I think it’s because I work here year-round that I tend to forget that Blithewold was built as a summer retreat. The Van Wickle/McKee family came up from Pennsylvania and later down from Boston and spent the entire summer here, from late May to October. Unlike most of the grandiose Newport mansions which were occupied for shockingly short periods of high society socializing, Blithewold was lived in: It was their home – and probably all the more precious and beloved for being their summer home.

I don’t know if it’s a universal tradition but around here – up and down the Eastern Seaboard at least – it seems like nearly everyone has a summer home-away-from-home, whether it’s borrowed or bought, really rustic or extra schmancy. These houses (or mansions or villas or camps or cabins) are often shared with extended family and passed down through the generations and the more we move around in our lives, the more these places become the constant. And the summer place (the shore, the lake, the island, the mountains) has all the blissful associations of endless summer days with absolutely nothing to do (besides swimming, reading, sailing, drawing, napping, eating, playing cribbage or cutthroat Trivial Pursuit, and laughing with family – to name just a few nothings) to give it even more significance and giant chunks of our hearts.  When I think about how attached I am to the place my family rented for a couple of weeks every summer for 70 or so years, I can only begin to imagine how much the Van Wickle/McKees must have loved Blithewold.

I’m way off the garden topic today because I’m about to go off on my own summer vacation and I can think of nothing else! I wonder, do you get away with your family to the same place every year? Where does your heart live?

I’ll be away for 2 weeks and I hope you’ll return when I do to see how dramatically the gardens have changed in the meantime. Happy summer – wish you were here!

It could happen to anyone. Even the “professionals” get it a little bit wrong sometimes … sometimes in a pretty big way. Last week when I discovered a rather substantial error in mistaken identity that Gail and I made, I swore that I wasn’t going to tell a soul. It was too embarrassing. It seemed like everywhere I looked another wrong plant was about to bloom in the North Garden. I kept pulling them out and stuffing them deeply into the weed bag while looking guiltily over my shoulder in case anyone saw. I was pretty mortified. But then today, when I was still finding clumps of mistake and Lilah turned it into an I-Spy game, I found it much more hilarious and thought you might get a chuckle out of it too.

I’m sure it could happen to anyone. This spring, in our annual effort to freshen and improve the North Garden, Gail and I moved several perennials from the Display Garden including a couple dozen divisions of Echinacea purpurea. We did this pretty early in the season – I can tell you that it was Monday, April 27th because I wrote in the calendar, “Gail and I moved echinaceas from DG to NG” – and on that date they were just minuscule clumps of pointed basal leaves and roots. Well. It turns out that some of them weren’t echinaceas at all. Neither of us has a memory of any rudbeckia in with the echinacea in the Display Garden but I just yanked an easy dozen Black-eyed Susans (Rudbecka fulgida) out of the North Garden. We did introduce a couple of new colors into that garden this year but school bus-yellow, as one of our good friends describes it, is definitely not one of them.

The good news is that the garden is really full and it’s impossible to see where any of these plants came out. As a matter of fact, that many echinaceas might have been too many – but we won’t know that until we maybe try again next year. Meanwhile, I feel slightly less idiotic since discovering that E. purpurea was once identified as R. purpurea and our mistake was an honest one. And yet…

It could happen to anyone – couldn’t it?

A rainy day offers many possibilities to the dedicated gardener. Even though a few of us might see a storm as a welcome opportunity for a break (I’m sure I’d like to wrap up on the couch with a cup of tea, a good garden book in my paws and a dog on my feet), there are others of us who not only have a job to do, but can’t quit fussing with plants. There’s always some kind of gardening to do inside when it’s raining outside besides watching the grass grow. I know this to be true because it’s been raining lately. A lot.

Gail and Lilah and I have been slowly chipping away at moving all of the plants out of the greenhouse. It’s a lot like moving out of an apartment – the hardest decisions are always saved for last when everyone is tired of the whole process. Gail made a couple of the final big pushes out during the most recent rain squalls but we both have a such a hard time getting rid of the dregs and stragglers that we went at it in stages this year.

The last plants in the greenhouse, aside from our array of succulents that can take the heat, are the sick, the dying, the forgotten and the ugly – our failures on display. It ain’t pretty. But it’s the hardest thing to surrender to failure and let them go. So we allocated clemency benches for plants that just desperately needed repotting and a bench for orphan adoptions – most of which seem to have ended up on my back porch. And we designated a pitch-it bench for a good last look at all of the plants we had both “had it” with. I have to hand it to Gail who finally hardened her heart and hurled them while Lilah and I had the much greater pleasure of potting up the keepers.

The greenhouse is mostly empty now. The fans are off, the hose coiled and Gail has earned another week’s vacation. Lilah and I will move the succulents outdoors next week – although if the rain continues, they’d definitely be better off staying put. And if we have to, we’ll move on to other rainy day chores like cleaning out the cellar, organizing old plant labels and ordering tulips. Can you guess which task we’ll tackle next?