We scheme and we plan and we cross our fingers and we hope for a succession of blooms and then when everything blooms at once we say “Oh — Wow.”  There’s a brilliant carpet of daffodils still – if you squint a little it’s possible to imagine that some haven’t started to go by – and the tulips have started blooming in earnest – more abundantly than we thought after the deer graze and a little earlier than we intended. The tulips and daffs are beautiful together.

Late last July, Gail and Lilah made the final tulip order decisions – without me – and I have to say, they done good. For the Rose Garden, they chose Apricot Giant and Big Chief which I, without knowing what they intended, planted as a mix. It’s gorgeous! They did clash a little last week with the Magnolia x loebneri ‘Leonard Messel’ but then they weren’t really supposed to bloom together…

The North Garden tulips aren’t all open yet but the ones that are, are a bit of a mixed bag. Apricot Beauty is a standby favorite and it didn’t disappoint. We mixed Amazone with it which is just starting to open and promises to be a deeper orange/green apricot that I think is destined to become one of my new faves. Cistula is supposed to be a pale yellow and it’s blazing hot (could it have reverted?) – but thankfully, it works anyway because of the daffodil echo. Dreaming Maid is more pink than the catalog pictures let on – we wanted it to be lavender and we’re still waiting on Formosa and Black Hero (which we know we love).

The tulip trials in the Cutting Garden are tu gorgeous. We wondered what color(s) Gudoshnik would be…

I’ve picked my winners in the lavender contest – Jackpot hits it and so does Violet Beauty so far – not all of the contestants have opened yet. Fringed Family (in the middle of the family portrait) is decidedly, definitely pink.

I have a winner for the yellows too:  I can see using Yellow Mountain in the North Garden next year…

And my choices for the North Garden, which were overruled and relegated to a Cutting Garden plot, are quite a nice combo so far too, if I may say, and definitely contenders for next year’s North Garden display.  Pimpernel is the red, Annie Schilder is the orange, and of course Spring Green is the excellent green.  Bleu Aimable – supposed to be lavender – is still biding its time. Perhaps this year, before they all go by, we’ll make a few combination bouquets and take pictures so that we’ll (with Lilah’s help again, of course) agonize less over the order come July.

Are your tulips blooming? Any surprises? Any favorites?

-By Gertrude Keller (daughter of Bessie Van Wickle McKee’s sister) from the Blithewold guest book, July 1953

Happy Halloween!

Gail has been focused – I’d say “fixated” if that didn’t have a wrong sounding tone – on getting the seedlings transplanted by May 1. So yesterday I worked on basils and Nicotianas and thought about whether or not I have “the touch” (a.k.a. a green thumb). I used to work with a 70 year old Dutch gardener named Gerard who taught by nearly silent grumble and who definitely had the touch. I remember planting out bedding annuals with him and watching him knock salvias out of packs, open the roots with rips and tears and shove them one after another into the ground. The fascinating thing for me watching him was the delicate balance – his handling of the plants both wasn’t nearly as rough as it looked nor were the plants as fragile as I thought.

The nicotianas I transplanted yesterday look like they’ve been through a devastating hurricane – I separated them from a pack like this one and I swear leaves broke when I only looked at them. I’m not a terribly coordinated person – my penmanship is illegible, it takes me 5 tries to thread a needle, I can’t walk in a straight line, and I fall off my bike sometimes. But I can handle plants with a certain “touch” because (and this is the real trick) they’re wired for survival. (Mind you, I’m not talking about gardenias and maiden hair ferns which under my care seem downright suicidal.) We transplant seedlings – and plant in our gardens – in order to give the plants room to grow to their best potential and so that’s just what they’ll most likely do. Of course we’ve still got to water them, give them the right kind of light and heat and make sure there aren’t any slugs lurking beneath the packs and even then, every once in while something might fail to thrive. And so we keep learning. Do you have “the touch”?

Mother Nature’s touch has been a little on the rough side the last couple of days but my guess is everything will thrive for it – even the tissue paper delicate waterlogged trillium (Trillium grandiflorum).

The daffodils look a little bit sat upon but I think they and the tulips will pop back up too. Did you know that a penny in a vase of cut tulips will keep them from slouching? (If only that worked for teenagers…)

Just as soon as the dust has settled from the frenzy of December 25 and even before all of the gifts we’ve been given have found a permanent place in our homes (and gardens!) and hearts we have the fresh start of a new year to consider and plan. Some people (are you one?) make New Year’s Resolutions. Personally, I try not to make resolutions because I have few reserves of resolve at this time of year and a half-hearted resolution now, for me is a waste of perfectly good guilty feelings later.

Gardenally, I think turn of the year motivational decisions are different creatures altogether. Unlike standard New Year’s Resolutions that are often born from regrets and soon forgotten or discarded in a heap of self loathing, garden intentions grow out of hope and desire. They are self-fulfilling and don’t have the odious chore-like feel of resolutions – it’s just what we do! We start fresh. We take what we already have and are determined to do it better; make it better, prettier, and more enjoyable some way or other. We give our-gardener-selves deadline-free rein to dream and create and decide, undecide. Whether a little or a lot, we will follow-through and feel proud (sometimes secretly) of whatever we manage to accomplish. And I think as gardeners we tend to be more realistic about what we can do/want to do and are easier on ourselves when our dreams overshoot our abilities. Carol at May Dreams Gardens offers a guide for setting some garden “goals” – a way to organize the buzz in our heads of everything we desire for our gardens in the coming season. Does the New Year spur you to make resolutions, set goals or intentions for your garden? Are you easier on your garden than you are on yourself?

The Christmas snow melt revealed one of Fred and Dan’s 2008 best garden intentions – before the ground froze they had begun forging ahead on the Display Garden redesign. This past year they had the advantage of a weirdly warm early January to resod the area around the cement pond and they cut the new beds on the north side of the garden over the spring. This year, they intend to re-do the south side Idea Beds, move the nursery (along with a bunch of other projects on the grounds). And just like in any home garden, they are at the mercy of the weather, constrained by time and limited by budget – those are realities that keep us gardeners pragmatic. Gail and I, with the volunteers’ help intend to plant up and beautifully maintain what the guys are able to give us. — Whatever we do in all the gardens, will be done to the best of our intentions! Happy New Year!

The North Garden is done! (pretty much. for today, anyway. mostly.) Yesterday on the way over with carts full of plants in nursery pots, Gail and I remembered almost at the same moment that we had intended to borrow just a few more things from the Idea Beds for the North. According to Gail, Sheila Loerke (who was Blithewold’s Assistant Horticulturist before she passed away in 2004) always thought the North Garden could use some distinctively shaped shrubbery. In her honor and memory, we relocated 4 pencil thin boxwoods, one to each bed and 2 blobular boxwoods to the entrance path. As soon as they were in the ground Gail and I stood back and said “Yup. That’s what it needed!” (Sheila is up there saying “told ya so” and smiling, hopefully.) This morning the Rockettes forked out tulips while I went back to the greenhouse twice for forgotten items (I’m much too young to call all the forgetting anything but dingy-ness) and then planted 215 tender color makers (Salvias, Zinnias, Ageratum, Dahlias, Browalia, Cosmos…) in about an hour. What a group!

The Deadheads were also a mighty workforce: Yesterday they forked all the cutting bed tulips yesterday and weeded the fig/melon bed down by the compost area and then said “what’s next?”. I honestly don’t know what we would do without them.

Things just keep blooming! If only the computer had scratch ‘n’ sniff — this (Carolina Allspice) smells like juicyfruit gum and this one (Empress tree) smells like grape cough syrup. You don’t believe me but it’s true!

The Tamarix by the water is all budded up and the Beach plum is sweetly blooming away down there.

and remember the little butter burs? This is what it looks like now!