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?

Pretty safe to say that it’s not going to be a great tomato year. If we’re very very lucky maybe we’ll get some honker waterlogged fruit with split skins but conditions are apparently favorable for something even less delicious. Late Blight is all over the news and typical of the media we have been primed for panic and widespread tomato mayhem. Truth be told, I am generally irritated by the culture of fear promoted by the press – it’s one of my pet peeves – but the more I read about Late Blight, the more I think “eeu”.

Phytophthora infestans (- can’t you just tell that this is something disgusting?) is the same disease that wiped out potatoes during the Great Famine in Ireland and could do (has done) the same in any monoculture of tomatoes or potatoes here if we don’t keep a keen eye out. The recommendation for anyone growing tomatoes is to check for infestation daily and bag up, throw out, Do Not Compost any plants that show any signs of the disease (for pictures and info, click here). But what really scares the daylights out of me is that we’ve collectively been advised to spray fungicides with clorothalonil – a skull & crossbones carcinogenic – as a preventive measure. Now, I can understand commercial growers doing this to protect their crops and livelihoods, but homeowners? Come on. We’re not growing a monoculture in our gardens – are we? How about we just enjoy something else this year? I for one will gladly pay a ransom especially for an organically grown, disease-free tomato if I have to and would be much happier and probably healthier if my neighbors upwind choose to do the same. And it seems to be a terrific Swiss chard, cabbage and lettuce year…

So far, Blithewold’s tomatoes are clean. The fungus, which overwinters on living tissue, must not have found any errant potato tubers left in the garden. And since we grow our own tomatoes from seed, we haven’t imported it either. But the weather isn’t on our side. Cool-ish days and nights (60-80°F) coupled with humidity and rain – we’ve had plenty of that – are ideal for spreading infection from garden to garden and as long as that continues we’ll have to keep our eyes peeled. (A stretch of stupidly hot weather, if we ever get the summer blaze we’re used to, will knock the disease out of contention.)

How are your tomatoes? Have you sprayed – or will you?

Rated NC 39 for graphic bug sex, violence and strong language

In a garden as beautiful as this (the North Garden this very morning) you might not be aware at first glance of the horrors lurking within and on top. But they’re here. The first Japanese beetle was sighted (by me) on July 6th and was ceremoniously snipped in half with an invective and a flourish (also by me). Ever since that day, we’ve had cans of soapy water at the ready and homicide in our hearts.

Normally I’m a very live-and-let-live sort of person. I don’t always mind an aphid or 2 and I generally think the bunnies in the garden are wicked cute and occasionally photogenic. But when it comes to wholesale destruction of something I love – particularly any plant in one of my favorite gardens, I lose my cool. Gail and I would never ever consider spraying poisonous chemistry to kill pests – it’s just not worth the risk to the volunteers’, visitors’ and our health – or the health of bugs we need and want in the garden. But I think nothing of hand picking, squishing (if I’m wearing gloves), drowning or feeding certain pests to the birds. (That said, our resident hawk family has been hard at work on the bunny population without any help from me.)

Japanese beetles feed on upwards of 300 species of plants and nothing in this part of the world feeds on them. There’s something wrong with that picture, isn’t there? So we try to do our top-of-the-food-chain best to control the population ourselves. We actually thought we might have put a dent in the numbers when we were planting this spring – every hole we dug was full of white grubs which of course we squished on sight. But I guess we weren’t able to get them all. We also have a population of Oriental beetles which are slightly smaller and a boring striped brown rather than the metallic auto body green of the Japanese beetles. The really disgusting thing about the beetles is that they tend to feed in sort of orgiastic pig piles.  According to my favorite bug book, Garden Insects of North America by Whitney Cranshaw, “The aggregation pheromones these insects produce combined with attractive odors produced by food plants often result in large numbers feeding together.” But that does make it so much easier to knock bunches at once into the beetle juice can… I remember thinking last year that there were fewer beetles and I wonder if it’s too soon to say that there are even less so far this year. Maybe the milky spore disease that Dan spread 3 years ago now is kicking in – and maybe, just maybe hand picking isn’t just a cathartic serial killing spree for us. Maybe we are actually slowing them down. Fingers crossed. And here’s a helpful hint if happen to be looking for one: They’re sleepy early in the morning. By mid morning on a hot day they’re more likely to see you coming and fly into your hair.

Have your beetles emerged yet? Do you have homicide in your heart?