Before Gail and I begin in earnest to plan and order for next year’s gardens I had to spend a little time looking back through the year’s pictures. I always need to jog my memory about what worked and what didn’t and remind myself what plants I fell – or stayed – in love with. The following 10 are a sort of random assortment in order of when I noticed them and had to shoot their portrait. Nearly all of these also held their own through the season, in bloom and out of it.

1. Paeonia x ‘Julia Rose’ was one of our new Itoh or intersectional peonies – crosses between herbaceous and tree peonies. They were all pretty great – with huge dessert-plate flowers and clean, gorgeous, fanned foliage for the duration.

2. Baptisia x variicolor Twilite Prairieblues(tm). This picture doesn’t do it justice. The color is slightly weirder – browner – which I love. The trademark blue pea foliage is as handsome as any false indigo out of bloom and I’m excited to see this 2 year old clump just get bigger and better.

3. Where has Campanula punctata ‘Pink Chimes’ been all my life? It’s an oldie but goodie that returned to Blithewold this year after an absence and I hope we never let go of it again. But disappearance actually seems unlikely since it spreads so beautifully we have already distributed some of its wealth from the Display Garden to the North Garden.

4. Oxalis vulcanicola ‘Duotone’. Be still my heart. True-black splotches on variegated purple hearts make this a Gothic stunner despite the sunny yellow and unbelievably persistent flowers. That clump is huge now and still blooming away in the greenhouse as happily as it would as a houseplant. Must has.

5. I’m a sucker for any flowering tobacco but I think I loved Nicotiana ‘Baby Bella’ the best this year. We grew it from seed; I took that picture at the end of June; and it kept on putting up luminous red trumpets until (a really hard) frost. It’s a short one – only about 2-3′ tall so it can be tucked in front and center.

6. I think Monarda fistulosa ‘Claire Grace’ was on my list last year too but I’m thrilled to report that the clumps increased generously and are just as pretty as ever in bloom, and as seedheads still standing now. Maybe next year we’ll try deadheading them for a prolonged bloom…

7. My love for anise hyssop – in any form – is no secret. But I think ‘Black Adder’ is my all-time favorite because of its endless deep purple-blue spires and butterfly magnetism.

8. Salvia ‘Wendy’s Wish’ was a new one for us this year and one that I expect will be a total keeper. And not just because it keeps throwing up perfect new growth for cuttings here in the greenhouse. More because those fabulous raspberry tubes opened early – in late summer rather than holding off for fall.

Lastly are two plants that I noticed when they bloomed (in early summer) but that waited until fall to knock my socks off.

9. We moved a two or three year old Indigofera kirilowii from the Rose Garden to a more prominent spot in the Display Garden so I got a better look and appreciation for its pinky-purple flowers and upright form. But I really can’t get over its fall blaze. How could I have missed that? Wowsers.

10. My love for sweetspire (Itea virginica ‘Little Henry’) has been coming on slowly for awhile – for about as long as it has taken to increase from a couple of spriggy twigs to a thicket (we bought it tiny about 8 years ago). But now I love it madly – as much (or more) for its translucent fall color as for its sweet summer dangles.

Are any of these on your top 10? What else?

I can’t imagine any other plant that embodies the abundance and exuberant excess of the holidays quite like a Schlumbergera. Blithewold’s recently gifted Thanksgiving/Christmas cactus in particular maybe — though I did hear that it was a good year for Schlumbergera all around. My two at home bloomed their little arms off too – but not like this one. It’s been going non-stop since our first Friday Sparkle right after Thanksgiving and shows no signs of quitting. And every Friday, as it stops visitors in their tracks, they’ve asked me and Gail the age-old questions of why theirs isn’t blooming/why it does some years and not others/why one plant will bloom while another doesn’t?

We all know they are day-length sensitive, needing a period of darkness to set their buds. But this does not mean they should be locked in a closet for weeks at a time. Bad idea, actually, to deprive them of daylight altogether like that. Better to give them natural nights, at least 13 hours long, unpolluted by lamplight. (I use that advice as a good excuse to go to bed at a reasonable hour.)

They also need cool nights in combination with long ones and that right there might be why some refuse to bloom. As soon as we turn the heat on in the house — unless we program the thermostat for night dips into the 50s — our modern, efficient, weather-sealed houses may be too evenly modulated to toggle the temperature trigger. Leaving plants outside at least until the forecast threatens dips into the 40s will probably give them the requisite weeks of cool, dark nights.

Although my favorite tropical plant reference book, the weighty Exotica by A. F. Graf, recommends temperatures that swing only down into the low 60s, we have used this Christmas cactus to decorate the “cold” end greenhouse where night temps dip into the 40s, and I would bet that’s partly why it has held its blooms so long. As if its been preserved in the refrigerator. By contrast, my plants at home, after the first and fast glorious bloom, dropped most of their follow-up buds. It could be they’re too warm but also maybe too wet. Although the soil shouldn’t be allowed to completely dry out, it shouldn’t stay overly moist either, especially through the winter.

The schlumbergera’s popularity among even non-gardeners belies their evident finickiness and difficulty as houseplants. If they didn’t bloom more often than not and survive for years to outgrow their holiday pedestals and mantels, they wouldn’t have become the passalong favorites that they are.

Can you count on yours to bloom for the holidays? Does it stay in bloom for ages too — or at least for the 12 days of Christmas? What’s your secret of success?

Right at the cusp of a season full of overwhelming delights, I discovered a teeny-tiny one. It’s a very small thing but for me, it was kind of huge. Ever since I found out that Aspidistra elatior, the famously boring Victorian houseplant, also known as cast-iron plant, has a flower, I’ve wanted to see it for myself. But I was never sure of the timing, and most days poor Uncle is way off my radar. It hardly ever even wants watering, for goodness sake. So just try to imagine the moment when I went to evict a pair from their pots (to use the containers in a Christmas display), and noticed the flowers! Picture me, all alone in the greenhouse, doing a little dance.

The flowers, right at soil level and mostly such a dark purple they practically match the soil, are completely incognito. Also since they open so close to the surface, the flower cups were full of bits of soil and perlite. It’s really no wonder I’ve been missing them all these years. But they’re so pretty. And while you might think that I’d leave them be and find a different pair of pots, I wanted a closer look at their full structure. (Click on pictures for a closer look yourself.)

I understand that this particular delight might not provide the same kind of thrill for anyone else but if you happen to visit the greenhouse – or for that matter wherever your travels take you throughout the holidays, I offer you the challenge of finding at least one small surprise to be delighted by. Maybe it will be these very same flowers…

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?

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).