Garden Bloggers Bloom Day (hosted by Carol at May Dreams Gardens) is the best excuse I can think of to show off some of my favorite weirdos. I know my cup of tea isn’t to everyone’s taste. For one thing, I tend to gravitate towards anything with nearly invisible green flowers like crazy-cool petal-less Boltonia ‘Nallie’s Lime Dot’ (below). It comes into bloom-ish in early September and is supposed to be about 4′ tall. Ours grew taller and then probably because it was shaded by our new dawn redwood hedge, flopped right over to hang with an aster. It holds up really well in arrangements so I’ll probably vote to move to a sunnier spot in the cutting garden. I also adore little Nicotiana ‘Delaware Indian Sacred’ (right) obviously because it’s green but also because it seeds itself around and is in bloom in one place or another all season long.

And ’tis the season to love the seedheads. They may look gone-by to some but I prefer the black knobs of rudbeckia sans petals. And aren’t teasel and cardoon at any stage wildly wonderful?

There’s probably nothing weirder than Amaranthus ‘Dreadlocks’ full stop.

And every late-summer/fall I rediscover cuphea. (Who doesn’t?) Suddenly though I’m head-over-heels for a cuphea that probably nobody else here has noticed.  Cuphea ‘Ballistic’ is a tiny little plant with mouse faces that ended up tucked under a whole bunch of other stuff (mostly other cupheas) in the kid’s bed. I vow to put them somewhere front and center next year and took a bunch of cuttings yesterday for insurance.

Speaking of taking cuttings, the speed of the season took us by surprise. (How did it get to be mid-September already?!) We usually start taking cuttings in late August/early September but have only now begun in earnest. If the same thing happened to you and those beautiful cut-able tips that emerge in late summer have since grown and flowered, cut your plants back in a few places to encourage new growth and check again in a couple of weeks.

What’s weird or wonderful in your garden right now? When did you start taking cuttings?

I think I might have an inkling of how parents feel when they realize that their babies have grown up. It seems like the garden is suddenly full of teenagers. I have to crane my neck to look at some of them and a few are clumsily in my way or gangly with giant feet and terrible posture. They need prompting and prodding to stand up straight just like I did when I was 14 going on 30. And same as then I still have crushes on the tallest… plants.

We’ve been diligently staking the dahlias all along, mostly by tying them to sturdy bamboo stakes. They’re so brittle and top heavy that it’s definitely easier to stake them long before they actually need it. In the cutting garden we use concrete reinforcement mesh, raised up on metal peony hoop stakes to help prop up the slouchers. – That system really works the best for plants that have been rowed out. And of course the trick with staking is hiding the stakes to make it look like nothing ever needed staking in the first place.

We used to lash burnet (Sanguisorba tenuifolia) against a fence to keep it from falling over and now that it’s out in the middle of the pollinator bed, I’ve tried sliding the beefiest bamboo stakes diagonally into the ground to give the stems something to lean on. I have to readjust the props almost daily especially if it’s been windy or rainy but I prefer the loose look of that to corralling the stems with string. It’s funny that they have such terrible posture given the grace and airiness of the flowers and how big their feet are (the larges foliage is at the base.)

And if I had remembered how big anise hyssop gets (we planted Agastache ‘Black Adder’ this year) I might not have placed it right next to the path. It stands up straight on its own but we’ve had to push it back with stakes (same method as the burnet) because it and its legion of bees are in everybody’s way.

Do you love the tall plants too? What do you do to improve their posture?

When I visit garden centers in the spring and summer I seem to have a hard time remembering to buy plants that will carry my garden through the winter. I forget all about my intention to buy a cartload of evergreens when I walk down an aisle of any other plant coming into leaf or bloom. I’m sure I’m not alone. (Or am I?) But it didn’t take a very long walk around Blithewold in this frigid weather to find that there are plenty of plants that could catch my eye at the nursery – and keep a good hold of it now.

I get sweetspire (Itea virginica) and summersweet (Clethra alnifolia) completely confused in my head, always thinking one is the other. I wish, back when I bought a clethra for my garden that I had remembered that it’s itea that colors up so beautifully in the fall and waves red flags right into December. (Of course I do love that clethra blooms almost by itself in August…) Oak leaf hydrangea is also stunningly multicolored in the cold.

Gail confuses agave and yucca, which is so funny because their differences are very obvious to me. (Of course they are in the same family and Gail’s the one who keeps clethra and itea straight for me.) And while I generally think agaves are the coolest plants, it’s yucca that can take the cold.

It never occurred to me that Toad lily (Tricyrtis hirta) could be as beautiful in seed as it is in bloom. And I think the purple moor grass (Molinia caerulea ‘Variegata’), with its curly blond tresses, is even more beautiful dormant than it ever was growing.

I have a deep appreciation for the evergrey of lavender – and have planted quite a few of those in my garden but I never noticed before today how silvery the slender deutzia (Deutzia gracilis ‘Nikko’) is.

What plants are carrying your garden into December?

This morning a fellow dog walker said to me, “Ugh – this rain is horrible!” To which I replied, “yeah… but we need it.” She looked at me a little sideways. And to myself I said, “Are you kidding me? This is GREAT!” My dog was as muddy as hers and I couldn’t see past the drops on my glasses but gardeners are a breed of human that take the bad with the good. And rain? It’s a good thing! Especially in the dusty wake of a drought. “Some days must be dark and dreary”*. — It’s about time. And it’s part of what I love about October. Nothing sets off the colors of fall like a fine mist on a gray day.

It is a heavy rain today giving us a welcome chance to catch up on greenhouse work and to hash out our annual assessments of the gardens. We’ve worked out a schedule for October and provided it doesn’t rain the entire month (and of course, we need it to) we’ll start taking the gardens apart to make way for projects.

We’ve already started to bring in stock plants – tender perennials from which we’ll take more cuttings – and we hope to have all of the container plants in the greenhouse by the end of next week. It might kill us to do it, but Gail and I will also harden our hearts to take annuals – still in glorious bloom – out of the North and Rose Gardens next week, right after the house closes for the season. (Remember, Columbus Day is last day to see the house before Christmas – and all of the gardens in full glory, come to think of it.) The week after that we hope to turn a load of compost in to the starved Rose Garden. And we’ve got to play musical perennials in the North Garden – the lady’s mantle (Alchemilla mollis) needs dividing (it’s been 3 years and the plants are huge) and to be moved back to keep the flowers from blurring the garden’s ultra-crisp edges. And we have to do all of that of course before we plant the tulips, which we have to do before we lose our volunteers for the season. Whether a little rain, or a lot of rain falls in this life, we have a schedule to keep.

What are your plans for October? Is it raining?

*quote and post title from a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

By now you probably know that Hurricane Earl gave us a miss. The wolf at the door turned out to be a tiny puppy who made a scritching sound just like crickets in the middle of the night. When we came in the next day to check for “damage” and to un-batten the hatches, we found the gardens looking refreshed and perfectly lovely. We certainly needed the rain (Earl dropped an inch and a little) and were desperate for a temperature change. I think all of the gardeners on the eastern seaboard could be thanked for fending off a potentially terrible storm because we so diligently prepared for it. Turns out that bringing potted plants inside, staking the tall plants and cutting back the brittle ones is just like lugging rain gear on a hiking trip: insurance that it won’t have been necessary. (We’re accepting thank you cards and gifts.)

Now that the weather has broken, I’m noticing all sorts of new (and old) blooms in the gardens and visitors are too. The most asked about plant in the Display Garden this week has been the bush clover, Lespedeza thunbergii ‘Edo Shibori’.  I’ve been surprised by the questions because my eye tends to pass right over this plant. This cultivar has tiny white blooms with a pink stripe that, to me, register as beige from a distance. I actually don’t think it’s very handsome at all. But it hums! Any plant that has its own soundtrack is certainly remarkable and worth another look – or listen. Bumblebees (more than any other kind of bee) can’t seem to get enough of the tiny pea blossoms.  The more I think I don’t like the plant, the more I find I do. (Is that a gardener thing or just me?)

Bush clovers bloom in late summer to fall – most are a pretty pinkish-purplish – on new wood. What that means for the gardener is that even if it doesn’t completely die back in the winter (which lespedeza tend to do in this neck of the woods), they can be cut back hard (within inches of the ground like a buddleia) to maintain a graceful hoop-skirt shape. Like any belle of the ball, they don’t want to be crushed into the backseat and don’t look as graceful crowded. Best to give it room to flounce and show off. They like well-drained soil (who doesn’t) and don’t bat an eye at drought. They don’t even need – or want to be fed. – Plants in the legume family are generally able to fend for themselves. Sweet peas excepted, of course.

Do you have a lespedeza? Do the bees love it? Do you? (And do you whack it back or let it go?)