Gail and I have been thinking about the big new bed in the Display Garden at least since last year. We shifted all of the keepers out of the Idea Beds last fall to make way for the new bed and then waited (im)patiently for the guys to dig it all up, re-grade, re-sod, place pavers and decorate.

(Check out Fred’s new fountain! – the guys made it from recycled greenhouse gutters and a parking lot stone that the caterers kept crashing into.) All the while we kept our eyes glued to the size and shape of the new bed and tried to form some how-should-we-plant-it-? ideas in our heads.

I think Gail and I have different methods for idea making but what I realized again (I realize this every year when we plan and place the gardens) was that we are amazingly in tune with each other and what we want the gardens to look like. Gail has memorized all of the plants we grow and makes copious lists of them on random sheets of paper and in notepads. We talk about themes and schemes – for instance, one bed this year will be heavy on green and pink flowers; others are cottage-potage garden mixes. Gail organizes the plants in the greenhouse by color and then by garden and meanwhile forms a mental image. I on the other hand am not particularly organized and if I’m not looking directly at a plant, I’ll pretty much have forgotten what it looks like. I can form hazy mental pictures of colors and textures but really need to “see” what I’m thinking. I got out Gail’s lists and my tiny tin of watercolors and tried to capture my vague fog of thought but it wasn’t until I actually went out this morning (while I was still fresh and well caffeinated) and started “plunking” that I could begin to see what the bed was going to grow up to be.

After Gail came to work and said “Yup – that looks good!” and Tara approved the holes, we got right down to planting. It’s only a start but the bed I have been calling “the big empty” suddenly today needs a new name! How do you come up with the design for your beds and gardens? Do you ever work with a partner?

The guys wasted no time finding a replacement fountain vase among old Christmas decorations in the barn. Although it’s a perfect fit and we’re all impressed with their quick thinking and ingenuity, it’s not perfect and we’re still madly hoping to get Blithewold’s beautiful original back. It’s sad to think that even if the urn is recovered we might have to keep it under lock and key and find a permanent ersatz solution for our visitors to enjoy outdoors. In my bleaker moments I can imagine a time when all of our valuable objects are hidden away for “safe keeping” and facsimiles are put in their place. Will our experience be diminished or will the fakes become as precious to us as the originals?

(At least the living collections in the gardens will always be the real deal. The moment our tree peonies are replaced with silk stand-ins is the very moment I’ll turn in my hori-hori for a new career in accounting.)

Gail and I will waste no time this week looking for temporary solutions in the Display Garden. The newest of the beds is a veritable blank slate and we intend to spend the season getting to know it. It will eventually be a mixed garden, full of our favorite shrubs, perennials, tender perennials, annuals and what ever else strikes our fancy from year to year – will we ever become bored with ornamental vegetables? This year though we will fill it full of temporary solutions gleaned from our container bed, our stock of tender perennials, annuals and yes, Lilah, ornamental veggies! Stay tuned for how Gail and I futz with placement in a tabula rasa garden. (At this stage in our process Gail is writing lists and I am daydreaming in technicolor…)

We noticed yesterday that one of our favorite fountain features was stolen and we are all sick about it. The copper Art Nouveau urn with a lotus motif was purchased for the original North Garden in 1908.

We are offering a $500 reward for information leading to its return so please keep your eyes peeled! – Click on the images for a larger view, etch its shape into your memory and help us scan for it in antiques shops, rummage sales, your neighbor’s garden, scrap yards, Ebay… so that it might come back to where it once belonged.

I think we outdid ourselves with tulips this year – we planted 300 (Angelique and Cool Crystal) in and around the Rose Garden and 600 (Cistula, Blushing Beauty, Black Hero and Creme Upstar) in the North – not to mention a cutting bed full of them. And they were spectacular! It was the perfect tulip year: They didn’t get eaten by the deer, they started blooming just as the daffodils were going by and they hung on … and on … and on! As a matter of fact some of them were still blooming today. I say “were blooming” because this morning we dug them up and they are now in a sort of organized heap right behind my chair in the potting shed.

For us, tulips in the North and Rose Gardens act as glorious spring place holders for summer annuals and tender perennials. It works clockwork perfectly – when the annuals come out in the fall, we put the tulips right in – the soil is pillow soft and easy; and come spring, just as the tulips are going by, it’s time to plant the annuals. Every year we buy new tulips for those gardens to make sure the show is as stunning as possible and rotate the past year’s to the cutting beds for one more go. Reduce -Add more! Reuse! Recycle! That’s our motto!

Ideally we would wait for the foliage to wither before digging the bulbs out but we don’t have that kind of time – we want to start planting next week! So we dug them leaving the foliage on to dry out and feed the bulbs for another couple of weeks and piled them in a dry place out of the sun (our “office” incidentally). Some rainy day in a couple/three weeks we’ll remove the stalks and paperbag the bulbs for summer storage in the pot cubbies which is as cool, dark and dry a place as we have here.

I’m debating about digging up the tulips in my own garden. On the one hand they are all in patches that I could more easily fill to the gills with annuals if I took the bulbs out first. On the other hand (she had five fingers) I could take my chances on losing a few to the spade, competition and over watering and save myself the trouble of fussing with storage issues. I’ll plant more in the fall either way… What do you do with your tulips?

You all know by now that I love taking plant portraits. I especially like the up-the-skirt close-ups, the Georgia O’Keefe abstracts and the soft focus glamour shots. The wide angle shots are harder to compose (except in the Water Garden where every vista is painting perfect); labels stick me in the eye and hoses are like neon signs. But like many (all?) of you who spend time researching the right plant for the right spot (something I’m spending time on now for my own garden), I find it more than frustrating that many books, catalogs and websites only show the gorgeous close-up of a stunning flower. What the expletive deleted does the whole plant look like?! I believe we deserve to know the best and worst before we allocate precious space for a plant in our gardens.

The thing to do is put the books away and look around real life. Go for a walk, visit your friends’ gardens and of course (you think I wouldn’t put a plug in?) your local public garden/arboretum. And for virtual visitors I am going to do my darnedest to practice my longshots. Kim from A Study in Contrasts asked about the Father Hugo’s rose (Rosa f. hugonis) – I stopped myself from going close to the flames again (they really do remind me of candles) so that she and you could see how outstanding the whole shrub is.

The thicket of canes arch gracefully and the foliage stays looking healthy. This particular plant is many decades old (possibly as many as 10…). I also stood back from the Dove tree (the tree blooming on the left is a dogwood) and the Halesia. The blooms on those trees did call to me like sirens. – But I resisted this time…

And the buds on the Empress tree (Paulownia tomentosa) pulled me in too.

Pretty soon the air will be thick with the scent of grape cough syrup… And I couldn’t help myself with this one (click here for a longshot) – the Maackia is loosing its silver coloring but keeping a delicate pencil-sketched edge. Gorgeous!

This is the week we begin to know that summer is not a longshot – the Deadheads and Julie Murphy, Blithewold’s new Education Coordinator (who might have to win the Best Dressed superlative. – Look out, Kathryn: You’ve got competition!), and Gail and I started forking out the tulips in the Cutting Garden. Over the course of the week, the North Garden and Rose Garden tulips will go. (We’ll save those for next year’s Cutting Garden.) Next week – planting!