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?

I finally bought my very own copy of Ken Druse’s latest book Natural Companions: A Garden Lover’s Guide to Plant Combinations and if you don’t have a copy yet, it’s worth dropping everything else – plant those annuals later! – to pick it up. (I ordered mine from my favorite local bookstore and beat feet to get it as soon as it came in.) Truly, you might never look at your garden and the plants in it the same way again. I appreciated Ken’s reminder to pick flowers and foliage to see what would look well together but Ellen Hoverkamp’s digital scans of those pickings are exquisite. And then Ken takes it several steps further to illuminate plants that not only look well together but go together in various other ways, whether they’re related by “blood”, color, place, habit, use, and so on and on for well over 200 beautifully written and photographed pages.

I don’t have Ellen’s patience – or her brilliant artistic eye – or her equipment – to ever be able to create such amazing compositions but I have already started to notice the garden’s own arrangements and natural companions with a fresh eye. Some of these combinations (related more by good looks and cultural requirements than anything more thought-provoking) were planned but I think most were either lucky guesses or pure wind-blown serendipity. (Mouse over for captions, click on for larger views.)

What combinations of plants go well together in your garden? Do you think about different kinds of plant relationships when you’re working on your garden’s design?

For this mid-May Garden Bloggers Bloom Day hosted by Carol at May Dreams Gardens, I’m going to postpone the usual list of all of the amazing things that are blooming suddenly all at once and go into euphoric raptures about a single fantastic genus that has been blooming for a while now. One of them even kept last year’s blooms all winter.

Of all 2000 odd species of euphorbia in the world, we only have a half-dozen or so on the property. In a way that’s plenty because the ones we have are pretty great, and on the other hand it’s not nearly enough because who wouldn’t want more?

At the top of my favorite spurges list is Euphorbia x martinii ‘Ascot Rainbow’. Not only does it have stunning multi-colored foliage and fabulously intricate flying-saucer blooms but it looked fabulous through the winter. In fact, it still looked so good this spring that we weren’t sure if we should cut it back. We decided to cut a few plants here and there to within a couple inches of the ground, and we left a few standing, and are planning on using their older stems for arrangements. That’s one of the greatest things about euphorbia: they make really great nearly ever-lasting cut flowers.

Euphorbia amygdaloides ‘Purpurea’ (below left) spreads generously (rhizomatously) in shade but we have it in full sun too in the Rose Garden. We transplanted bunches of it around from underneath the chestnut rose and it pouted for a good year (or was it two?) before finally looking stunningly settled. Never give up on a euphorbia. Last year we also planted ‘Craigieburn’ (below right) in the cutting garden I think I like that one even better for the subtle range of colors in its foliage and the extra acid in the green of its flowers.

E. longifolia (below left) has been seeding itself around the North Garden and Display Garden for years, which is great because we always have the option of using it where it lands or hoiking it out to make room for something else. After it blooms (it stands about 2′ tall) we cut it back hard to encourage a new flush later in the summer. That’s a dangerous job because the sap of this one seems particularly caustic. Anyone who has ever gotten a bright red burning and wicked-itchy rash from spurge learns pretty quickly to wear body armor to work with it.

The cushion spurge (E. polychroma – above right) in the Rock Garden hasn’t self-sowed although it’s supposed to and I wish it would. It’s too cute. We also have ‘Bonfire’, which has bright orange blooms and red foliage, up in the Display Garden but we don’t have it in enough sun to show itself off properly.

I could go on because we also grow sticks-on-fire pencil cactus and crown-of-thorns in the greenhouse and those go to show how varied the genus can be. But I’m stuck on spurges. Which ones do you grow – or wish you did? For a look at what else is bloom (besides euphorbia) all over the country and the world, click on the links listed here.

To me it still feels too early to talk about the holidays – I avert my eyes from any commercial Christmas display at least until the day after Thanksgiving – but Blithewold’s decorators have been thinking about Christmas since … well, February anyway. And they’ve been elfishly at work decorating the mansion since the middle of October. Last week the garden volunteers came in to do the big tree (designed by Joanne Murrman) and so I think it must be time to say the halls of Blithewold are well and truly decked – just in time for opening the day after Thanksgiving. I refuse to call that day “Black Friday” because Thanksgiving is a such a sweet holiday and for me the day after is for relaxing into the spirit of the season. In fact, it’s a perfect day to take a walk around Blithewold and receive the Gifts of Nature – if I may say so myself!

I love this year’s theme. It lends itself so well to our annual celebration of Nature’s abundance (although she was a little stingy with acorns and cones this year), natural talents, and home-made joy. All over the house there is evidence of imaginations run wild, and sublime repurposing of some of nature’s prettiest bits and bobs. Outside, Gail outdid herself on the front door wreath. Once again, Fred and Dan have created a stunning display of bamboo ingenuity; and I hope it’s obvious that I had a ball putting together the container arrangements.

It amazes me how Christmas at Blithewold has become a special part of so many traditions – from the volunteer decorators who insist on returning with new ideas year after year; to whole families who attend our wreath making workshops (Saturday’s is sold out) and to everyone who makes an annual winter pilgrimage all decked out in holiday finery for tea or a musical performance. But it makes perfect sense – it’s a gracious and relaxing place, sparking and festive, and well away from any hullaballoo of holiday mayhem.

Do you have a place you go every year to get into the holiday spirit? Do you borrow any of nature’s gifts for your holiday decorations? (Need any new ideas?)

It isn’t easy to let go of an amazing season in the gardens but at some point in the fall we will have to. Just not quite yet! There’s more activity and color in the gardens than ever – I don’t think I’ve ever seen more monarch butterflies than I have this week and even the hummingbirds are sticking around (or stopping here for meals before continuing south.)

We have been soaking up the last of the season and taking it all in. Literally and figuratively. This week’s harvest for the East Bay Food Pantry may have been our next-to-last but we managed to tip the scales at a whopping 148 lbs (of cabbage mostly) bringing us so close to our 1000 pound goal for the season we can practically taste it. Yesterday we also picked our next-to-last buckets of flowers for arrangements and even as I write, Crystal Brinson, flower and garden designer extraordinaire, is entertaining and inspiring a full-house with a floral design demonstration in the dining room.

We will begin taking out the cutting bed in a couple of weeks – but only after picking from it one last time to honor our curator Margaret Whitehead, who is celebrating the release of her book Blithewold: Legacy of an American Family. Margaret and a team of volunteers (she herself began as a volunteer) spent years – decades – sifting through the entire collection of letters, bills, journals, etc and transcribed everything. Margaret then spent the past three years putting it all together in a way that offers us all a glimpse into the lives of the people that created this place. It’s been a labor of true love for Margaret and is a fascinating read for the rest of us. Proceeds from the sale of the book go into the Mary Philbrick Conservation Fund to support preservation projects in the mansion. (In addition to storing Blithewold’s archives in her head, Mary Philbrick was also a much beloved garden volunteer, and Dick’s wife.) Buy the book!

The forecast for the weekend is sunny and in the 70′s so there’s no reason not to get out here and take it all in one last time too. That said, this bountiful fall could go on for a while yet and it’s only the mansion that will be closed after this weekend (to be readied already for Christmas!) The gardens remain open year-round and visits beginning next week will offer a behind-the-scenes look at projects and how we prepare the gardens for winter.

Is your fall bountiful? Are you still busy taking it all in?