There are often artists in the garden. Some bring easels and paints, others bring notebooks and pens, or just their imagination. Ellen Hoverkamp brought her flatbed scanner and laptop.

If you did as I suggested back in May and bought Ken Druse’s latest book, Natural Companions: A Garden Lover’s Guide to Plant Combinations, you’d recognize Ellen as the artist who so beautifully illustrated those pages.

For two full days last week Ellen was an artist in residence, camped out in the carriage house making bee-like forays back and forth into the gardens for stems and branches.

She drew the shades and made the room as dark as possible to create portraits of Blithewold’s gardens on the surface of her scanner that have the immediacy of a plein air painting with the detail of a botanical etching months in the making. Given the ephemeral nature of cut specimen, Ellen has to work quickly to capture their vitality but what isn’t obvious, because the images are so fresh, is how much time she takes and how much care she puts into each composition. It’s only when you really stare into their details that you notice the details within the details. How one flower sort of speaks to another and how the eye is allowed to travel around without slamming against anything out of place.

I probably wouldn’t even be aware of how perfect her compositions are (which is part of what makes them so enjoyable) except that when I visited her at the end of my work day, she was taking tweezers to a tiny portion of a petal in a corner of the corner that didn’t hit her eye quite right and showed no sign of fatigue. She’s got serious skill wrapped around the kind of hyper-critical perfectionist temperament artists are often born with, coupled with a patience some of us (I) lack. It was such a wonderful treat to get to get a glimpse of her process and help her pick from the gardens. And I’m thrilled that she’ll be back next Thursday, 6-8pm to show off what she made here. Come if you possibly can. Her work is inspiring on its own but her enthusiasm adds a-whole-nother dimension to it. And if you haven’t bought a copy of the book yet you’ll have that chance as well. I’m hoping she’ll have prints for sale too. There’s one I covet of the pollinator bed, with a sprig of Boltonia ‘Nally’s Lime Dot’ whispering in the ear of a big orange dahlia, that has me seriously reconsidering whether I really need things like lightbulbs, toothpaste, and trousers more than art…

Have you met Ellen or her art yet? Will you come on Thursday?

Even after so many years gardening (how many? I’m much too young to say 20+) it still feels counter intuitive to transplant in the fall. Maybe it’s because I love the fall garden and don’t want to disrupt it. It’s also so full and lush that it isn’t always obvious where one plant ends and another begins. Where to dig? The only plants I don’t have to question and won’t miss in the fall display are peonies. (And come to think of it, maybe iris and every other spring bloomer…) Peony foliage always looks especially terrible by now though (that said, the new intersectional peonies still look great) and I’m all for cutting it back even if that means leaving a gaping hole. And I certainly can’t imagine moving them in the spring when their new foliage unfurls like fragile baby chicken fingers. They’d survive transplant then – they’re made of tough stuff after all, but they’d resent it and so would I. Now’s the time.

The peonies in the Rose Garden, planted only 3 years ago, were enormous this year – too big for hoops. And no one but me loved the scraggly weirdo, ‘Alley Cat’ so we put transplanting them on the fall to-do list and got down to it last Thursday.

Anyway, out they came and in they went into the Cutting Garden peony row where I will still be able to enjoy old ‘Alley Cat’ and maybe no one else will notice them and ask with a curled lip, “Is that what it’s supposed to look like?!” I’ll miss that question because it always made me laugh… And they’re all ready to go for next year. Their eyes have formed and we made sure to plant them within 1-2″ of the surface so they’ll bloom away come spring. (Eyes down too deep won’t bother bud up.)

I think it was a perfect way to start the fall planting season. I seem to need to ease into it unlike in spring when I’m raring to go. But we won’t actually start playing musical perennials until after the mansion closes Columbus Day weekend, and the last wedding is held, and we’ll shoot to be done by the end of the month because then we’ll have a few hundred bulbs to plant.

Have you started transplanting yet? Did you, or will you move peonies now too?