium sized green shrub with arching branches that are open and airy. In this photo, in late September, the tiny white flowers are gone by.

What a contrast with last September when this shrub was a giant haystack, covered in a profusion of little blooms.

Yes, this is the same plant. The over-bright lighting in the photo above was terrible when I took it last year, but you can see what a monster it was. Species bush clover can be a huge mess of a plant, but this cultivar, 'Ido Shibori' is a much smaller variety. Even so, it was a big sprawly arching fountain.

The pea-like blooms don't read well from a distance, you need to see them quite close up.

Not only was the entire plant about 2/3 the size it was last year, but the flowers were brief and sparse. The overall shape was actually nicer this year than that big haystack was, and the plant is healthy and fine looking, but I missed the little flowers.

MoBot says lespedeza is drought tolerant, but this experience makes me think it is actually drought dependent for best growth and flowering. It certainly did not respond this year as it has in the previous two hot, dry summers.

What a difference a few extra inches of rain and a July below 100 degrees makes.

All the drama in Washington has seriously unnerved me lately. I am out of sorts and need to calm down. So I turned off the TV and went outside for a walk around my yard.

Aromatic aster - Aster* oblongifolius 'Raydon's Favorite'
(*Symphyotrichum now, but it's hard to change)

The deep red is Itea virginica, with red berries of Aronia arbutifolia behind.
The edges of this shot are purposely blurry. This is an art shot.

This calms me. It just does.

This calms me too, every time I walk down the path and around the curve.

This is the first year the bottlebrush buckeye hedge (Aesculus parviflora)
has turned so golden yellow in fall.

Sheffield Pink mums (Chrysanthemum, -- they didn't change this name, did they?)

Fragrant sumac (Rhus aromatica) has its best season in fall.

Another shot of the itea and the aronia berries above it.

The west side of the house, with the gravel sitting area behind this garden border.
Do you recognize the little red tree on the left? The sourwood that I post about all the time.

Another look at the west side, with bright red salvia 'Hummingbird' in front of
the purple Raydon's Favorite asters.

Candy lily seedpods (Pardancanda norisii. They are very similar to blackberry lilies)

Doublefile viburnum, (V. plicatum tomentosum, 'Shasta').
It's a deep rust color that just doesn't photograph well from a distance.

Up close I can get a richer shot of the doublefile viburnum's leaves

Looking back at the house from the rear of the yard.

Rosa glauca, with no foliage left, but lots of hips.
I transplanted this from another area a few weeks ago. I hope it survives.

View from behind the iteas. Montauk daisies (Nipponanthemum)
are bright and cheerful next to the garnet red itea.

Thanks for taking this tour around the yard and staying with me through this post. It's all just random things I saw, no particular meaning and no significant observations, nothing to ponder. Just my garden.

My refuge.

Another art shot with a blurred frame. I like it.

Do you recognize this plant?

I saw this compact, glossy shrub at Wave Hill Gardenin New York City in early October. It was covered in subtle greenish little flowers. I was struck by its rounded, full shape and the deep green, almost black, shining leaves.

This was an eye catcher and exactly what I think I need for a spot my garden.

Do you know what it is? Does a close up of the little flowers help?

How about a close up of the leaves?

Yes. This is common English ivy, Hedera helix.

Ivy! A dense, full shrub, about three feet high and pleasingly mounded.

Immature, vining ivy leaves

Here is something interesting about ivy: when it is immature it is a vine and we all know how aggressively it climbs and how long it can get. A monster. The leaves have three pointed lobes that we all recognize.

But when an ivy vine reaches the end of its structure or the top of a tree, it has nowhere further to climb, and it then matures.

When ivy matures it changes genetically. The leaves lose their lobed points and become rounded. The vine stops being a vine and the topmost part of the plant becomes shrubby and dense.

If you take a cutting from the shrubby mature part of the ivy, it will keep its altered genetic characteristics -- you get another mature shrub form of the plant.

But if you plant the seeds from the mature flowering ivy, you get an immature vine, and you are back to having rampant vining English ivy.

Weird. I had never seen a mature ivy before, and it was pretty. That alone was worth the trip to Wave Hill, but there were many other delights that day as well.

Wave Hill is in the Bronx, but feels miles away. It's tucked into a busy neighborhood, a couple streets off Broadway, with aggressive traffic whizzing by at its edges, but all is serene inside the grounds.

It overlooks the Hudson River, across from the Palisades.

It is a mature and old garden, with beautiful tree and shrub specimens. That's not a flowering tree -- that snow white blast is the foliage on a variegated 'Wolf Eyes' kousa dogwood.

It had been a private garden originally and has beautiful walks and pergolas, a greenhouse, flowerbeds, and the original stately homes.

It's a relaxing garden, with the iconic Wave Hill chairs dotted about the lawns to encourage sitting, and many families spreading out picnics on the grounds.

The "Wave Hill" chair

I spent more time on our visit sitting around than walking through the garden areas. That's a giant bottlebrush buckeye behind me.

You can't beat a day when you learn something completely new and astonishing about a boring old plant, you get to sit in a beautiful oasis in the city, and you have a bottlebrush buckeye for a backdrop.

Doesn't get any better than that.

I started with six tiny little plugs in four inch nursery pots.

I planted them in exactly the wrong spot, in too much sun, in dry soil. They normally grow in woodland shade near streams.

I put the six little plants along a raised free draining berm, competing with spruce tree roots and facing full west.

And yet, in hot sun those six tiny plants spread and filled in to become a stunning ground cover all along the berm. Out in the sun they have grown dense and twiggy and full. They color beautifully in fall, all coppery and bronze.

This is yellowroot, Xanthorrhiza simplicissima.

Not only did those six little plants spread into this curving stretch of dense ground cover, but I have dug and moved many to other spots, I have dug several to give away, and I have dug out a lot that were crowding the spruces and hollies. This woody one foot high shrub covers ground.

It's not aggressive, or a problem. It just happily bulks up and stretches out.

The yellowroot that I have seen growing properly in its preferred conditions is a more open plant, growing in individual clumps. In the deep forest or along stream edges it is delicate and I don't recall seeing any fall color.

In my garden, in the sun, it seems to be on steroids.

In summer the foliage is a clear, light green. The leaves look like celery and the roots really are bright yellow. It roots easily, wherever a stem touches the ground.

In April the upright woody stems sport subtle fuzzy purple flowers, just as the leaves emerge.

I did not do my homework when I planted yellowroot. I did not even consider the moisture or light conditions it needed. I never intended a sweep of ground cover under the spruces, I thought I'd just have six little yellowroot clumps scattered about for effect between the spruces.

But this plant likes me.

It likes me a lot, and has performed beautifully in all the wrong conditions.

In the waning days of October, before last weekend's frost changed everything, there were mornings when the light stopped me in my tracks.

The rays were so specific, lighting up just a tree or a clump of irises, and catching each falling leaf in suspension.

It was startling how bright the colors were as the autumn light was getting lower and lower each morning.

The blueberries gave me such pleasure this summer with bowls of blueberries for my breakfast. Now, long past bearing, they were lit up by the early sun.

'Gro Low' sumac caught fire below a witch hazel as the sun came around the corner of the house.

White reblooming clematis was focused in a shaft of sunlight right outside the kitchen window.

It took me a while to get the coffee made on those mornings. I was too taken with staring out the window at the light.

The first morning that we got a hard frost, the air above was cold too. Contrails streaked across the sky. There were three more V shaped rays just to the right of this shot, but they were exploding directly out of the rising sun and my camera couldn't take the picture, nor could my eyes comprehend what I was seeing. I thought the sky was starting to crack open.

There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.

The strange, focused light in the morning is different now that frost has announced winter's intentions. There has been a shift, and the season moves on.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

October left us, November arrived, and overnight, it seems, the Norway maples turned butter yellow, the silver maples turned lemony and the red maple in the back yard went up in flames.

I planned the walkway around the side of the house to feature the red maple at this time of year. It's the focal point as you round the walk, although honestly you can't miss it from anywhere in the yard, inside the house, or half a mile up the street.

I even planned it so there would be an allee effect, with the maple framed in the distance as you walk the short path from the driveway to the back of the house.

A multi colored fothergilla is at the start of the walk, and the maple is at the end. It works the way I planned.

The fothergilla is enough to make you stop before you even start down the allee.

I also planned a pop of flame red color to anchor the far right front corner of our lot, where I put in a red oak last year, but it is nowhere near as big as the maple.

And yet this skinny red oak is not bothered by its wispy stature. It puts out a confident blast of red, even though it is eight feet tall and has the girth of a drinking straw.

It will some day have an effect like the maple, but I'm tickled that at this young stage it is so blatantly red in fall.

When I go back inside the house the flaming red fire of the maple lights up the kitchen window. A red glow reflects off the table, the floors, the counter.

Even in the bedroom, where a leafy green magnolia by the window screens the view, there is no escaping the fire outside. Red light pools on the dresser top.

The autumn sky at sunset also reflects the riot of color below, but softens the golds and reds to peachy rose. I couldn't plan anything this beautiful.

Different Worlds

Birthday

The Porch Reveal

Proud Weeds

Cup Plant

I'm Rockin' Rocks

Pleased With the Result

Late Summer

Protecting Young Trees

The Dawn of Realization

Upon My Return

Merry September

What's That?

A Trip to the Compost Pile

Drought Dependent

This Calms Me

Recognize This?

A Plant That Likes Me

The Light in the Morning

As Planned