Maybe I was too hard on March. Last week, like a miracle, a light switched on during my morning dog-walk. And today dawned with blue skies and sunshine. Maybe March isn’t going to be as dreary as I thought?

Then again, day-light savings is coming up (March 14) and will throw my morning back into the night and there’s snow in the forecast for later today and through most of the rest of the week. I guess the deal with March is that it forces us to not take any of the good stuff for granted and to appreciate every single sunny moment to the fullest. And at least the sun, when it’s out, is starting to feel warmish.

Gail and I took advantage of today’s sunny moment (which lasted pretty much the whole day after all) to search for signs of spring – it’s evident in the 4” high daffodils, emerging tulips (- got to get the deer-off on!), the red buds on maples and yellow haze of willows, and a rumor spread by a favorite visitor about a crocus blooming somewhere on the grounds. Gail cut some more forsythia – it shouldn’t take long to force, maybe a week. And we spent most of the day organizing the greenhouse and making space for seeds, which we’ll start sowing in earnest this week. (Starting with perennials, biennials like foxglove, some cabbages and kale, calendula, snapdragons… Dick’s onions, leeks, and artichokes are already coming up.)

Meanwhile, Fred and Dan have been diligently pruning trees and shrubs all over the property. The best time for dormant pruning is any above-freezing day before the buds break. They are not ones to wait for sweater weather, like me…

All in all, there’s plenty to work on, lots to look forward to and I appreciate a slow start to spring – and I really shouldn’t knock March (- it might knock back). Have you started sowing seeds? Are you bad-mouthing March or getting busy with the pruning instead?

Everyone deserves something sparkly – or at least shiny – in time for Valentine’s Day. Wasn’t it nice of Mother Nature to give us her latest gift – a 14 karat white-gold with diamonds storm (known in my household as The Apocalblyzzard That Wasn’t). We only had a couple-four inches of snow here but it was heavy and wet and even after 2 days of sun, it is still clinging to tree trunks and sparkling like jewelry. (I took the pictures first thing on the morning after. Hover over for captions and click on for a closer look.)

And what’s Valentine’s Day (weekend) without a love story? I’m not sure what made me stop and turn my gaze way upwards but after a moment’s reverie I spotted our resident pair of hawks (we think they’re Red-tailed) gazing back down at me. Red-tailed hawks generally mate for life and our female should be laying a clutch of eggs in the next month or two. We have seen them circling around a bit lately screeching and that, according to the wikipedia entry, is foreplay. — On that note, I’ll just wish you all a Happy Valentine’s Day (weekend)!

The annual January thaw always fools me – and maybe the wrens too – into thinking that spring must be right around the corner. After yesterday’s warm rain deluge, the snow is a memory, the ground gives and squishes like a soaked sponge and there is so much variety in the shades of green and brown that I’m getting distracted trying to give them all names. (viridian, turquoise, jade, moss, pea, blue lichen, salad mix; topaz, russet, ashes of roses, sepia, raw umber, muddy boot…) Anyway there’s a rainbow, so to speak, (get it – rainbow?) outside and it smells pretty good too.

Some gardeners take the cold weather opportunity to find hot (color) climes this time of year. But as envious of them as I generally feel (evidently, Costa Rica is the happiest place on Earth), I wouldn’t want to miss the thaw and the daily reminder to appreciate the changes even when they’re really, really subtle. (This is how I console myself – along with naming the greens and browns.) Plus there are all sorts of seminars and lectures over the winter and I wouldn’t want to miss any of those either – just last night Lee Reich gave a talk here on how to espalier fruit trees (and shrubs – currants!) and tomorrow we’re off to the RI Nursery and Landscape Association winter conference.

Can you smell the earth today? How do you console yourself for not being in Costa Rica? (Or is that where you are?)

It is generally acknowledged that the difference between being temporarily pretty and eternally beautiful has something to do with bone structure. Like our own skin, which may or may not be wrapped around a Katherine Hepburn-esque skeleton, our garden hangs on its bones too. But although no plastic surgeon is truly capable of changing those of us unlikely to age gracefully, I think it is possible for everyone to have a garden every bit as timelessly handsome as, say, Gregory Peck. All we need, aside from a plan, is … time. Plus patience. (Isn’t it interesting that, when it comes to standards of beauty in a garden, age is usually a benefit rather than a liability?)

It’s easy to recognize an eternally beautiful garden. During the height of a colorful summer, you might not even be aware of why it’s so beautiful. But over the winter it hits you that the garden is every bit as stunning, stark-raving naked. Some properties (like Blithewold) are sublimely situated and while, like the curl in one’s hair, that’s definitely part of beauty, it’s not the be-all and end-all. What the garden really needs is structure within its perimeter and view to keep it from being as boneless and boring as our cutting bed in winter. It needs permanent elements – trees with muscles, rocks maybe, buildings (most of us have a house in the middle of our garden if not a garage and sheds too), and some might say to include a water feature – anything worth looking at even after the summer’s skin is shed. And those features should fit the scale of the garden’s face like expressive eyebrows and chiseled cheeks.

The last leaves haven’t even fallen yet but I’m already jazzed to think about Gregory Peck – I mean the gardens’ bone structure. The Display Garden still has a ways to go before it’s truly handsome in its own right but now it’s much easier to see what it needs. — My own garden at home cries out for eternal beauty too and there is where my patience will be truly tested: Good bones take such a long time to build.

Does your garden have good bone structure? Do you have plan(t)s to improve it?

Sometimes it’s all about timing. John and William Bartram were in exactly the right place, the coastal shores of the Altamaha River in Georgia, at exactly the right time, 1770, just a few years before the tree they discovered there became extinct. They collected seeds, propagated a few plants and named it Franklinia alatamaha for their friend Benjamin Franklin and the site of discovery (a variant spelling of the river – or was it dyslexia?). And even though they and other plant hunters kept searching for the tree, it was considered extinct in the wild within 30 years of its discovery. All of the Franklin trees in cultivation today are descendants of the Bartram’s original collection. Although enthusiastic collection may have contributed to the tree’s early disappearance, it was on its way out already due to a rapidly changing environment. (Sound familiar? Let it be a lesson.) Perhaps if the cultivation of cotton in the area hadn’t spread a debilitating root pathogen, it might have been able to crawl back by layered limbs to cooler climbs where it seems happier today. Franklinia is listed as hardy in USDA zones 5 to 8(9) and has Goldilock’s cultural requirements: Full sun to light shade; rich, acidic and moist but well drained soil; not too dry, not too wet – juuust right. But we easily forgive its persnickety-ness and even give it pride of place because it has the extra-special distinction of extinction.

Timing is everything. Although our Franklinia (a sizable well-established specimen planted in 1969) usually begins blooming in August, it was never ever more beautiful than it is right now. A delayed frost has the flowers continuing to open bright creamy-white against a frame of brilliant reddening fall foliage. Dirr says, “it is best not to become smitten with this plant.” Too late. I brake for Franklinia alatamaha – do you?

I remember walking to school in the fall with a beach-comber’s lurch looking for the most beautiful leaf. When I found it, I memorized it and then kept looking for a more perfect one. I don’t remember ever making anything from my found leaves – some people probably like to press them or make wreaths – I just kept them as bookmarks until they faded to boring or disintegrated. Now that I have a digital camera I collect only pictures of leaves and I have to say it’s not nearly as gratifying and I end up with way too many to look at when just one perfect real one tucked in a book would do.

I also remember that the most strenuous garden chore I had as a kid was raking leaves and I thought that the whole point was to make a giant pile to jump into (preferably before the dog noticed it). It’s funny, the whole raking leaves issue. Why do we do it, really? This article from the Fine Gardening E-newsletter makes the claim that raking is actually unnecessary. The author, Terry Ettinger, recommends mowing the leaves into little bits and leaving them to break down on our lawns and in our gardens. I can think of two reasons not to do that. 1, I have had it with mowing by now and 2, the neighbors already give my garden the hairy eyeball for looking a little wild. I think tidiness is the main number-one reason we all collect leaves and I’m pretty sure Fred and Dan, now into their second or third pass with the blowers around the property, would agree. It’s bred in the bone. Gail and I also rake leaves out of the garden beds and our main reason for doing that is so that we can see beds as blank slates when we do our fall planting. Ettinger says, “observation shows that unraked leaves in planting beds don’t smother shade-tolerant perennials.” You know me – I’ll happily test that theory at home but here we’ll continue to mulch beds with shredded leaves instead which break down much faster than whole ones.

The great debate ends when all agree that collecting the leaves – not just one for a keepsake but as many as you can use in the garden – is what’s important. Whether they stay in bits on your lawn or in your garden beds, are added to the compost or shredded for mulch, we gardeners know that leaves are way too good of a soil amendment to let go of.

How do you feel about raking? And do you collect leaves too?

The boundary between this world and the next is said to be thin right now. – Personally I think it’s on the thin side most days but it’s good to have a reason to honor the ancestors and welcome them back among us. Blithewold’s family is never far from here and our hearts – they live on through the property and our collective love of it. And I feel certain that they were overseeing our work yesterday as a few volunteers finished burying the undead (the tulips!) in the North Garden.

I thought it was only fitting for this Halloween post to visit the place where some of the ancestors have been laid to rest. Juniper Hill Cemetery is a 19th century garden cemetery, which is a type of burial ground designed as much for the solace of the living as it is to house the dead. Juniper Hill is a place of pure quiet and deep shade on a hill overlooking Bristol harbor and, these days, seems forgotten by all but a few dog walkers (and the Bristol Historical Society which offers grave and tree tours occasionally). I have to admit that I visit this place weekly, if not daily, but I think it has never been more sublimely beautiful than it is right now.

Happy Halloween!

I’m not crazy about the term “leaf peeping”. Not only is it a little too tweely alliterative but it seems to suggest something furtive and illicit. I’d much rather point and stare openly at the fall. And that’s just what I did on my rounds the last couple of days.

Mouse over for captions and click on for a larger view.

I took 100 pictures between yesterday afternoon and this morning and could have/would have taken more if I didn’t have other work to to get to. I hope that, especially if you’re within 100 miles of here, you’ll come through soon to see all of the leaves I peeped but didn’t include in this post. And if you’re not nearby – or even if you are, I invite you to share a link to your own fall-color gawp-shots!

The tiger eyes staghorn sumac (Rhus typhina ‘Bailtiger’ Tiger Eyes™) has been driving me to distraction all day. This is what happens to me in the fall. I can’t ride down any road without nearly driving off it rubbernecking some blazing tree. But I swear I’ve never before seen anything this color – anything besides flash-orange safety gear, that is. It’s really a good thing that I was only digging up plants today (there’s a frost warning in the forecast!) and not driving because I kept looking over my shoulders in disbelief. I wish the pictures did it justice, but you can get the idea: On a dark day, this sumac is lit like a beacon.

If I made a top 10 list or even a top 5, I think tiger eyes would have to be on it. In full sun, its electric yellow foliage might be a bit hard to take but we asked Fred and Dan to plant ours in the shade of the bamboo and the leaves remained a lovely chartreuse all season. Until now. Word is, it might spread aggressively in the way that sumac does, by sucker – but I really don’t think I’ll mind a some babies popping up here and there…

Do you have a tiger eye sumac and/or an opinion about it to share? Are there any other glow-in-the-dark beauties driving you to distraction right now?

If you tell someone you found it in “Dirr” they’ll know you mean the Manual of Woody Landscape Plants: Their Identification, Ornamental Characteristics, Culture, Propagation and Uses (now in its 6th edition). But Michael A. Dirr, PhD has also written The Book on viburnums (Viburnums: Flowering Shrubs for Every Season), The Book on hydrangeas (Hydrangeas for American Gardens) co-written by his wife Bonnie, and several other coffee-table-worthy, destined-to-be-dogeared reference books. What makes his books worth consulting – and reading from cover to cover – is not just the breadth of information but that they’re thick with pithy opinions. I found out yesterday that Mike is just as entertaining and full of it (I mean knowledge) in person.

Mike’s slides were, unfortunately, a little tough to see due to the brilliance of a perfect day but the afternoon tree tour of the University of Blithewold (it felt like a campus yesterday) was a spectacular pleasure. I’m still trying to process it all. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one in the group of local industry professionals, savvy cognoscenti and at least one fellow blogger, straining to catch every second of his mile-a-minute professorial banter. Everyone looked as riveted, and by the end of the day, as overwhelmed as I felt. I’m so relieved that there’s not going to be a quiz – but I’ll try to recap just a little for you.

The event was co-sponsored by the New England chapter of the International Society of Arboriculture, and the topics – fitting for that group and ours – were noble trees and new introductions. Mike pointed out that you always know a noble tree when you see it – you don’t even have to know what it is, just that it has a venerable stature, grace, beauty and presence. It’s a squirrel highway and a landmark and Blithewold is blessedly full of them. It most certainly isn’t a Bradford pear (Pyrus calleryana) which has become not only the most ubiquitous street tree but has turned out to be invasive as well. And certainly not enough truly noble trees are being planted today for the benefit of future generations. Have you planted any? Which ones? Do you have a favorite noble tree? (Mine is a particular linden in a particular Middletown garden – even though – or because – I’ve nearly been knocked cold a couple of times by its enormous akimbo elbows.)

It is new introductions of trees and shrubs that keep the industry on its toes. Mike and Bonnie are on the constant look-out for unusual traits in trees and shrubs and have had a few “85 mph” drive-by finds introduced into commerce. (Keep your eyes peeled for a new redbud called ‘Bonnie’s Pink’.) We all want something new and different (we can’t help it) and with a trained eye any one of us could find the next winner, have it tested, propagated and introduced. The lesson I take from that is simply to pay more attention even to the old stand-by, tried-and-trues. How is it that I never in my life really noticed a hornbeam before yesterday? The professor in Mike brought out the student in me. I’m still interested all over again. And I’ve got a(helluva) lot to learn and a few of my own opinions to cultivate. How about you?