I’ll use the excuse of Garden Bloggers Bloom Day (generously hosted as always by Carol at May Dreams Gardens) to show off a few more of the attractive plants in and around our pollinator’s garden. It’s been really fun talking to visitors about all of the activity and noticing who goes in for a closer look and who takes a few apprehensive steps back. The bees and wasps don’t seem to mind either reaction, they’re so intent on taking it all (the nectar and pollen that is) in. Would you go in for a closer look at all the busyness or are you more comfortable with a little distance between you and any insect activity?

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There are lots of names for July’s full moon, which was full in the wee hours of this very morning, but Full Thunder Moon seems the most appropriate this year. (Full Buck Moon and Full Hay Moon are other choices…) We’ve been lucky enough to have had a couple of good storms within the last week and the gardens are loving the infusion of rain – almost 3″ last Friday and another 1/2″ish Wednesday night. This last storm broke the heat wave and I can’t ever remember more heavenly July days than these last two. It’s not too hot or too humid – it’s juuuuust right. I hope you’re getting to enjoy a Goldilocks-perfect mid-July too!

I’d say it’s easy to plant a garden full of attractive plants except that it isn’t so easy. There’s way too much to choose from and what qualifies as attractive changes, for me at least, by the day. Some days it’s green flowers; other minutes it’s spectacularly enormous leaves; sometimes it’s blue foliage or anything orange. But it’s very easy to find plants that are attractive… in other ways … to other garden visitors, such as insects and birds, bees, wasps and butterflies. And planting those plants turns the garden from a pretty picture into an experience.

Every year we change the Display Garden around a bit. Some years we focus on flower colors (green, blue, anything that amazing apricot shot through with magenta…), sometimes we play more with texture (giant leaves… you catch my drift) and I have never known these gardens to not hum – audibly and visually – with activity. The gardens look alive because we plant such a variety that there are always plenty of plants for the insects and birds. But this year we tried to plant, in the big display garden bed in particular, ONLY what would be attractive to pollinators.The garden is buzzing! And lucky for us and for all the garden’s human visitors, we didn’t have to leave aesthetics out of the design equation.

The hands-down busiest (and hands-off busiest if you have any healthy respect for bees and wasps on a mission) is the sea holly (Eryngium planum). There must be an easy dozen different species on it at any given mid-day moment. And it’s highly attractive to me too, fulfilling the blue foliage (and flower) category so handsomely along with having an excellent architectural prickliness. When the sea holly goes by, the more subtly lovely (green) flowers on the mountain mint (Pycnanathemum muticum) will likely draw the most visitors.

But the butterfly weed (Asclepias tuberosa), which is a stunning shade of brilliant orange that incidentally looks amazing with sea holly, not only attracts all sorts of bees, wasps and butterflies to its flowers, the plant itself is the only larval food source (along with every other member of the Asclepias/milkweed family) for the beloved Monarch butterfly. It’s always great fun to attract butterflies to the garden, and it’s even better to give them a reason to stay. At least 4 generations will go from egg to caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly over the course of the summer in a garden with an Asclepias restaurant. When Gail and I started researching plants for this garden we were thrilled to note that a lot of the best nectar sources are also popular host plants for all sorts of butterfly and moth caterpillars – like goldenrod (Solidago), Aster, false indigo (Baptisia), Joe Pye weed (Eupatorium) and even Zinnia.

Do you plant anything specifically for bees and butterflies? What are the most attractive plants in your garden?

Along with taking a good look back at last year’s successes and failures (I’ll get to those later maybe) we gardeners take this time to look forward and dream a little. (Incidentally, we are probably at our most optimistic right now: in January – the “dead of winter.”  Just before another storm pig-piles more snow on the garden.) Gail and I have been gathering our thoughts before we open the catalogs, and started to volley some ideas for next years gardens back and forth across the table. (This might well be the very best part of our job.)

We have both come to realize that we’re not interested in gardening just for our own or our (human) visitors’ pleasure. I haven’t forgotten that is a public garden – stick with me here: we have just started noticing that we habitually use words like “nature”, “habitat”, “environment”, and “ecosystem” and of course you already know that we are head over heels for pollinators. In truth, welcoming pollinators, insects and birds into the garden is ultimately self-serving because wildlife is good for the garden and what’s good for the garden is great for its visitors – as well as its gardeners.

So this year we’re considering buying or making bird, bat, butterfly, toad, and mason bee houses and as usual, we’ll be planting a lot of flowers. We’ll also make some changes to our maintenance practices to allow more seed heads to remain. All of these intentions will be part of how we form our designs, which we have every hope, will be as abundant and beautiful as ever.

And because we’re still on the sustainable gardening bandwagon (and can’t imagine ever hopping off of it) we’ll make a concerted effort to reduce our water needs by selecting plants with last summer in mind; we’re researching low growing and steppable lawn alternatives to plant in one of the Display Garden beds; and planning to keep invasive weeds out of the native wildflower area behind the summer house in the Bosquet. And because we love our human visitors too – and couldn’t do any of this if it weren’t for you, we’re imagining shady relief from blazing summer sun in our container bed, and planning to install more crowd pleasing roses as well as irrigation in the Rose Garden.

Are you starting to look forward and plan this year’s garden? Do you have a particular area of focus or any new intentions? Is there anything you’d like to see at Blithewold that I haven’t mentioned?

The closer it gets to the holidays – and as the weather slides to the darkest, coldest time of year, the more I think about food. I know I’m not alone. Birds are hungry too. We don’t hang feeders here – there would be no way to keep up with them not to mention we’d need a separate and sizable budget to fund them. But we do offer a few natural breakfast buffets in the gardens and grounds. And after walking around looking for bird food, I have a whole new list of plants that I know need in my own starving garden.

Rather than cut everything back for the winter we leave some seedheads – like rudbeckia and echinacea – in the gardens because they are goldfinch favorites. Seed-eating birds also enjoy certain grasses like the Panicum virgatum ‘Heavy Metal’ planted at the Carriage House (matching the color of the cedar shingles exactly right now) as well as the goldenrod growing wild at the edge of the Bosquet.

Cedar waxwings love their namesake eastern red cedar (Juniperus virginiana). I had a hard time finding berries to photograph, perhaps because the birds have already come through, or the squirrels got there first, or maybe it just wasn’t a good year for berries with all the heat and drought. I wonder too about the bayberry (Myrica pensylvanica) because I couldn’t find a single berry on any of our plants (and I’m sure we have some females among them). The waxy fruit ripens in September (I have to admit I’ve never paid attention then) and it’s possible birds – any of dozens of different varieties – found them long before I looked. Virginia creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia) and Boston ivy (Parthenocissus tricuspidata) berries are already stripped too.

Winterberry (Ilex verticillata) and crabapples (Malus sp. – especially ones with very small fruit like ‘Prairifire’) are into-winter favorites for a lot of different birds. The fruit has to freeze and thaw before being soft enough to gobble up, which gives us gardeners a chance to glean some (visual) sustenance too during our darkest, starved-for-color season.

I know this is a short list – I didn’t touch the viburnums… What do you have in your garden that birds love to eat this time of year and through the winter?

Throw leaves away? Perish the thought. I wish I could preserve fall’s leaves for color therapy sessions in the middle of winter. Right now I’m particularly taken with the changing colors on some of the shrubs and vines. I’ve never squinted at such a fluorescent color not in a highlighter marker as the redvein enkianthus (Enkianthus campanulatus). The Fothergilla gardenii is even prettier than a brand new box of 64 colors, and the Boston Ivy is as shiny and intensely red as fresh blood (who isn’t secretly enthralled by a bloody-gusher papercut?) What is your favorite shrub – or vine – for fall color?

Even if the colors will fade, the leaves are still worth keeping as the winter blanket and soil amendment that nature intended when she dropped them on the ground in the first place.

“Back in the day…” according to Gail, the Blithewold grounds crew vacuumed up all of the property’s leaves in mowers and dumped them in giant piles on the vegetable bed. Gail remembers spending blissful December days distributing the piles of shredded leaves and grass clippings (after walking on her knees three miles uphill in the snow to get here) throughout the Display Garden beds – and she doesn’t remember having to do nearly as much weeding in the spring as we (and by we, I really mean the volunteers) have done lately. This fall Gail’s wish for a return to the old-school method was granted, at least in part. If it ever stops raining, we’ll still be given a lofty pile or two of blown leaves to shred and use in the spring, but last week we were also given a few slightly grassy piles of pre-shredded leaves to spread immediately on the gardens. With any luck – so far the leaf layer hasn’t blown away – in spring we (again, the volunteers) will be able to plant the gardens without having to do major battle with the weeds first. On the down side, some of our volunteers – self-sowers, that is, such as emilia, poppies, talinum, snow-on-the-mountain, and blue spice basil – may be no-shows in the spring.

Do you cover your garden beds with leaves now or in the spring? Do you notice a difference in the amount of weeds or self-sowers?