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?