I haven’t read the book club’s selection for this month: Passalong Plants by Steve Bender and Felder Rushing (every time lately that I sit still with any open book I pass out cold – it’s spring…) but there’s an invitation to join the club with a story — and as luck would have it, one of Blithewold’s extra special “passalong” plants just started to bloom!

Around the turn of the (20th) century, the Ladies Association of Mount Vernon sold rooted cuttings of a chestnut rose (probably the one called ‘Martha Washington’) as a fundraiser to preserve and restore that property. According to evidence found in Blithewold’s archives, Bessie Van Wickle, a member of The Colonial Dames, visited Virginia around that time and quite probably returned with (at least) one of those roses. The Rosa roxburghii by the Visitor’s Center is a massive shrub that blooms a clear pink single that a horticulturist at Mount Vernon agreed looks to be the same as theirs. British author, Marion Cran, visited Blithewold in the 1920′s and in her book Gardens in America, commented on Bessie’s chestnut rose – it must have been in bloom when she visited…

Things sometimes come around full circle, and now that Blithewold is a non-profit public garden in need of funds for preservation and restoration, seedlings and cuttings of Bessie’s Chestnut Rose have occasionally been potted up for sale and passed along!

It’s already been a weird week of elfish triumph, freakish nature and things that nightmares are made of.

First the triumphs: our garden elves and selves yesterday planted the cutting garden and spread leaf mulch (every one of us was eyeing it jealously – why can’t we all have arboretum leaves for our own gardens?!) and the Rockettes changed venue to attend to post-planting details in the North Garden. A fresh layer of buckwheat hull mulch makes that garden look extra fancypants!

The leaf pile gave us this little treasure yesterday — qu’est-ce que c’est??

And I noticed this little sporty thing in a North Garden Clematis integrifolia today – it’s hard to tell but it seems to be one of the petals choosing a different path in life. (“I always felt like a leaf in a petals body…”) Anyone else notice this sort of thing ever?

As for nightmares – I was too bereft to take pictures: we lost a bunch of dahlias to rot. I was feeling so smug for packing them so diligently and – I thought – so successfully in sawdust last fall. As a matter of fact, I unpacked some and potted them up on the 18th and they were fine! Less than a week later Gail went to unpack more and noticed the wildlife (gnats… a family of mice…) and rot… What happened???!!

and I had to take a picture of this because if anything causes me to question my calling in life, it’s a tangle of garden hose…

But miracles bring me back from the brink — the bamboo shoots are up! We’re often asked if we sell it — we don’t. It’s the kind of thing that makes neighbors angry when it runs to their side of the fence and under foundations! (say it with me — “it’s invasive!”) There are nurseries that stock it though if you’ve got the space to let it run. We (I mean, the guys) mow the edges of our grove to keep it in bounds.

I wonder if everyone had as glorious a Memorial Day weekend as we had here in sunny RI? Every nursery and garden center I passed by seemed packed with color – both human and floral. Local nurseries have a lot to contend with – sales are fair-weather driven/dependant and competition is fierce. I was happy to see that gardeners were shoppers this weekend and even I succumbed to a busman’s holiday – I was lured into one of my favorite nurseries and totally taken by the most abundant fuchsia on the planet!

I couldn’t stay away from Blithewold this weekend either – look what’s blooming now! The Tamarix went from this to this over the weekend. Julie (the Director of Horticulture) told me this morning that she’s never seen it so floriferous and she also told me that it was Bessie’s favorite shrub and she also had planted them down by the water. (Bessie Van Wickle McKee was Blithewold’s founding mother)

The North Garden is beginning to burst – the Lady’s Mantle is showing signs of froth

and the perennial bachelor buttons are bluer than blue.

Clematis integrifolia is just getting going too – this one doesn’t climb but if we don’t hoop it, it flops right over.

Clematis is getting going all over elsewhere too! – here is ‘Guernsey Cream’ by the Moongate

and old favorite, ‘Nellie Moser’ hanging by the Visitor’s Center.

Memorial Day is the official opening of the summer season – especially in New York resort towns like Rhode Island – and today’s weather, instead of being an appropriately crisp (or rainy) farewell to Spring, is a muggy slide into the middle of Summer. We had our chance yesterday to acclimatize – it was only 80 something…

The Florabundas took the temperature in stride and without the least sign of wilt, forked out more tulips and planted 219 more plants in the Rose Garden — it’s really going to be specacular this year! We placed 90 Heliotrope (an old fashioned variety that’s hard to come by which is strange because it’s vigorous and super highly scented. Why isn’t it the one that’s widely available??) all over the garden rather than just in the entrance beds. If the fragrance was cloying, it might be too much but I think it will be a delicate wash of vanilla nostalgia to linger in.

A note on forking out the tulips: Visitors have asked – what do we do with them? Of the new ones we buy every year, we try to save about half to replant for next year. (We try new ones in the Visitor’s Center beds and the North Garden every year and last year’s go usually to the Cutting Bed. Because the 2nd year show tends to be less dramatic, we also buy new ones for the Cutting Bed.) To save the tulips that we fork out, we allow them to slowly dry with the foliage attached for a couple of weeks. (It’s best to let them dry in the shade rather than leaving them in the blazing like we did this year – Oops! Do as we say, not as we do!) Then we paper bag them by variety and store them either down cellar or in our pot cubbies until we’re ready to replant them in the fall. The viable extras are snapped up by staff and volunteers (there have to be some bennies for all their hard work!)

Here’s just one bloom for today because it stole the show: Paeonia suffruticosa ‘Yachiyotsubaki’. I had to put my hand in for scale because how else would you know that it’s the size of a dessert plate and that I didn’t need the macro setting to fill the frame!

And to tempt you and the kiddies to visit — I wonder what’s behind the bamboo?!….

The North Garden is done! (pretty much. for today, anyway. mostly.) Yesterday on the way over with carts full of plants in nursery pots, Gail and I remembered almost at the same moment that we had intended to borrow just a few more things from the Idea Beds for the North. According to Gail, Sheila Loerke (who was Blithewold’s Assistant Horticulturist before she passed away in 2004) always thought the North Garden could use some distinctively shaped shrubbery. In her honor and memory, we relocated 4 pencil thin boxwoods, one to each bed and 2 blobular boxwoods to the entrance path. As soon as they were in the ground Gail and I stood back and said “Yup. That’s what it needed!” (Sheila is up there saying “told ya so” and smiling, hopefully.) This morning the Rockettes forked out tulips while I went back to the greenhouse twice for forgotten items (I’m much too young to call all the forgetting anything but dingy-ness) and then planted 215 tender color makers (Salvias, Zinnias, Ageratum, Dahlias, Browalia, Cosmos…) in about an hour. What a group!

The Deadheads were also a mighty workforce: Yesterday they forked all the cutting bed tulips yesterday and weeded the fig/melon bed down by the compost area and then said “what’s next?”. I honestly don’t know what we would do without them.

Things just keep blooming! If only the computer had scratch ‘n’ sniff — this (Carolina Allspice) smells like juicyfruit gum and this one (Empress tree) smells like grape cough syrup. You don’t believe me but it’s true!

The Tamarix by the water is all budded up and the Beach plum is sweetly blooming away down there.

and remember the little butter burs? This is what it looks like now!