Tricia Bailey, our gardens intern this year, is a horticultural therapist by training and instinct has an infectious enthusiasm and energy for the work she clearly loves to do. She is even willing to write about it, which is a wonderful treat for me, and I believe will be a breath of fresh air for you. (See if you can feel it…) She and Gail clearly had fun working (playing) together to create a tour of the property that indulges and excites all of the senses. (Accompanying photos by Gail Read.)

Gail and I had the great pleasure of taking seven guests on our first sensory walk. It was Saturday, the first day of fall. The autumnal equinox is now upon us and with it the sky’s appearance changes, the colors are fading, the clouds are more expressive, the temperature slightly cooler and the air a bit crisper. It was a perfect day to enjoy our natural environment.

We had designed our walk to be a personal exploration with nature. We would stop at a chosen specimen where Gail would make the introduction and acquaint us with its plant biography and then I would encourage each guest to engage one or more of their senses for a more personal experience.

We decided to begin our walk among our majestic trees. It was so fitting for the beginning of our journey. Our sensory system is akin to being the roots of a tree. Without strong roots the tree cannot flourish and without a strong sensory foundation, we may not either.

During our walk we felt soft needles, hairy bark, rough cones and velvety catkins. We smelled the many plants that emit sweet, spicy, and woodsy tones. We listened for wind, waves, rustling grasses, birdsong and buzzing insects. We viewed colors, shadows, shapes, contrasts and reflections.

We finished our walk and indulged in refreshments that engaged the taste buds. We enjoyed sweet, sour and salty. We shared memories, laughter and conversation.

I’m reminded of the quote from English writer Hanna Rion Ver Beck –

“The greatest gift of the garden is the restoration of the five senses.”

Blithewold is truly a sensory delight.

Do you feel restored after a walk in nature?  Do you have a familiar sound, smell or taste that sparks a memory of good times?

As much as I love the freshness of a June garden, September is my favorite month. Some visitors seem surprised that we “still” have so much color but I can’t imagine it any other way. The gentle light and the beautiful cool blue days demand that we be outside reveling in exuberant color. We definitely plan for this time of year (in truth, for the whole summer into fall season) to be stupendous but it doesn’t take much – a few annuals like zinnias, ageratum, and alyssum; and a handful of tender perennials like dahlias, salvias, angelonia, and plectranthus and you’re golden. Or the garden is in any case, especially in the slanted light of September. Even with roses, delphinium, asters, and euphorbia (re)blooming in the Rose Garden, it wouldn’t be nearly as spectacular without the annuals and tender perennials giving them a boost. I know a lot of gardeners choose not to buy plants that won’t survive the winter outside but I think those plants are worth every penny (and seed annuals like zinnias really do just cost pennies) because they’re the ones that carry the garden so effortlessly past its usual early summer peak well into the prettiest months of all.

And of course, some of them can survive the winter and carry whatever we spent on them into the next season too (and the next after that and the next…) We’ve started taking cuttings of some of our favorites like porterweed (Stachytarpheta mutabilis), cigar plant (Cuphea spp.) and heliotrope. We’re lucky to have the greenhouse for overwintering them but sunny windowsills would work too.

Is your garden as colorful as you’d like it to be this month? Do you use annuals and tender perennials too or do rely on late-blooming hardy perennials and shrubs? For a look at a whole world of colorful September blooms, check out May Dreams Gardens Garden Bloggers Bloom Day (September 15).

Our Tuesday volunteer group has been known for years — for ever? — as the “Deadheads” because they work in the Display Garden and traditionally, the biggest summer chore in these gardens has been to deadhead flowers to keep them from quitting and going to seed. While we still ask for help deadheading the annuals in the cutting garden to keep them blooming gangbusters, in recent years we have not deadheaded the other beds as rigorously. Now when the Deadheads ask if we want echinacea deadheaded in the pollinator bed we say, “No… let’s leave their seeds for the birds.” And when they ask if they should deadhead the betony, beebalm, cardoon, teasel, and eryngium, we say, “Nah, don’t those look cool?! Let’s leave them up for the winter.” Perhaps the Tuesday group needs a new name…

I know the betony (Stachys monnieri ‘Hummelo’) wouldn’t have bloomed again because we cut a couple of clumps back last year as a test, but the beebalm (Monarda fistulosa ‘Claire Grace’) might have rebloomed, and there are still buds opening along the echinacea stems. But right now I wouldn’t trade any of those seedheads for their flowers. Not only are they beautiful (in the eye of this beholder) but there is more wildlife activity in that garden than I ever remember seeing before. It’s positively mesmerizing – I’ve been so distracted that visitors have caught me gawping instead of working. Goldfinch, wrens, and sparrows are all vying for seeds and hummingbirds, bees and butterflies are still zinging around working all of the flowers that aren’t ready to go to seed yet.

But there’s a fine line between letting the garden go to seed and letting the garden go. Some gardeners and visitors might think the cardoon seedheads look more like the undead than the simply un-deadheaded. And I imagine that it might make some people nervous to watch them self-destruct and send helicopters wheeling on the wind to float with the butterflies and catch in the grass and on bare patches of soil. But that doesn’t make me nervous. As long as the stalks are still standing upright, surrounded by a colorful garden that looks tended (it’s been meticulously weeded and propped, if not deadheaded) rather than abandoned, and the birds are happy, then I figure we gardeners are as golden as the light that falls this time of year.

Do you deadhead everything up until the bitter end or do you leave seedheads standing for their looks and for the birds? Have you found a happy medium? (Have we? – All opinions welcome!)

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?