That could have been the title of my autobiography but instead it’s the title of Eleanor Perenyi’s book of assorted alphebetized essays on gardening and this months selection for the Garden Blogger’s Book Club (graciously hosted by Carol at May Dreams Gardens). A slightly used copy of Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden has been in my bedside stack mostly unread for months. When I discovered recently that it was this months book I thought “oh well, too bad I didn’t read it sooner”. But I opened it up again anyway and realized that it’s really not meant to be read cover to cover in a sitting. Rather, pick a chapter, any chapter! Her topics range from “Blues” to “Tools” to “Magic” to “Potatoes” to “Partly Cloudy” and seem almost like blog posts to me. Ms. Perenyi says in the forward “a writer who gardens is sooner or later going to write a book about the subject – I take that as inevitable”. It’s true whether you’re a writer who gardens or a gardener who writes – we are an opinionated bunch and we love to share! She’d fit right in the blogging community. She makes me chuckle and bristle by turns just like some of the writers on, say, Garden Rant! And I have the added benefit of having a copy underlined by a previous reader – it’s almost like the book has a comments box. In the “Lilies” chapter, this line was underscored: “I order lilies only every other year and spend, each time, about $100. I waste twice that on cigarettes.” Kindred spirits, clearly! Prices of lilies and cigarettes notwithstanding, this book could have been written yesterday or tomorrow. Ms. Perenyi sounds like a lot of us when she talks about organic gardening methods: “…I can now either beg or steal the bags of leaves unwisely set out for collection by the inorganic neighbors and add them to our store.” And what she writes about “old fashioned and solidly made garden [tools]” that she bought in “a sort of hardware heaven” that went out of business and was “replaced by a store called Unisex, whose speciality was blue jeans” is -ugh!- so frustratingly true.

One thing that seems to me to have changed since 1981 is that I don’t believe as she did that “gardens like mine, which go by the unpleasing name of ‘labor intensive’, are on their way out”. I think that if gardening was truly passe then, it’s back in vogue now. Proof is in on the internet by way of hundreds of garden blogs, in well loved public gardens like Blithewold and the reprinting of Eleanor Perenyi’s “classic” Green Thoughts. (I guess I’ll need a different title for my book…)

I have to diverge from my usual “Blithewold Gardens” theme for just a moment this rainy day to mention “Christmas at Blithewold“. Raise your hand if you finished your gift shopping in July and your lights are up — Christmas at Blithewold is for you! Hands up if you’re feeling slightly resentful that all over everywhere bucket trucks were putting up trees and lights before you even had a chance to finish your Dagwood style Thanksgiving leftovers sandwich — Christmas at Blithewold is made for you too!

Volunteer decorators, house staff, Fred and Dan, garden volunteers, and Gail and I have been working on getting Blithewold decked for the season since –gasp– before Halloween! And I can’t think of a better way to find some holiday cheer and most excellent decoration ideas to take home than to visit the house and grounds this time of year. The whole house is like a display garden with idea beds. It doesn’t matter if your own method of decorating is like mine (flinging a mismatched menagerie of ornaments on a tiny tree and wrapping presents at the last minute using blue tape because where’d the scotch tape go?) or like Martha’s with a different color scheme every year and a tree full of white lights and angels. Either way you’ll find a spirit of fun and creativity in all the different rooms and ideas that you can’t help but want to bring home.

Fred and Dan come up with a new way to light the grounds every year what they do is worth trying to copycat (the highest compliment!). This year their show might not stop traffic the way the star topped sequoia or the bebobbled gingko did but it will delight all who come through the gates for a closer look. I don’t want to give it totally away but I bet you’ve never seen a star magnolia flowering like ours!

The garden volunteers, Gail, Julie and I helped to decorate the 18′ front hall tree – if you look closely you’ll see a reflection of me hanging out on the balcony scaffold taking Gail’s portrait. And Gail and I picked greens from all over the property (we’ve got 7 different chamaecyparis’s!) for Gail’s front door wreath and my container arrangements.

So if you’re anywhere nearby and are either totally into the Christmas spirit already or need to have the inner humbugger exorcised, I hope you’ll come over and see what we made for you!

For Fred and Dan, leaf cleanup on the property must feel about as futile as vacuuming a cat. They were collecting leaves this breezy morning in the same places they’ve been cleaning up for weeks now and the trees just kept right on shedding. Sometimes it’s better to put off until tomorrow what can’t be finished today!

A couple of weeks ago Fred and Dan delivered 4 truckloads of beautiful dry leaves to the compost area for us to shred for the gardens. There’s nothing so delicious as shredded leaves for the garden! This time of year we use the leaves to mulch things like the figs which need extra protection in the winter (more about the figs later!), and Dick (the veggie garden volunteer) was given a layer of leaves and grass for the vegetable bed – he should be able to plant right in the mix next spring without needing to rototill. In the spring and summer we use the shredded leaves to top dress the beds in the Display Garden. I think they make a beautiful looking as well as a beneficial mulch and I always think the gardens look “done” when they’ve been dressed. Even if you mulch your beds in the fall, it’s a good idea to shred the leaves rather than use them whole so that they begin the breakdown process and allow the rain to reach through – a solid mat of leaves can choke rather than feed a garden. So between Fred, Nick-The-Willing (one of the Deadheads who says “Sure, I’ll do that!” anytime we ask for help), and myself we passed that enormous pile, scoop by scoop through the machine into another slightly smaller enormous pile. We already have more leaves in that pile than we had last year but we’re feeling greedy and needy and with any luck, Fred and Dan will be able to gather another pile for us next week. I’ll bet they are crossing their fingers for a good breeze to shake off the rest of the leaves while they’re otherwise occupied decorating the property for the holidays. (I wonder what Christmas light suprise is in the works for us this year?! – We’ll all have to come by on Friday to find out!) The house also opens for the holiday season on Friday. Come and see how the decorators have interpreted the family’s “favorite things” with a different theme in each room. (For more information about hours, holiday teas, events, and the live music schedule click here)  Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

It’s garden bloggers’ bloom day and I’m distracted from blooms! Not a day went by this summer when I didn’t try to see up the skirt of a bloom with the macro setting on the camera but lately I’m all for the wide angles. Working in the garden I get so focused on the details that just like when I spend too much time in front of the computer, it feels good to stretch my eyes on the distance. (That said, I did look for some perfect close-ups in honor of bloom day – the Enkianthus is not blooming, I know, but isn’t it so bloom-day pretty? As usual, click-on for a larger look)

This has been a long fall so far at Blithewold. We are getting eased into the bare distances of winter. This is the time for gardeners to get a broad look at our gardens and then retreat inside for mind’s eye dreaming. The Annual Garden Design Luncheon is perfectly timed to provide a fresh thought palette for those dreams. Today Douglas Reed (preeminent landscape architect from the firm Reed Hilderbrand in Watertown, MA) spoke to us about designs that fully “connect” us to the place. In his work, Doug evaluates each project site based on its history, the lay of the land and its natural attributes and rather than eradicating any of that (which LAs are perfectly capable of doing) he works to enhance our personal experience within – and looking out from – the site. He talked about how our own childhoods also help to create a connection to a place. Kids spend the first few years taking in and processing their surrounding environment. What we learned then (the shape of a tree, the size of the sky) never leaves us and instead informs how we build and inhabit our adult world. I hadn’t really thought about it that way before! And only yesterday I read an interview (sent as link in comment on yesterday’s post – thanks, Max!) of a California based garden designer who talked about how his Newport childhood influences his work.

As a landscape, Blithewold fits its place in the world (Doug beautifully illustrated this point) and because of the views within and out, we are personally grounded in it. I suspect the Van Wickle/McKee’s probably felt an even deeper connection to the place and worked with the site (not against it!) to create something that felt viscerally familiar to them.

Do you feel that kind of “connected” to your own garden or any other landscape? Do you see childhood views in your gardens/landscapes? I’d love to hear from anyone who attended today’s luncheon – don’t be shy! – and I put the question out as a possible meme too if any fellow bloggers feel tempted to write a full post… (Please put a link in a comment so we’ll all know if and where the conversation continues!)

We planted a lot of cardoons this year. A lot. And now that the season is done, Julie (who doesn’t love giant horsey things in the garden – especially when they’re everywhere flopping big leaves on delicate things – but who generously let us plant them all in the first place) has been asking us, “When are you going to cut them back?, Can you cut them back today?, How about now?, Are you going to dig them up?, Maybe you should dig them up.” So yesterday when they looked frost-flat I did a little research to find out what to do to them for the winter (Gail and I would like *some* to come back…) and I learned all sorts of new things about cardoons. To give credit where credit is due, most of what I learned I found on this site.

Cardoons are winter hardy perennials to about zone 7b but with protection might come back into the zone 6’s (Gail had one come back a few years ago). They are best planted by seed and the first year they establish their tap root, grow gorgeous gray and spiny foliage (some might call it horsey) and the second year they become even more gigantic (they can reach 7′) and they flower. The flowers are thistle-ish, artichoke-like wildlife magnets – birds and bees, etc reportedly can’t get enough of them. But once they flower, the foliage goes downhill for at least a month before sending up new leaves from the base (I suspect that happens more reliably in long growing seasons.)

I have all sorts of appreciation for their ornamental function in the garden but had no idea about the culinary uses and frankly the spiny stalks are about as appealing to me to eat as a fully clothed porcupine. I found out that cooking them for supper is more complicated than just breaking off a stalk and sauteing it up. They must be blanched first. A couple of weeks before the first frost you tie them up in a wheatsheaf bundle and wrap them in burlap or cardboard so just the top feathers stick out. Restricting photosynthesis evidently sweetens the stems and cooked up, they’ll taste like artichoke heart. The entire plant is harvested after the 2-3 weeks of blanching by cutting the base just below soil level. Cook prep is a little high maintenance too – you must remove the spines (duh!), cut the stalks into sections and submerge them in “acidulated water”. That was another learn-something-new-today thing for me – acidulated water is, well, just what it sounds like – lemon water. And that keeps them from turning ugly oxidized colors before cooking. My interest flagged at the recipes because I’m not a cook but if you are, there’s probably all sorts of ways to make tasty things (that I would love to eat) from this most outstanding (horsey?) ornamental vegetable! Have you ever eaten cardoon? Is it worth the wait and the work?

After all the reading up, I’m still not ready to put them to bed for the winter. The flattened leaves popped back up as the temperatures rose and I think they’re still too architecturally pretty to behead. When the leaves really go to mush, we’ll cut them off, throw a little mulch around our favorites and hope for the best!

Is it long winter’s naptime yet? I’m bushed tuckered pasted wasted fried asleep on my feet! The gardens are done. Pretty much. Mostly! And we can cross more off of Gail’s to-do list. Yesterday the Florabundas came in for a last go through of the Rose and North Gardens. We weeded and cut the dead out of the roses. The weather isn’t reliably cold enough yet for us to be sure the roses are totally done growing (and there are still bloomable buds) so we decided to wait to do the winter whipping-cane cut back. The North Garden is ready for bed – we gave the Nepeta a little haircut, the Geranium ‘Rozanne’ a trim, cut the wall ivy back out of the beds and took the dead out of the Rosa ‘Ballerina’s too. Gail and I went back to do a little futzing around with daylilies – why are they never in quite the right spot? – and then pronounced that garden “done”. (wahoo!) Today Gail and I relocated more Idea Bed plants to the newer Display Garden beds because it’s looking more and more likely that Fred and Dan will be able to get started on phase 2 of the redesign this winter (wahoo times two!). I’m sorry I don’t have illustrations of this week’s work – it was chilly and busy and aside from perhaps my last praying mantis portrait of the season (it was a frosty day slow mover on the most robust ‘Rozanne’ ever) I kept forgetting that I should be documenting all the activity!

Next week we’ll be inside decorating the front hall christmas tree (it’s an 18′-er – and yours truly will have tree top scaffold duty. I will remember to take pictures from up there!) and we’ll be attending the Garden Design Luncheon on Thursday. Have you signed up yet? I’m going to work on getting my fingernails clean as soon as I have a little lie-down first…

I have this unreasonable – not dread exactly – worry maybe about the approach of winter. I have to keep reminding myself that there are still colors in the winter. I will find them… I know I will! But I keep thinking “the monochrome is coming the monochrome is coming!” and I run around madly trying to glue all of the fall color – every leaf – to my mind’s eye for safe keeping. Good thing I have a camera.

This morning I startled a deer and he hightailed it (Hey! so that’s where that expression comes from!) across the great lawn before I could unholster my camera. Quick Draw McGraw I’m not.

The Maidenhair tree (Gingko biloba) was looking especially gorgeous today so I went in for a close up forgetting the vomit smelling fruit underfoot… Oh well. To me, the picture’s worth a 1000 stinks.

The Franklinia is exhibiting a delicate range of colors – it’s hard to believe this beauty is extinct in the wild – Thank goodness it’s not gone forever from our gardens too. (Plant one!)

The Tupelo is almost done.

But the maples still have a ways to go…

And I bid a fond farewell today to my favorite cutting garden plant (Asclepias physocarpa ‘Oscar’) and some Salvia vanhoutiis (carted off in a red hat lady color combo) from the Idea Beds. Our killing frost is forecast for tonight…

Were you ever scolded as a child -or do you scold your own children- for making a mess? The answer for most of us is probably “you bet”. I submit though that it’s in our natural nature to love a good mess. I think it’s satisfying to fling things and gratifying to tidy up. This morning I admired the aftermath of this weekend’s storm (nature flung things).

My boss, Julie had already picked up sticks in the Bosquet and made piles – sometimes I think she’s actually tempted to go out in a storm and catch sticks as they fall. When I asked Fred if he wanted/needed extra hands (mine) to help clean up he said “it’s not that bad. Unless you have a burning desire to pick up sticks…” I don’t. It’s always less fun to pick up someone else’s mess, don’t you think?

So after doing some stick-picking-up anyway, I made my own mess.

I love to pot up. The potting shed is designed to contain messes. I can spill soil with wanton abandon and groom dead leaves straight onto a floor pile. I don’t have to be careful of the furniture! Today I took the wedding pots apart and divided and repotted the phormiums. Phormiums (New Zealand flax) aren’t as hard to divide as you’d think. I set them on the floor and parted the blades until I found a mid point with at least a semblance of a seam between the fans of blades. Then I stabbed the seam with my hori-hori and wrestled until I felt and heard the rip tear of roots. It was totally satisfying mess making… and I can’t put off the gratification of cleaning up any longer… Do you have a place you can make a proud and uncareful mess?

It just occurred to messy-me that I should tell you that those fingernails will be clean next Thursday for the Annual Garden Design Luncheon and there are still some seats available!

Fall garden clean-up is the subject of the week all over the world wide interweb! A conversation was started at Bliss over the merits of putting off the major clean-up until spring. Wildlife certainly benefits from a garden full of winter snack seedheads and hiding places left intact; some plants really appreciate holding onto their natural cold weather protection and the soil is better off undisturbed.

In a public garden there are other factors to consider in the fall. Blithewold’s gardens are open year-round and we have to make sure that they’re attractive to gaze upon even in the off seasons. If we had a constant blanket of snow starting now, we probably could let things go (ugh! perish the thought!) but we also do a lot of furniture moving in the fall and a-really-lot of bulb planting.

The Rock Garden is the one garden we let go a bit. We weed it and cover it in a pine needle blanket and save most of the felco action for spring. It’s off the beaten track in the winter, it’s pretty self-containedly tidy as it is and needs all the winter protection it can get (this is the garden that is occasionally covered in/surrounded by a high tide).

The North Garden is a different story and we spend several days putting it to bed in the fall. This week we took out annuals, tender perennials and dahlias and cut back things like phlox, baptisia, campanulas, asters and iris. We left the amsonia (for outstanding fall color), calamintha, nepeta (mostly – we will cut that back a little), caryopteris and ‘Rozanne’ geraniums (at least while they’re still blooming – they’re still blooming!). I do worry about the wildlife – we were able to rescue 3 praying mantis egg cases – but there’s hope that critters will retreat to the nearby Bosquet. Clearing the garden out in autumn gives us a chance to move perennials and we plant tulips where the annuals have just come out – that makes for easy placement and digging. We (and 3 Rockettes) planted 600 tulips in the North Garden this year!

This was the first year we had a lot of annuals in the Rose Garden. Visitors pass through that garden on the way to the mansion and it’s important that it be as aesthetically pleasing as possible every moment of every season. Melted annuals aren’t exactly a feast for the eyes so we took them out. But because we weren’t planting many bulbs in that garden we compromised a little and cut the plants off at the ground to leave a small feast (of roots) for the soil. I have to say though that cutting (hacking) through the remarkably woody stems of zinnias and heliotropes was not nearly as physically gratifying as ripping them out of the ground roots-n-all. Check out the size of the zinnia (Profusion Apricot) that Gail is holding: Last spring that plant was a 4″ seedling in a peat pot!

We’ve still got a page-long list of ToDos for those gardens but I’ll save what’s next for another post. Meanwhile, what I wonder is, do you treat the public beds in your garden differently in the fall than you do the parts of your garden hidden from your neighbors’ gaze?