Along with taking a good look back at last year’s successes and failures (I’ll get to those later maybe) we gardeners take this time to look forward and dream a little. (Incidentally, we are probably at our most optimistic right now: in January – the “dead of winter.”  Just before another storm pig-piles more snow on the garden.) Gail and I have been gathering our thoughts before we open the catalogs, and started to volley some ideas for next years gardens back and forth across the table. (This might well be the very best part of our job.)

We have both come to realize that we’re not interested in gardening just for our own or our (human) visitors’ pleasure. I haven’t forgotten that is a public garden – stick with me here: we have just started noticing that we habitually use words like “nature”, “habitat”, “environment”, and “ecosystem” and of course you already know that we are head over heels for pollinators. In truth, welcoming pollinators, insects and birds into the garden is ultimately self-serving because wildlife is good for the garden and what’s good for the garden is great for its visitors – as well as its gardeners.

So this year we’re considering buying or making bird, bat, butterfly, toad, and mason bee houses and as usual, we’ll be planting a lot of flowers. We’ll also make some changes to our maintenance practices to allow more seed heads to remain. All of these intentions will be part of how we form our designs, which we have every hope, will be as abundant and beautiful as ever.

And because we’re still on the sustainable gardening bandwagon (and can’t imagine ever hopping off of it) we’ll make a concerted effort to reduce our water needs by selecting plants with last summer in mind; we’re researching low growing and steppable lawn alternatives to plant in one of the Display Garden beds; and planning to keep invasive weeds out of the native wildflower area behind the summer house in the Bosquet. And because we love our human visitors too – and couldn’t do any of this if it weren’t for you, we’re imagining shady relief from blazing summer sun in our container bed, and planning to install more crowd pleasing roses as well as irrigation in the Rose Garden.

Are you starting to look forward and plan this year’s garden? Do you have a particular area of focus or any new intentions? Is there anything you’d like to see at Blithewold that I haven’t mentioned?

I’ve saved this end of the list for most of the plants I loved well enough to take them for granted — meaning, in some cases I haven’t yet shot their portrait.

6. I’m sure that no top ten list for a dry summer would be truly complete if it didn’t include lavender. (No list of mine would be complete in any case.) They were all perfectly lush despite the wet spring and because of the dry summer – our now venerable clumps of Lavandula x intermedia ‘Grosso’ especially. This year we also tried Lavandula angustifolia ‘Silver Edge’ (among others) in the herb garden and it has a silver lining sort of variegation that could make any gardener more optimistic. I don’t even remember the flowers. Whatever.

7. Lobularia - sweet alyssum – ‘Snow Princess’ on the other hand was all about the flowers. They are big (for an alyssum), honey-fragrant (as they should be), and absolutely unstoppable. We grew it in the Rose Garden and Gail claims to have cut it back weekly. I never noticed that she did that because the plants were rampant always. I think they would look even better draped over a wall or flowing out of a giant pot. Next year…

8. No list of Gail’s would ever be complete without a salvia and this year we have a Goldilocks tie between Salvia ‘Mystic Spires’ (a child-sized version of ‘Indigo Spires’) and enormous Salvia vanhouttei and Salvia elegans (pineapple sage). S. vanhouttei might be my secret favorite though because its deep wine color is so …  intoxicating.

9. All of the basils did really well too but I was especially impressed with the variegated Ocimum basilicum citriodorum ‘Pesto Perpetuo’ because it made a sturdy column and never bloomed so never bolted. Next year I’d like to try shearing it periodically for shape (and using the clippings for a perpetual pesto…) And as far as the blooming basils go, African blue will always be on our top 10 list and we’ve added a generous reseeder, ‘Blue Spice’ to the life list too. (No decent pictures of that one either, alas. My apologies.)

9.5 I do have decent pictures of Panicum elegans ‘Frosted Explosion’, a brandy new annual grass we spotted in the seed catalogs last year. It was a dry and fragile thing towards the end of the season but tucked it with neighbors it provided a fuzzy frothy sort of contrast from start to finish.

9.75 Acalypha wilkesiana (Copper leaf) was another plant that by virtue of being incredibly interesting to look at, made every one of its neighbors look extra fascinating too.

10. By contrast Kalimeris incisa ‘Blue Star’ was more easily overlooked. It’s on the tiny side – not quite Tom Thumb but nearly knee high to a toad stool. The daisy flowers were the color of today’s cold bluish sky and lasted nearly as long as winter feels – it was in constant bloom from June into September.

I know I’m forgetting something I loved a lot. Like all of the nicotianas… What are you wishing I had mentioned?

I am inclined to celebrate a new year when we sow sweet peas or when the daffodils bloom or when the leaves fall off the trees. But the beginning of January is as good a time as any to make a fresh start, and in any case, this  is when Gail and I really start over in the gardens, firming up our ideas for next year. (I mean this year.) And like most gardeners we always begin the process of planning by remembering the best and worst of the past season.

Hands down, the worst was the weather: much too much rain in March and then not nearly enough through the summer. But since there’s not a lot we can change about that I might as well move straight on to what was “best” despite the weather (keep in mind, we do water the gardens periodically during dry spells in hopes that nothing ever looks wretched.) Here are my favorite plants from this past year, in no particular order:

1. Allium schubertii and A. albopilosum (Star of Persia). Like a sustained display of firecrackers that sparkled in the garden well beyond when they first opened, and were extra super fun spray-painted.

2. Ricinus communis – Castor bean – ‘Pretty Purple’. This was supposed to be a 4′ tall form but for us even cut back it reached a good 8′. And it had the prettiest purplest leaves and a nicely branched structure (perhaps owing to being whacked back now and again.)

3. Pelargonium ‘Lady Plymouth’ (scented geranium). It’s all about the lacy white-edged foliage and vigorous habit. (Had it ever flowered, that would have been totally beside the point.) It was such a great companion plant that we’ll be hard pressed to not use it again in the Rose Garden.

4. Lespedeza thunbergii ‘Edo Shibori’. Visitors and bees adored this plant. I disparaged it for being beige but then discovered I loved it too, which often happens with things I think I hate. After it went to seed it looked lit from within.

5. Echinacea purpurea ‘Virgin’. I still prefer the color of  ‘Green Envy’ (to any other color on any other flower) but nothing beats the unstoppable blooming and sturdy uprightiousness of ‘Virgin’.

6. (to be continued…)

What were some of your favorites from last year?