I finally bought my very own copy of Ken Druse’s latest book Natural Companions: A Garden Lover’s Guide to Plant Combinations and if you don’t have a copy yet, it’s worth dropping everything else – plant those annuals later! – to pick it up. (I ordered mine from my favorite local bookstore and beat feet to get it as soon as it came in.) Truly, you might never look at your garden and the plants in it the same way again. I appreciated Ken’s reminder to pick flowers and foliage to see what would look well together but Ellen Hoverkamp’s digital scans of those pickings are exquisite. And then Ken takes it several steps further to illuminate plants that not only look well together but go together in various other ways, whether they’re related by “blood”, color, place, habit, use, and so on and on for well over 200 beautifully written and photographed pages.

I don’t have Ellen’s patience – or her brilliant artistic eye – or her equipment – to ever be able to create such amazing compositions but I have already started to notice the garden’s own arrangements and natural companions with a fresh eye. Some of these combinations (related more by good looks and cultural requirements than anything more thought-provoking) were planned but I think most were either lucky guesses or pure wind-blown serendipity. (Mouse over for captions, click on for larger views.)

What combinations of plants go well together in your garden? Do you think about different kinds of plant relationships when you’re working on your garden’s design?

It’s game time here at Blithewold. Even though we’ve been planting steadily since … March (!) the biggest push starts now that we’re well past frost and are desperate to get everything moved out of the greenhouse. What we call “planting week” usually spans a month or more and starts with marathon planting sessions in each garden that never take as long as we imagine it will. We were set back by rain earlier in the week but a powerful crew of volunteers adjusted their schedules to work today and along with the Florabundas yesterday they got us over the first of several humps.

A good 400 annuals and tender perennials including dahlias, salvias, ageratum, helichrysum, zinnias and agastache went in the North Garden yesterday; Dan planted at least 40 tomatoes; and almost 600 cutting garden annuals like tassel flower, amaranth, and lisianthus, and tender perennials and perennials such as lavender, butterfly weed and “Rhody Native” mountain mint went into the cutting garden, herb garden and pollinator bed today. Today’s planting session was completed just in time for a drenching downpour – a half an inch in what couldn’t have been much longer that a half an hour – that watered everything right in.

We try to make the job as easy as possible. Gail, Tricia and I place everything the day before so that no one has to wait while we make up our minds about where it all goes. And mostly the planting is easy – the soil is soft, fluffy cake mix wherever we took tulips out and wherever we evict forget-me-nots and teasel seedlings that have fulfilled their duties as space holders/weed barriers. But it’s still a big manicure-wrecking job that’s hard on the knees and the back and we couldn’t possibly have gotten even a fraction of it done in the time it took without our amazing volunteers.

The more we plant the more space we have under the arbor for hardening off plants as they come out of the greenhouse. I’ll spare you uninteresting shots of empty benches but to Gail and me they are almost as thrilling as seeing our plants go in the ground one by one by one.

Will you spend any part of this long weekend planting? I hope you have perfect weather for it and well-timed downpours – at night of course after the cookout – to help settle it all in. Happy planting!

Despite knowing that pinching new growth makes plants branch into full and sturdy clumps that promise extra flowers, it can be one of the hardest things to do. Somehow it goes against the grain to nip healthy new growth and I just can’t do it sometimes. But then I always wish I had. The nepeta at my house grew so fast I missed my chance to pinch them before the flowers budded and now they’re splayed open and not-so-very pretty even though they’re blooming away. If only I had pinched them back in … April. Or if not in April, then a couple of weeks ago when I realized they were about to bloom. It would have been better to set the bloom timing back a bit for the sake of sturdier, bushier growth. Mental note for mental toughness next year.

Last year our Agastache ‘Black Adder’ and ‘Blue Fortune’ were tall and a little rangy so we determined to remember to pinch them this year. They should end up being a little shorter, the blooms might not be quite as large possibly, but the plant will look much better in the garden and there will be even more flowers for the bees.

We also pinched Aster ‘Lady in Black’, which we bought as spindly single-stemmed plugs. Cutting off the apical meristem, the tip of a new shoot, will send energy into the side shoots and make the plant branch. It feels barbaric to lop off their heads but they almost instantly respond – within a few days anyhow – by starting to branch out from every axil. I hate to think how weak and unattractive the plants might be if we didn’t decapitate them.

And the consolation prize for following through with this necessary but weirdly difficult task is that the pinched tips of annuals and perennials make the best cuttings – as long as they’re not blooming yet. Spring cuttings take much more quickly than fall ones – fast enough that we should have more plants to tuck in later where we need them.

Make sure the cuttings are neither floppy nor woody. Trim off the second or third set of leaves from the top right at the stem using a sharp knife or razor blade. Trim the remaining leaves in half, dip the end of the stem in rooting hormone, and stick it in dampened  sterile rooting medium like perlite or vermiculite. If you don’t have a high-tech mist system like we do, put a low-tech clear plastic bag over the cuttings and mist them with a spray bottle occasionally. Keep them in a bright warm spot out of the sun and they should root in 2-4 weeks. Pot them up for few weeks before planting them out.

Other plants on our pinch-now list are the ones that bloom late in the season like chrysanthemum, which can be pinched again around Father’s Day; Boltonia – I swore last year that I would pinch ‘Nallie’s Lime Dot’, and Helianthus – ‘Lemon Queen’ to keep them from keeling over; and rabdosia (trumpet spur-flower). We also sometimes pinch summer phlox – but only if we don’t want them to get too tall (otherwise we’ll just thin out some stems to give them better airflow); dahlias if they’re up and leggy, Salvia, and potted annuals when we plant them even if they’ve already been pushed into bloom.

What plants are you pinching back now? Are you squeemish about doing it too?