As we’re blown toward a new year, I feel bound by tradition – or is it just habit? – to take a look back at the past year and make endless lists of plants to know and grow (and not grow). Below is a continuation of a list I started the other day of the plants I was particularly impressed with and want to see more of. They’re in no particular order, and as always, I hope you’ll click on pictures for a better view or hover over for captions.

Clary sage (Salvia sclarea) stopped everyone in their tracks – not just because at the edge of the path it was in anyone’s way, but with its large fuzzy leaves topped by enormous luminous green(ish-white) salvia spikes. This is an early-summer bloomer with a reputation for being chock full of medicinal properties – perfect for an herb garden. Or a cutting garden if it happens to plant itself there…

Clary sage’s large soft leaves couldn’t hold a candle to wooly morning glory’s (Argyreia nervosa) though. Gail spotted this plant twined 30′ high in a friend’s garden last year and resolved to find one for Blithewold. She planted ours mid-summer, babied it through the heat, and it did its best to cover the vegetable bed arbor by September. It appeared to flower, sort of. We think. But it’s really all about those silver heart-shaped leaves unfolding…

I really can’t believe that Nicotiana didn’t make it onto my Fine Gardening list last year. I am so in love with all of them – maybe I have a thing for large soft leaves. I always thought it was the flowers… Either way, they’re great plants – so easy to grow, so lovely, so long lasting (they only just got hit by an extra hard frost) and so generous with their seeds. I’m always especially thrilled to see N. mutabilis and ‘Lime Green’ come back but I can’t help order more varieties of seeds every year – every available variety, please and thanks.

While I seem to be on the subject of awesome leaves I’ll just add one more (two more) to today’s post. Licorice plant (Helichrysum) is totally in keeping with some of the above for having really great wooly, silvery leaves. What I especially loved about this plant was how it wove itself through its neighbors in the North Garden – it’s never just for containers.

And now for something completely different: We’ve had sweet fern (Comptonia peregrina) in our entrance bed for a few years now so I’m not sure why I noticed it with fresh eyes this year. It could be because the mosquitoes were particularly persisitant and a visitor pointed out how you can use the leaves, lovely leathery, rick racked and fragrant things, as a natural bug repellant (rub on skin). Brilliant. Sweet fern is one of our natives too and if you can give it full sun and terrible soil – say that slope where nothing else grows – it colonizes beautifully.

There are a few more plants on the post-it note next to my keyboard and I have the feeling I’m forgetting something important, so this again is to be continued. Next year. — Happy New Year!

Last year Steve Aitken, the editor of Fine Gardening magazine, sent out a survey inspired by the list of 100 essential country-music songs Johnny Cash shared with his daughter Rosanne. Steve asked for a list of top 10 (plus one) essential plants that we thought every newbie gardener ought to know about. I’m thrilled to see my original answers here (scroll down) and in the January/February issue. It’s funny though to see my list a year later – it could easily have changed 365 times between then and now – and although I stand by my selections because they’re tried and true faves, I have at least 11 more to add (or a baker’s dozen) this year. In no particular order:

(click on pictures for larger view – hover for captions)

Euphorbia x martinii  ‘Ascot Rainbow’. I can’t get over the gorgeousness of this plant. There really does seem to be a rainbow’s worth of colors in the leaves – even more pronounced as the nights got cooler.

I’m really surprised that I didn’t put Eryngium planum on my Fine Gardening list. I adore its prickliness, its stem-to-stern true-blueness, and the fact that at any given sunny midsummer moment there are at least a dozen different species of bees and wasps working it.

Monarda fistulosa ‘Claire Grace’ was a new beebalm (or wild bergamot) for us this year and although I hope it is every bit as thuggish as Jacob Cline, I suspect it’s more mild mannered. It started blooming in early July and stayed upright, mildew-free and lovely as it formed seedheads, which incidentally are now providing us with winter interest Piet Oudolf-style.

Another new one (to us) that I loved and never deadheaded was Agastache ‘Black Adder’. It’s listed as hardy from zones 6-9 so my fingers are crossed that it comes back (no worries when winter continues to act like fall) and if it does return, the only thing I’ll do differently next year is pinch it early on to encourage compactness. (Let go, it grew to a tilt-y 4 feet in our nice soil.)

I can’t leave this genus without tooting a horn for Agastache ‘Acapulco Orange’ and A. x ‘Heatwave’ too. They pick up major speed late summer and carry the garden on their slender shoulders all the way to frost. Can’t beat the tender perennials. And sometimes they come back too – Acapulco Orange did.

Stay tuned for part two. I look forward to finding out if the list I jotted down and started today, changes tomorrow… And I really hope you work on a list of your own and share it – or a link to it – here.

By the looks of a stubborn delphinium in the Rose Garden, I’m not the only one who would prefer to think of the winter solstice as the official start of summer. But winter might actually be here at long last. A cold blast over the past weekend froze the pond into a scattered ream of ice sheets. (Why does water sometimes freeze in rectangles?) The nicotiana and pineapple sage are finally, in the words of Miracle Max, “mostly dead”. And it really seemed like it was finally time to do the final cut back.

Gail and I went up to the Rose Garden today to trim the whips on the roses (we never do a hard pruning this time of year, rather a light cut back of the extra long canes so they won’t break in the wind or under a snow-load) and not only did we find that diehard delphinium but a lot of the roses are still budded and ready to bloom the next warmish sunny day. It’s almost as if they knew that the cold would be followed by more of the gentle weather we’re all getting used to. So we decided to let them be one more week. Some of us might prefer snow but I’ll definitely take roses for Christmas if they’re being given as a gift.

I’m actually still glad to have an excuse to continue doing the putting-the-garden-to-bed chores in stages too. I love having an excellent reason – besides taking pictures – to be out in the garden. A friend of mine recently remarked on how much she was enjoying the long fall because she was still willing to go outside. It’s true for most of us probably that once winter hits it gets harder and harder to convince ourselves that bundling up and going outside is a better idea than staying inside where it’s toasty, and there’s a kettle going on the stove… and we are already in our pajamas… But so long as the weather outside is comfortable (not frightful) we gardeners know we’ll find joy out in the garden.

May your holidays be joyful – inside and out!

Looking back at my past December Garden Blogger Bloom Day posts I’m actually a little bit surprised that I remembered them wrong. I thought we had had late color in years past but this year really is unusual for the length of the lingering fall.

A lot of the plants in bloom now are the ones that are simply unwilling to give up. Here’s a little list of our hangers-on:

Other plants are blooming out of all proper sequence. I expect that of forsythia and the autumn-blooming cherry (in fact off-season bloom is the reason Prunus subhirtella ‘Autumnalis’  is so special) but flowering quince (Chaenomeles speciosa) really shouldn’t be blooming now (I couldn’t get a shot of ours because the few opening buds are at the tippy top of our largest shrub.) So many of the buds on the quince are swollen that I really fear for the inevitable frost-bite blast that could do in our spring show. And the skunk cabbage is a full 4 months early. Not all of those are up but enough of them to make me worry if there will be few for the bees come March. Or maybe the same plants will push out another round?

Are you worrying like we are about what a lingering fall might mean for spring?

Head over to May Dreams Gardens for Garden Bloggers Bloom Day and a look at what else is in bloom this December…

Despite increasingly frosty temperatures some plants in the garden seem unable to resist the urge to keep growing and are lending a whole new meaning to the idea of “evergreen”. Usually by now have extolled the virtues of evergreen foliage in the garden: how essential it is for structure and color particularly through the winter months. But we haven’t had the chance (aside from needing needles for holiday wreaths) to fully appreciate it yet. I won’t give away the oddly timed bloomers before Garden Bloggers Bloom Day on the 15th, but I can show you some examples of new growth, lingering fall color, and even prematurely swollen buds.

Apart from grousing about the weirdness of the weather and worrying over the plants that are headed towards winter in a very vulnerable state, you won’t catch me complaining. Part of me is anxious for the cold to hit but it’s the same part that knows I won’t be quite ready for it when it comes.

Because we’re still growing too. Even though the shading hasn’t been etched off the greenhouse yet (frost – snow even – is what does it) the plants are thriving and we’ve started taking another round of cuttings from the cuttings we took back in September. I feel like I’m just doing that because I can’t not, but actually, growing in the greenhouse doesn’t stop for winter and this work is all part of our normal cycle. We’ll take cuttings from these cuttings when the sun climbs over the greenhouse roof again in late February and March.

Are any of your plants still growing? Are you having a hard time knowing when to quit too?