For gardeners, this blustery cusp of fall into winter is the true turning of the year – much more real to us than the holiday in January that opens the calendar year. As our gardens cycle now into rest, so do we cycle into reflection. This is our time to look gratefully back on a season rich and bright enough to sustain us through a long, dark winter. And, of course, the official Thanksgiving holiday is a perfect excuse (as if we need one) to celebrate the abundance of the passing season and share it with generous abandon.

It is also the start of a new season at Blithewold. Just as our attention shifts this time of year from deciduous plants to evergreen, we also concede a shift from outside to inside. The mansion is once again lavishly and glitteringly decorated for Christmas, and will be open from November 28 to January 2. (Click here for hours and events. – And don’t forget that the grounds, gardens and greenhouse are open daily, year-round.)

Happy Thanksgiving!

The closer it gets to the holidays – and as the weather slides to the darkest, coldest time of year, the more I think about food. I know I’m not alone. Birds are hungry too. We don’t hang feeders here – there would be no way to keep up with them not to mention we’d need a separate and sizable budget to fund them. But we do offer a few natural breakfast buffets in the gardens and grounds. And after walking around looking for bird food, I have a whole new list of plants that I know need in my own starving garden.

Rather than cut everything back for the winter we leave some seedheads – like rudbeckia and echinacea – in the gardens because they are goldfinch favorites. Seed-eating birds also enjoy certain grasses like the Panicum virgatum ‘Heavy Metal’ planted at the Carriage House (matching the color of the cedar shingles exactly right now) as well as the goldenrod growing wild at the edge of the Bosquet.

Cedar waxwings love their namesake eastern red cedar (Juniperus virginiana). I had a hard time finding berries to photograph, perhaps because the birds have already come through, or the squirrels got there first, or maybe it just wasn’t a good year for berries with all the heat and drought. I wonder too about the bayberry (Myrica pensylvanica) because I couldn’t find a single berry on any of our plants (and I’m sure we have some females among them). The waxy fruit ripens in September (I have to admit I’ve never paid attention then) and it’s possible birds – any of dozens of different varieties – found them long before I looked. Virginia creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia) and Boston ivy (Parthenocissus tricuspidata) berries are already stripped too.

Winterberry (Ilex verticillata) and crabapples (Malus sp. – especially ones with very small fruit like ‘Prairifire’) are into-winter favorites for a lot of different birds. The fruit has to freeze and thaw before being soft enough to gobble up, which gives us gardeners a chance to glean some (visual) sustenance too during our darkest, starved-for-color season.

I know this is a short list – I didn’t touch the viburnums… What do you have in your garden that birds love to eat this time of year and through the winter?

Some blooms just don’t know when to quit and others are coming back for more. Although we’ve had our frost – and even a light dusting of snow, I guess it hasn’t been quite cold enough to turn off the sturdiest annuals/tender perennials like Salvia guaranitica and pineapple sage, agastache, and nicotiana. A few perennials and shrubs (such as the unstoppable Daphne transatlantica not shown here) are still putting out for the bees and there are a few – possibly confused – plants blooming a little bit all over again just in case. Their effort is paying off because the honeybees at least are still out and about taking whatever they can get before hunkering down for the winter. And it may be beside nature’s point, but we gardeners are enjoying the show too. I’m very happy to have so much to show off for Garden Bloggers Bloom Day, graciously hosted as always by Carol at May Dreams Gardens. (Despite the fact that there are still blooms galore, I’m sorely tempted to show more fall color. Maybe just one gratuitous sunset shot?) Mouse over for captions and click on for a larger view.

Do you have lingerers – or comeback blooms – in your garden too?

Throw leaves away? Perish the thought. I wish I could preserve fall’s leaves for color therapy sessions in the middle of winter. Right now I’m particularly taken with the changing colors on some of the shrubs and vines. I’ve never squinted at such a fluorescent color not in a highlighter marker as the redvein enkianthus (Enkianthus campanulatus). The Fothergilla gardenii is even prettier than a brand new box of 64 colors, and the Boston Ivy is as shiny and intensely red as fresh blood (who isn’t secretly enthralled by a bloody-gusher papercut?) What is your favorite shrub – or vine – for fall color?

Even if the colors will fade, the leaves are still worth keeping as the winter blanket and soil amendment that nature intended when she dropped them on the ground in the first place.

“Back in the day…” according to Gail, the Blithewold grounds crew vacuumed up all of the property’s leaves in mowers and dumped them in giant piles on the vegetable bed. Gail remembers spending blissful December days distributing the piles of shredded leaves and grass clippings (after walking on her knees three miles uphill in the snow to get here) throughout the Display Garden beds – and she doesn’t remember having to do nearly as much weeding in the spring as we (and by we, I really mean the volunteers) have done lately. This fall Gail’s wish for a return to the old-school method was granted, at least in part. If it ever stops raining, we’ll still be given a lofty pile or two of blown leaves to shred and use in the spring, but last week we were also given a few slightly grassy piles of pre-shredded leaves to spread immediately on the gardens. With any luck – so far the leaf layer hasn’t blown away – in spring we (again, the volunteers) will be able to plant the gardens without having to do major battle with the weeds first. On the down side, some of our volunteers – self-sowers, that is, such as emilia, poppies, talinum, snow-on-the-mountain, and blue spice basil – may be no-shows in the spring.

Do you cover your garden beds with leaves now or in the spring? Do you notice a difference in the amount of weeds or self-sowers?

It’s kind of astonishing that an “immense sense of abundance” was, for Gail and me, a take-away theme from the Garden Design luncheon given that Joe Eck, our speaker, so recently lost his partner in life and gardens, Wayne Winterrowd. Joe and Wayne spent their lives together creating gardens and Joe showed us a few examples of their designs – all labor intensive (“labor intensive gardens are our speciality”, says Joe) and all exuberant, lush celebrations of nature.

Joe approaches garden design from an intentionally theoretical angle – something that a lot of us plant junkies, Wayne included, do not. In the preface to Elements of Garden Design (by Joe Eck), Wayne writes, “I knew there was a difference in our approaches, mine tending to be from the plant up, and his from the hedge down – or, to put it another way, from dirt as opposed to theory.” Incidentally, after reading a quarter of the way through this book last last night, I have already added it to the stack of books I wish I had read before starting to pack plants randomly into my own tiny property.

Joe showed slides from four projects: Hanover, NH; Henry County, KY; Smithfield, KY; and Southern California (clicking the links takes you to the project photo albums on the North Hill website.) The gardens Joe and Wayne made were unified by particular aesthetic elements like rooms, themes (a room of mostly-daisies in Smithfield, KY!), frames, hedges and walls, and Joe says, “there need always be a vegetable garden.” After all, we only ever started to garden in order to eat from it. Their effort to make use of the local vernacular – native plants and materials made each garden entirely unique and site specific. And in all of their gardens, plants are allowed to exuberantly fill the confines – blurring edges, leaning on and growing through each other – with what Joe called an “immense sense of abundance”. The gardens were also designed and planted specifically for their gardeners with the affirmation that to a gardener, when some is good, more is better.

Blithewold too was designed for its gardeners with obviously careful thought for harmony, balance, contrast, scale and structure among other theoretical considerations. A light bulb flashed when I realized that, by Joe’s definition – and mine too now that it’s been validated – the whole property is a garden, not just the gardens (the flower beds) framed within it.

Have you given this kind of thought to your garden’s design? (Like me, do you wish you had?) Does your garden at least give you an immense sense of abundance?