As soon as I published about Stephen Orr speaking at our Garden Design Luncheon, I found out that he couldn’t get out of NYC. We know he would have been here if he possibly could and our thoughts are with him and everyone else whose plans – and lives – have been wrecked by Sandy. We are really counting our blessings, one of which is that at practically the last minute, Tovah Martin very graciously agreed to speak in Stephen’s stead.

Tovah came to our rescue not only by braving a scary, snowy nor’easter herself to get here, but by speaking about infusing the garden with personality, and giving us a reminder that I’d like to have engraved on my hori-hori: don’t worry so much about what other people think about your garden. And then she made a quick and gorgeous terrarium because, “if everybody in the world grew a terrarium, there would be no war.” (It was kismet that we had already made terrariums — temporaryums, actually — for table centerpieces. We’re that much closer to peace.)

Intermixed with practical design advice regarding repetition, textures, and shapes (“You’ve got to have balls. –I do.”) Tovah also told us to “be happy in the garden.” Know who you are and what you love. If, “in your heart of hearts,” you love open spaces and gazing at the horizon, make your garden so. If enclosure is comforting, create it. When speaking about garden art and tsotchkes, she says, “if a miniature golf course moves you, go for it!” Plant orange and pink flowers together if those colors resonate for you (as they do for me) and then don’t worry over what anyone might say about it. All of this advice hits home for me because (at home) I garden with wild abandon in an otherwise well-manicured neighborhood. I do worry a little about getting the hairy eyeball from my neighbors but in actuality, I have noticed returned smiles and what could be interpreted as nods of approval. Perhaps, as different as our gardens are from each other’s, we recognize a kindred passion, just as Tovah does when she visits other gardens. And that’s it right there. Tovah told me she’s never been to a garden that she didn’t think was amazing, just by virtue of it having been created. And the inspiring slides she showed reflected exactly that.

Tovah’s latest book, The Unexpected Houseplant: 220 Extraordinary Choices for Every Spot in Your Home is already one of my faves, as is The New Terrarium (for obvious reasons). Read them and any of her dozens of others and be inspired to be you. And most of all – have fun.

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?

Yesterday, Gail and I had the pleasure of a road trip to a garden in the wilds of southwestern Rhode Island that would have felt as far away as Borneo or any other exotic tropical place if it weren’t for the assortment of familiar native plants tucked in with the hundreds of pots of eucomis, colocasias, bananas, flamboyant trees, and gingers. We were treated to a personal tour led by this garden’s owner and designer, Louis Raymond, who is easily one of the most enthusiastic self-described plant geeks I’ve ever met. Even under the weather with a fever, Louis practically jumped out of his socks every time we noticed a particularly awesome plant or already knew of one of his fabulous finds by name.

I’m not sure many people garden the way Louis does. For one thing he gardens large. He has a Tetrapanax paperifer ‘Steroidal Giant’ planted next to his back door that surprised him by sending out a sucker that popped up in the dirt floor of his cellar — not to mention all of the pups that have come up in his terrace like unexpected dinner guests. But does its propensity to travel far and wide bother or worry him? Not one bit. He LOVES that plant and he’s thrilled that a couple of them didn’t die to the ground over the winter last year, which means he might get flowers this fall. Woot!

A lot of what Louis grows, big or small (mostly big) he grows in nursery pots, which give him all sorts of control. He can rearrange the furniture whenever he wants (I’ll have to go back to see if he does that), he can monitor the wildly different water requirements, and he can more easily overwinter all of the tender things he loves. I would wonder why he doesn’t choose to live in a southern climate except that I bet he’d be compelled to find cold storage for all of the northern climate plants he also dies for. Now he uses his cellar to overwinter some things and rents a cold greenhouse for the rest. If you look at his garden and only see how much work it would take to move everything in and out, you might be overwhelmed and miss its magic. Clearly it’s a labor of true, mad love — as is any great garden.

Louis’ enthusiasm is inspiring. We gardeners don’t mind the work we put in (we can still complain about the weather) because the process is almost the best part. But we all have different thresholds and tolerances for effort. I don’t mind pulling out shoots of rambunctious plants by hand when they go too far but someone else might prefer to confine the same plants to pots dug into the ground. What’s a lot of work in the mind of one gardener is a piece of cake to another and vice versa. I haven’t always enjoyed schlepping plants in and out of the greenhouse but Louis even made that seem like it should be a super fun thing to do — as long as you love the plants you’re moving. Suffice to say, Gail and I both left inspired to be even more adventurous. Stay tuned.

What kind of hoops do you jump through to grow the plants you love?

With Helen Dillon, whether you read her books (the latest is called Down to Earth with Helen Dillon) or hear her speak you know right away that she only tells the absolute truth – particularly when she’s talking about her own garden. If you’re not already a fan, Helen Dillon is a gardener and garden writer from Dublin, Ireland (originally from Scotland). She reminded us that Ireland falls along the same latitude as New Foundland and although the climate is much milder, the sun is just as low. She mentioned taking Graham Stuart Thomas around her garden on an “ugly August day”. Thomas she said, was not a fan of strong yellows and it wasn’t until she met Christopher Lloyd that she realized there can be more than one opinion on the matter. Now she knows that “yellow is so luminous. It lights the place up.” But she’s “gone off” dark purple.

Aren’t we all fickle? Over her 70 years as a gardener (how can that be?), Helen has formed plenty of her own decided opinions. And is as unapologetic about changing her mind as we should all be. She has taken out swaths of lawn and replaced “80′s looking” gardens (bit of this, bit of that; one of everything) with a gravel mulch garden full of self-sowers in the front of the house, and a limestone (bluestone) surrounded pool between her famous borders. She planted a grove of birches in her front garden because, says Helen, “I never don’t love birches.” And she has added blues (among other colors) to the red border and reds to the blue border because they were becoming like overworked paintings. She lately wrapped a “smug” cherub sculpture in barbed wire before deciding to remove it altogether. There’s no reason to be overly sentimental about anything in our garden that we don’t still love like we used to.

Her advice on plants was just as much fun. Try arranging teasels after they’re dead – simply cut them down and replant the stalk in a deep hole. – Because why not create an allay of teasel for the winter wind to whisk through? Put sun loving plants like agapanthus, Casablanca lilies, and tall alstromeria – not the squiffy short ones -  in pots (she uses “dustbins” and big black plastic containers with handles) and move them in an out of the garden as they bloom and fade. She may have “gone off” boxwood balls but says that if you want to topiary a holly tree (hers is mushroom shaped) it’s very quick and “you could have a go this afternoon.” She only allows beautiful plants in her garden and considers Sisyrinchium striatum ‘Aunt May’ to be the ultimate of all plants not to grow because most of the time it looks neither alive nor dead. On the other hand, she’s keen on ubiquitous candytuft (Iberis sempervirens) because you only ever need to buy one packet of seeds and after blooming the green seedheads are just as pretty. I’m sold. But then anyone who thinks that the rudest thing to say about a garden is that it looks “manicured” has me at hello.

Have you met Helen Dillon yet in person or through her books and articles? Do you let yourself be as opinionated?

It’s not EVERYDAY that one gets invited to sit in Martha Stewart’s studio audience, but last week a bunch of tickets to the Gardening Show were offered to Blithewold staff. And, honestly now, who wouldn’t want to get out of bed at 2:30 AM in the middle of a vacation to trundle off to NYC with a gaggle of coworkers and compatriots to see Martha her very self in action? Not me, that’s who. (I mean to say that I DID want to go. Mostly. Pretty much. Hey, I went – and went smiling: see for yourself at the 7 minute mark of the final q&a segment of the show – clips are here and Blithewold staff make up most of the second to last row, starting with Gail on the end up to me, wearing signature green.)

I’ve had a lot of time in the last few days to think about the trip (and recover from something kind of like jet lag) and I can tell you that what was most amazing (aside from the bucket of swag we all took home) was the spectacle of Martha’s army in action. There were a dozen or so assistants whose job it was to herd the audience from our line down the block, to the coatroom/waiting room to the studio and then to make sure we were color coordinated in some mysterious way (everyone in the audience was encouraged to wear gardening clothes and there were some wonderful hats and boots!) and bouncers to make sure we didn’t leave our seats. There were dozens more milling around the set moving props, watering plants (the fake greenhouse is full to the gills with live plants), sweeping invisible dust, cooking food, operating scads of cameras, shuffling cues, and giving orders. There was even a court jester whose job it was to make the audience laugh, smile more and clap louder, – LOUDER – then faaaade oouuttt…

I was feeling a little envious – after all, Blithewold doesn’t employ anywhere near the number of staff that Martha Stewart does. But now that I’ve thought about it, our behind the scenes staff, although fewer in number, is just as amazing for being able to put on a live show that never goes off the air or takes station breaks (well, maybe we get a bit of a break starting in January. But we’ll be back soon! Stay tuned. — APPLAUSE, APPLAUSE!… and fade out…)

Do you have an army working behind the scenes on your show?