I’ve gotten out of the habit of writing lists.  Even though I carry a notepad with me at almost all times I apparently find every excuse not to write in it.  (Usually it’s for lack of a pencil.)  But this time of year, just like spring, I’m so easily overwhelmed with all the things that seem to need to be done this instant – or at least before frost that I really ought to write it all down.  There are so many to-dos floating around in my head it almost feels as if I’m walking around under a threatening thunder cloud – and I’m afraid my demeanor lately reflects that.

So just now I finally wrote a list.  And wouldn’t you know, it’s remarkably short and entirely do-able.

The mansion is open for only one more (long) weekend so we’ve had to begin to say goodbye to the gardens.

We’ve made some telltale holes  – a few stock plants and planted container beauties have come into the greenhouse to roost and the Rockettes began the great container bed move today.  The teasels finally came down yesterday but with any luck you’ll be able to see them again soon reincarnated as Christmas decorations in the mansion.  Next Tuesday will be a Display Garden doomsday as we take out the Cutting Garden to make way for tulips (which arrived yesterday – wahoo!) and we’ll begin in earnest to un-furnish the other beds as well.  My to-do list for the next week or so looks like this:

1. Take more cuttings

2. (which really ought to be #1) Pot up rooted cuttings to make room for new ones

3. Bring in and pot up a few more stock plants – in case my cuttings don’t take

4. Continue to move containers into greenhouse

5. Help Fred and Dan put up the bubble wrap again (maybe)

6. Make room to store dahlias (and decide on a storage medium – saw dust and shavings again?)

See?  Not so bad!

My weekend to-do list for home looks like this:

1. take out stinking cabbages and yesterday’s tomatoes before the neighbors call the pretty police

2. dig out and pot up tender keepers

3. think about cutting the grass

4. make a cup of tea

It’s so easy!

And If I were you and I lived nearby but hadn’t made a visit to Blithewold in a while, I’d add that to my list.  This weekend promises to be gorgeous and this will be the last chance to catch the hat exhibit in the house and an amazingly riotous abundance of color in the gardens.  But if you visit the greenhouse too, make sure you use the “other entrance”.

If you missed Fall Gardeners Day at Blithewold last weekend then I’m sorry to say you missed Mike Chute’s info packed lecture on roses and, I for one, learned something new.  – But then again I always learn something from anyone with a favorite subject to teach.  With roses in particular I feel like I can never learn enough.

Mike Chute has a rose consultation business called Rose Solutions and is producing several of the cold hardy Brownell roses (developed by the Brownells of Little Compton, RI) which will be available for purchase this coming spring.  He spoke to us on how to encourage roses to peak spectacularly for a second time in the fall.  The fall bloom is so different from the spring peak:  Although the flower size may be smaller, cool nights intensify the colors and the mid-day sun doesn’t blanch them.

His methods for re-bloom (on remontant a.k.a repeat blooming roses) are pretty intuitive involving a fertilizing regimen (early spring; just after the June peak; mid-summer; and late summer), plenty of water, and vigilant deadheading.  As for deadheading, he told a story about preparing the Roger Williams Park Victorian Rose Garden for a fall rose festival.  He said that the time required for each rose to set buds and re bloom is dependent on a few factors including the number of petals (more petals = more days) and the weather.  He was able to calculate an average re bloom time for that garden – 50 days – based on the varieties they planted and then he counted back from the date of the festival.  It must have been the hardest thing in the world to do, but sometime in July he and the gardeners and volunteers at Roger Williams cut off every single bloom and bud in that garden until there was nothing left but foliage.  It makes me cringe just to think of it!  But evidently their gamble with the weather paid off and they had nothing but blooms galore just in time for their event.

We traditionally stop deadheading the roses in September so that they can set hips.  Mike said that he’s never lost a rose for not allowing hips to form — he doesn’t like the way they look in his garden.  And seeing the buckets of roses he brought from his own garden reminded me that I’d much rather look at bunches of blooms than hips too!  So we have already changed our methods at Blithewold and with any luck the garden will still be blooming as the volunteers start coming in to decorate the house for Christmas.

How long do the roses bloom in your garden?

Incidentally, the yellow rose pictured above is my current all-time fave (besides Rosa rugosa which has the scent that makes me swoon).  One of the Floribundas purchased ‘Morning Has Broken’ for us because the flowers are gorgeous and sweetly scented and the foliage is glossy and perfect – too slippery for black spot to take hold perhaps – all season long.  Mary wasn’t wrong (Thank you, Mary!).  We’ve only had this particular plant for 2 years (we bought others for the Display Garden this year) but it has only gotten more handsome and garnered more and more praise from visitors.  It’s not an easy rose to find to buy but I think it’s well worth pursuit and perserverance!

It’s time to think about next year’s garden.  (When isn’t it time to think about next year’s garden?!)  Last week Gail cleaned out the cutting bench, filled it fresh with new perlite and we’ve both started hoarding plants for next year’s garden.  Even into my 5th year here, I still don’t feel that confident about propagation.  I’m amazed when my seedlings germinate and a little bit astounded when a cutting takes root.  But tip cuttings are so easy (Gail makes it look so easy, anyway).  You just have to learn by feel what kind of growth to look for.  Now that I’m starting to get the hang of it, I’ve gotten greedy – if a plant is loaded with perfect cuttings, I have to be careful not to want to take them all (we don’t have that kind of space)!

Plants have built in cellular level mechanisms for survival and reproduction.  Some plants will root if the stem touches the ground; some will put out roots and shoots if there’s a mere hint of a whisper of the soil nearby.  I can imagine the potted succulent (left) leap frogging in all directions if we only gave it the ground.  Plants have certain cells that wait for hormonal direction before becoming whatever the plant needs for new growth.  To make new plants, we just have to trigger those cells to make roots.

Step one:  Fresh as a daisy in the morning before plants have transpired the day’s water away, choose a growing tip that is neither so wimpy that it will keel over, nor so sturdy that it’s brittle and woody feeling.  Shoot for fat, green, flexible growth preferably before it has set a flower bud.  Remove it from the plant using snips or a knife and place it in water or a baggie until you’re ready to root it.

Step 2:  Make a clean cut below about two sets of leaves.  Using a sharp knife or scalpel, remove the lower set of leaves right at the stem being careful to not damage the stem.  This is where those versatile cells live.  Cut the remaining sets of leaves by a third or half to restrict transpiration and cut flower buds off to force energy to the roots.

Step 3: Dip the end of the stem in rooting hormone – this gives the plant’s own auxin a fake auxin boost.  We use the kind that includes a fungicide.  Don’t lick your fingers after this point in the process.

Step 4:  Plant the cutting in a rooting medium like sand (again, we use perlite) with the cut nodes below the surface.  Place the cuttings in a bright light spot and keep them moist.

Step 5: Wait.

But don’t just take it from me.  There are beautiful books (Making More Plants by Ken Druse is the prettiest instruction manual I’ve ever seen. – Check it out in my Amazon link on the left.) and there are plenty of websites with a lot of detail if you want to learn more about the process.

Do you take cuttings?  Do you bring favorite plants in for the winter in case your cuttings don’t take?  Do you think it’s all too much trouble and shop for new things in the spring instead?