I am often asked, usually when I’m away from work, when would be the best time to visit Blithewold.  And of course I say, “It’s always a good time to visit Blithewold!  Why aren’t you there right now?”  I really do think there’s always something beautiful to see to make a visit worthwhile.  But. There’s honestly truly no time like the present.

I know gardeners.  (It takes one to know one.)  We’d all love to get out and see gardens when they’re fresh and lovely in the spring but that’s when our own gardens are their most demanding.  And high summer is … well … it’s the middle of summer.  It can be hot and awful.  That’s when I tend to get easily exhausted and there’s watering to be done and then a nap in the shade or a swim in the ocean is about all I can be talked into.  How about you?

Come September I’m willing to leave my own garden – if only to procrastinate weeding – and find inspiration elsewhere.  It’s time to plant and divide and move and replant in the garden and as the season winds down I have a real need to get jazzed about the whole process again.

But we’re not winding down here the way my garden at home is winding down.  It’s more like we’ve just hit our stride.  So right now is a/the perfect time to visit Blithewold!  The light is just right – even blazing midday won’t fade these colors and the temperature is ideal for a walk and a linger.

Fall Gardener’s Day is coming up next weekend (September 20th, 10 – 2:00) and promises plenty of inspiration and information plus a little shop therapy and a raffle gamble.  Mike Chute, Master Rosarian will talk about hellebores — just kidding!  Mike will be talking about preparing roses for a New England winter.  Blithewold’s own Dan Christina, (assistant grounds manager) will talk about his favorite thing – miniature gardens; Gail and I will do a tag team demo on our favorite thing – terrariums. (–Is it odd that we all spend our work days on 33 grand acres and go home to tend and gaze at tiny gardenlets?)  Super star volunteer and plantsman, Gil Moore will teach propagation (better he than me!); Bonnie Kavanagh, an herbalist will lead an herb walk; Emily Gedney, nutritionist and food writer will talk about eating local food in season and do a tasty cooking demo; learn how to make paper from textile designer, Robyn Borges; and The Good Earth gurus, Joyce and John Holscher will talk about organic gardening. It promises to be an eventful event and I hope to see you here!

And if you can’t be here, where will you go for September inspiration?

It’s time to think about next year’s garden.  (When isn’t it time to think about next year’s garden?!)  Last week Gail cleaned out the cutting bench, filled it fresh with new perlite and we’ve both started hoarding plants for next year’s garden.  Even into my 5th year here, I still don’t feel that confident about propagation.  I’m amazed when my seedlings germinate and a little bit astounded when a cutting takes root.  But tip cuttings are so easy (Gail makes it look so easy, anyway).  You just have to learn by feel what kind of growth to look for.  Now that I’m starting to get the hang of it, I’ve gotten greedy – if a plant is loaded with perfect cuttings, I have to be careful not to want to take them all (we don’t have that kind of space)!

Plants have built in cellular level mechanisms for survival and reproduction.  Some plants will root if the stem touches the ground; some will put out roots and shoots if there’s a mere hint of a whisper of the soil nearby.  I can imagine the potted succulent (left) leap frogging in all directions if we only gave it the ground.  Plants have certain cells that wait for hormonal direction before becoming whatever the plant needs for new growth.  To make new plants, we just have to trigger those cells to make roots.

Step one:  Fresh as a daisy in the morning before plants have transpired the day’s water away, choose a growing tip that is neither so wimpy that it will keel over, nor so sturdy that it’s brittle and woody feeling.  Shoot for fat, green, flexible growth preferably before it has set a flower bud.  Remove it from the plant using snips or a knife and place it in water or a baggie until you’re ready to root it.

Step 2:  Make a clean cut below about two sets of leaves.  Using a sharp knife or scalpel, remove the lower set of leaves right at the stem being careful to not damage the stem.  This is where those versatile cells live.  Cut the remaining sets of leaves by a third or half to restrict transpiration and cut flower buds off to force energy to the roots.

Step 3: Dip the end of the stem in rooting hormone – this gives the plant’s own auxin a fake auxin boost.  We use the kind that includes a fungicide.  Don’t lick your fingers after this point in the process.

Step 4:  Plant the cutting in a rooting medium like sand (again, we use perlite) with the cut nodes below the surface.  Place the cuttings in a bright light spot and keep them moist.

Step 5: Wait.

But don’t just take it from me.  There are beautiful books (Making More Plants by Ken Druse is the prettiest instruction manual I’ve ever seen. – Check it out in my Amazon link on the left.) and there are plenty of websites with a lot of detail if you want to learn more about the process.

Do you take cuttings?  Do you bring favorite plants in for the winter in case your cuttings don’t take?  Do you think it’s all too much trouble and shop for new things in the spring instead?

I think there’s a whole lot of “necessary” and not a lot of “evil” (see the previous post) when it comes to seed annuals.  It’s true that they cost the moon as pushed plants in 4″ pots at garden centers but if you plant them as nature intended – as seeds, they cost beans.  Play your cards right and next year you’ll have them again absolutely free.

Those of us who allow self seeders into our gardens probably all have a love/hate relationship with them.  Gail spent most of June and early July trying to eradicate Verbena bonariensis from the gardens but we still have plenty of it.  Another year or two of diligent seedling weeding and we might be Verbena free.  Then we’ll probably miss it.  I have so much Nicotiana sylvestris and N. mutabilis in my own garden that I can’t see anything else.  I’m not sure that’s a bad thing this year but next year I might regret letting it grow wild.   We thought Julie had weeded out all of the Snow On The Mountain (Euphorbia marginata) but we have a lovely crop in just the right corner of the Cutting Garden bed.  And we always have peony flowering poppies early in the summer though we pull those seedlings out by the handful too.  The lovely thing about self sowers is that sometimes nature plants them by happy accident in exactly the perfect spot and we can edit the rest without feeling the least bit guilty.

Seed annuals are an easy-peasy way to stretch summer color to frost.  Things like Zinnias and Cosmos go from seed to bloom in about 6 weeks (direct sow in mid July for full bloom now) and the cooling temperatures of September keep the blooms from blowing out quickly.  This patch of Cosmos sulphureus (right) was sown the week of July 21st and should burst into bloom any day now.  (A little late at 7 weeks).

We saved the Cosmos seed from a batch of Polidor Mix we bought from Stokes last year.  A lot of seed catalog companies are – this is shocking to me – either owned by Monsanto or buy their seeds from producers owned by Monsanto.  They are replacing open pollinated heirlooms with hybrids (vegetable varieties especially) at an alarming rate.  In order to have the same plant next year, gardeners have to purchase the seeds all over again.  Here at Blithewold, we save the seeds that come true, allow the self sowers to work their design magic and we do still spend some beans – not the moon – on new varieties and our favorite hybrids every year.

Do you grow any annuals from seed?  How do you feel about the prolific self sowers?  Do you have favorites?  Do you save seeds?

… aren’t coming to an end just yet!  Just because school buses are stopping traffic and old fashioned fashionistas are shooting poison daggers at anyone who dares to wear white, it doesn’t mean summer is over.  Not by a long shot.  Or at least a good month on this edge of the world.

I know I’m not the only one who’s starting to lose steam and wanna-garden energy but truly it doesn’t get much better than September. The days are apple crisp, the light is in an intensely golden slant and the garden has never seemed more colorful or full of wild vibrations.  Why then is my own garden at home a good thing thing that has come to an end?  Why am I sick of it and ready for fall?

We’ve had a lot of comments in the last couple of weeks from Blithewold visitors including one from a green industry professional about how much color we still have in the gardens.  Truth is, we still have a color riot because we use plenty of annuals and tender perennials that stretch their full glory right up to a frost.  The visiting professional (for whom summer was evidently already over) referred to annuals/tender perennials as “a necessary evil”.

We have the means (a greenhouse) to take cuttings, start seeds and grow hundreds (thousands?) of plants for the gardens over the winter.  Without those plants, these gardens might look as over with as my garden at home.  The “evil” in annuals and tender perennials is that they are almost as expensive to buy (as grown plants) as any hardy perennial that might survive 10 years in your garden.  The reason to have them is that their season is now – just when the garden and we should be enjoying a second wind.  Plants like dahlias, salvias, lantanas and zinnias are really worth every $8.00 because they make such excellent technicolor companions for late blooming perennials like anenomes, caryopteris, roses, and asters.

In a way it feels like September is the moment we’ve been working towards all summer.  We still have to keep up with the watering, deadhead a little, and edit here and there but our biggest job now is to revel in the pretty of it.  I don’t want to be tired of my own garden this time next year – I want to be proud of it.  So I’m making myself a promise for next year:  I will, at the very least, throw some money in the direction of dahlias and throw some zinnia seeds in the direction boring places in my garden!

Do you get tired of your garden by this time of year or are you still madly in love with it? Do you make room in your garden and budget for annuals and tender perennials?

…Please stay tuned for even more thoughts on seed annuals and possibly Possible Propagation and if you need a hit of color and September inspiration, come on over.  Gardener’s Day is coming up September 20th – save that date and hope to see you here!