I used to work in a windowless office so I completely understand when every other visitor tells me I have the best job in the world. I know. I totally do. But contrary to popular opinion amongst non-gardeners at least, the weather isn’t always 70 degrees and sunny; gardening is not always serenely therapeutic, and it’s certainly not glamorous. Especially not when it involves hauling out a truckload of annuals out of a garden, or shoveling dry compost in a windstorm. Gardening is dirty work.

It’s been an especially back-breaking work-week here between taking out the cutting bed to make room for tulips (next week’s work), cutting back, dividing and moving various perennials around like musical chairs, and forking compost into the two North Garden beds that won’t be trampled during the wall’s restoration project. Of all the hard work this week, the compost was definitely the dirtiest. But it was also the most potentially gratifying.

We haven’t amended the soil in the North Garden in a very long time and it has become compacted from years of feet and years of moving plants around in wet springs and falls, just like the Rose Garden had. And just like we did in the Rose Garden last year, we opted to use Bristol’s own (free) compost made with biosolids and yardwaste, which is super stinky but certified top-grade and tested pathogen-free. Thanks to a strong team of volunteers (Go Rockettes!) who plugged their noses to rake out and fork in the compost, we have every expectation that next year the North Garden will be every bit as stunningly healthy as the Rose Garden was this year. (The Rose Garden is still glorious by the way – although frost/snow might do it in tonight…)

We are coming close to the end of the dirtiest work in the gardens for the season. Once the tulips go in we will have to make a shift to the more mentally challenging work of planning next years gardens. – Just listening to Gail and Tara try to plan where to plant the tulips in the cutting garden is making me feel a whole other kind of exhausted…

Have you been doing dirty work in your garden too?

Don’t tell anyone but I am not a big fan of potted mums. For weeks now they’ve been popping up on doorsteps everywhere and plopped pot-and-all into every other foundation bed, and I can’t help yawning. They’re just so… municipal. Now, you know me – I’m all for whatever gets people buying plants and out in their gardens/yards, but mums? Really? There are so many other things that are more interesting – including …  mums.

Hardy Chrysanthemum – or Dendranthema or whatever the kids are calling them these days – are so much lovelier than the ones that are forced into bloom only to die from neglect or stress a few weeks later. Hardy mums have a looser more graceful form – extra loose if we forget to cut them back in June – and they live for practically ever and tend to be generous spreaders. Sheffield Pink is our grandmotherly favorite, spread along the edge under the dawn redwood hedge in the Display Garden and borrowed with something blue in the Rose Garden. I don’t know and haven’t been able to find the name of the sweet yellow and red one in the Rock Garden. Anyone recognize it?

It should be noted that some of the potted mums for sale are hardy mums in disguise. Neither Gail nor I remember planting the deep-pink mum in the North Garden and have credited a wedding decorator. (We toast the happy couple every fall.) Over the last few sunny days, it has been as covered with different species of bees, flies, wasps, etc as any aster. And that right there is reason enough to plant the hardy mums – they’re a great late meal for pollinators.

Potted mums have become part of people’s -non gardeners and gardeners alike – fall tradition but wouldn’t it be great if growers started forcing Cuphea micropetala instead? Aside from being an outstanding tender perennial worthy of a position in the garden from June on, the late summer-into-fall flowers look just like candy corn. And I know at least one nursery owner who puts luminous Plectranthus ciliata on display in the fall. I’m sold. How about you? Do you buy potted mums or have you made another late-fall flower part of your garden’s tradition?

The North Garden wall restoration project had already begun but it was almost as if we couldn’t wait to get at the wall itself. Three members of Team Florabunda came in on a wet and wildly windy morning, were reluctant to break for tea, and stayed past lunch to take the climbing hydrangea (Hydrangea anomala subsp. petiolaris) off of the North Garden wall. I never thought we’d be able to do it in a day but as soon as we started to rip-tear, none of us could stop. (Never underestimate the enjoyment a gardener takes in destroying something – gardening may in fact be one of the only creative arts that allows for that impulse. Don’t we all kind of love to weed?)

Without the hydrangea, the wall looks a lot smaller, and a lot more precarious. It became very clear as we worked that the very hydrangea that must have contributed to the wall’s downfall was also helping to hold it up. The edge along the east side is severely bowed and another section by the steps had begun to separate – you can just see the light of day through it in the picture below (top right). (Click on pictures for larger view.)

But other things were revealed as well, such as the quartz rocks that young Augustine collected in her travels and asked the masons to insert (also visible in the stone steps picture above.) And it’s much easier now to see the supports for a bench under the star. Gail and I only learned of the bench’s existence when we visited the archives to look at old pictures a couple of weeks ago. When the North Garden was divided into parterres, the bench was in line with the bowling green and the low fountain at the edge of the Bosquet, and must have been removed when the garden was done over in borders.

We all hoped to find buried treasure as well and in a way we did. The wall itself is a marvel and it will be wonderful to see it restored. And in case you are shocked about the demise of the hydrangea – that filled the truck just about to its limits – Fred and Dan took cuttings earlier in the year. It lives and will be replanted.

Do you enjoy giving in to the destructive impulse too? Cathartic, isn’t it?

While the weather is still so mild and the nights still so warm, it feels decidedly premature to bring plants back into the greenhouse. I’d much rather keep enjoying all the color out in the garden. (So much color!) But the time is absolutely right. It’s much easier on the plants if they come in with enough time to acclimatize before we close the vents and turn the heat back on. – That’s particularly important for houseplants and advice I really should be following at home, come to think of it…

Over the last few days we have brought cart load after heavy-back-breaking cartload of container plants back inside along with dozens of tender perennial stock plants. We’ve pushed aside the office supplies and made a colossal mess of the potting shed – it’s always gratifying to use this room (where I sit as I type surrounded by muddy tracks of potting soil) for its primary purpose – and it’s been amazing to watch the greenhouse transform from an airy bare-bones space back into a garden. (Click on pictures for larger view.)

Our one consolation for losing the plants in the (outside) garden is that they all look just as beautiful inside. Actually, there’s something about bringing plants indoors that makes them seem extra precious and lovely somehow. So lovely in fact that we decided the greenhouse is too nice not to linger in. We hope we will still have room for the livingroom ensemble after our collection of phormiums comes inside…

Have you started bringing the garden back inside?

The North Garden Star Wall Project has officially begun! (The wall, 100 years old this month, will be restored this winter.) Yesterday Team Rockette dug and hauled hundreds of pounds of perennials out of the two beds along the North Star wall and southeast side and heeled them in the vegetable bed (readied by Team Deadhead on Tuesday) for the winter. They also unceremoniously pitched all of the annuals along with moldy-old Phlox paniculata ‘David’ (it may be mildew resistant for awhile but for us, no longer) and anything infested with goutweed (Aegopodium podagraria), which over the last few years has insidiously reentered the North Garden in a number of places.

As hard as the work was yesterday – we all needed restorative naps afterwards – I kept thinking about how much easier it was, psychically at least, to do a major renovation project now as opposed to spring. As hard as it is to cut back or take out late season flowers that the bees and butterflies are still working, I find it much more difficult to move or destroy anything with fresh growth full of the season’s potential. And fall weather is much more reliably cooperative too. The ground is still warm so plants’ roots can take hold easily and there’s plenty of rain in the forecast. As much as we’d like to be able to get back into the North Garden with Team Florabunda, today’s rain is helping yesterday’s transplants settle into to their temporary home. The timing for that is also perfect. As long as you’re careful to not plant wherever you’d want to sow the early crops next spring (and we were careful) a vegetable garden makes a brilliant holding bed for anyone that doesn’t have space for a dedicated nursery bed.

We still have to get the roses (Ballerina) and hydrangeas (Limelight) out and sundry back row denizens but we’re nearly there thanks to the Rockettes – and the Tuesday Deadheads – (we could not have done this without them) and we’re right on schedule despite the rain. Stay tuned for progress reports and maybe even a discussion about all of the ideas being floated about potential design tweaks. (If the garden is going to be under the mayhem of construction, why not think about making a change or two? – Always preserving the family’s intentions, of course.)

Are you starting a big project now too? Do you prefer to do the work in spring or fall?