That’s my answer for anyone who might wonder why I haven’t posted in a few days. 4000 bulbs, give or take. Planted. Mostly. Still planting… Over the last couple of weeks, Gail and Tricia and I have tried hard to get all 3686 bulbs that we ordered along with the few hundred tulips we saved from last spring placed and in the ground before we let the volunteers take a much deserved winter break. We’re also trying to stay a step ahead of the weather – something wicked this way comes next week, according to forecasters… One of the hardest parts of rushing to get the bulbs in is having to make way for them by taking out plants that are still blooming. (We plant tulips in the same slots as our annuals.) In a perfect scenario, frost would have done the dirty work for us. But this year there are still bees and butterflies working the African blue basil, dahlias and zinnias. Every plant that came out broke our hearts a tiny bit so we left as much as we could, especially in the Rose Garden.

The physical act of planting is also not easy (except wherever the ground was loosened by taking annuals out). The volunteers did the lion’s share, down on all fours in the bulb hunchback – my least favorite yoga pose. And we have all cheered ourselves up as we stretched and arched our backs back into proper alignment that the promise of a spectacular spring is worth a  few hours of discomfort. I watched everyone get the same glazed look on their face as they cast ahead to the days when tulips like Blue Spectacle, Golden Artist, and Akebono bloom in concert. When unearthly earthy Fritillaria persica dangle deep purple-black bells on 2′ stems in the Rose Garden, and Allium Pinball Wizard lights up the North Garden. We planted more varieties of muscari and scilla, endless crocus, and are trying brodiaea, pushkinia, and a tiny oxalis that hasn’t been gone in yet because we can’t make up our minds where we’d love to see it more – the Rock Garden or the Rose?

Bulb planting takes a kind of blind faith and strong constitution that I believe must be unique to gardeners as a species. Bulbs are the ultimate in delayed gratification, dormant proof of gardeners’ collective optimism because they give absolutely no hint of what’s to come. We can only hope as they go in that they’ll spring out again in some more fabulous form. And our fingers have to stay crossed that this year that the squirrels and deer find plenty of other things to eat…

Have you started planting bulbs in your garden yet? Are you pinning your hopes for spring on anything new?

Our Tuesday volunteer group has been known for years — for ever? — as the “Deadheads” because they work in the Display Garden and traditionally, the biggest summer chore in these gardens has been to deadhead flowers to keep them from quitting and going to seed. While we still ask for help deadheading the annuals in the cutting garden to keep them blooming gangbusters, in recent years we have not deadheaded the other beds as rigorously. Now when the Deadheads ask if we want echinacea deadheaded in the pollinator bed we say, “No… let’s leave their seeds for the birds.” And when they ask if they should deadhead the betony, beebalm, cardoon, teasel, and eryngium, we say, “Nah, don’t those look cool?! Let’s leave them up for the winter.” Perhaps the Tuesday group needs a new name…

I know the betony (Stachys monnieri ‘Hummelo’) wouldn’t have bloomed again because we cut a couple of clumps back last year as a test, but the beebalm (Monarda fistulosa ‘Claire Grace’) might have rebloomed, and there are still buds opening along the echinacea stems. But right now I wouldn’t trade any of those seedheads for their flowers. Not only are they beautiful (in the eye of this beholder) but there is more wildlife activity in that garden than I ever remember seeing before. It’s positively mesmerizing – I’ve been so distracted that visitors have caught me gawping instead of working. Goldfinch, wrens, and sparrows are all vying for seeds and hummingbirds, bees and butterflies are still zinging around working all of the flowers that aren’t ready to go to seed yet.

But there’s a fine line between letting the garden go to seed and letting the garden go. Some gardeners and visitors might think the cardoon seedheads look more like the undead than the simply un-deadheaded. And I imagine that it might make some people nervous to watch them self-destruct and send helicopters wheeling on the wind to float with the butterflies and catch in the grass and on bare patches of soil. But that doesn’t make me nervous. As long as the stalks are still standing upright, surrounded by a colorful garden that looks tended (it’s been meticulously weeded and propped, if not deadheaded) rather than abandoned, and the birds are happy, then I figure we gardeners are as golden as the light that falls this time of year.

Do you deadhead everything up until the bitter end or do you leave seedheads standing for their looks and for the birds? Have you found a happy medium? (Have we? – All opinions welcome!)

When the cicadas start buzzing early in the morning we know we’re in for a scorcher. With temps in the 90′s, high humidity and ground level ozone levels that were predicted to “approach or exceed unhealthy standards”, all we can do – without falling over – is the bare minimum. It’s a good thing we’ve finished planting because all we really need to do now is water, maintain, and harvest the bounty. As for watering, Nature helped a bit yesterday with a freakish afternoon downpour that gave us at least half an inch and by the looks of the refreshed gardens, some of it actually soaked in rather than running right off. As for maintaining, I feel inclined to leave a few extra seedheads for the goldfinch and have concentrated on staking slouchers instead. (I have never noticed our pink peony poppy seedheads looking eaten before – peeled like bananas. But today I caught a glimpse of the goldfinch at work on them and also snacking on the Verbena bonariensis.)

And as for harvesting, there were lots of flowers to pick bright and early for house arrangements, and the vegetables are coming in gangbusters. It was wonderful to be joined by a skeleton crew of very local and very willing-to-be-sweaty volunteers who spent an hour picking a cart-full for the East Bay Food Pantry and then hopefully went straight home to recuperate in front of the A/C. The rest of us on staff who aren’t relaxing on vacation (I’ll follow Gail’s excellent example in a couple of weeks) will have to find inside work for the rest of the day. Check out the fruits of some of my indoor labor here - I finally published plant list pdfs! (For future reference, they are located in a clickable page on the right-hand sidebar, underneath BECOME A MEMBER.)

What are you doing to keep cool?

I would never complain about getting rain when we need it but almost every week for the last few we’ve lost at least one day with our volunteers. It has interfered with our planting schedule and dampness has made us postpone necessary deadheading and weeding to keep from compacting the soil. But the worst part is, this year the volunteer ranks have swelled to almost 40 hardy souls and our time getting to know the newbies and hanging out with old friends keeps getting interrupted. Today, despite the damp dreariness of the morning, some of those hardy souls, newbies and veterans alike, came prepared to lean into the Rose and North Garden from the very edges to deadhead and weed as much as we could reach from arms’ length. It’s a testament to our volunteers’ dedication that they would be so willing to be so sopping.

Last night at Blithewold’s annual meeting we were able to honor one of our most dedicated and loyal Wednesday “Rockettes”, Beverly Christ with the Anne Archibald Volunteer Service Award. As Gail said in her introduction, Bev has been quietly and steadily tending to the details of the minutia of the Rock Garden for well over 20 years, and we have come to rely very heavily on her to start seeds for us in spring. As quiet and tiny as Beverly is, she’s no mouse. She’s tough as nails and doesn’t suffer fools. She takes my cheek on the chin and gives it right back. I love her more than words can say – and that’s saying something.

I know I’ve said this before but it bears repeating over and over: Blithewold is a beautiful and special place because of the people who love it. Like any garden, it wouldn’t be worth visiting if no one poured heart and soul into it. We’re very, very lucky. Because when it rains, it totally pours.

It’s game time here at Blithewold. Even though we’ve been planting steadily since … March (!) the biggest push starts now that we’re well past frost and are desperate to get everything moved out of the greenhouse. What we call “planting week” usually spans a month or more and starts with marathon planting sessions in each garden that never take as long as we imagine it will. We were set back by rain earlier in the week but a powerful crew of volunteers adjusted their schedules to work today and along with the Florabundas yesterday they got us over the first of several humps.

A good 400 annuals and tender perennials including dahlias, salvias, ageratum, helichrysum, zinnias and agastache went in the North Garden yesterday; Dan planted at least 40 tomatoes; and almost 600 cutting garden annuals like tassel flower, amaranth, and lisianthus, and tender perennials and perennials such as lavender, butterfly weed and “Rhody Native” mountain mint went into the cutting garden, herb garden and pollinator bed today. Today’s planting session was completed just in time for a drenching downpour – a half an inch in what couldn’t have been much longer that a half an hour – that watered everything right in.

We try to make the job as easy as possible. Gail, Tricia and I place everything the day before so that no one has to wait while we make up our minds about where it all goes. And mostly the planting is easy – the soil is soft, fluffy cake mix wherever we took tulips out and wherever we evict forget-me-nots and teasel seedlings that have fulfilled their duties as space holders/weed barriers. But it’s still a big manicure-wrecking job that’s hard on the knees and the back and we couldn’t possibly have gotten even a fraction of it done in the time it took without our amazing volunteers.

The more we plant the more space we have under the arbor for hardening off plants as they come out of the greenhouse. I’ll spare you uninteresting shots of empty benches but to Gail and me they are almost as thrilling as seeing our plants go in the ground one by one by one.

Will you spend any part of this long weekend planting? I hope you have perfect weather for it and well-timed downpours – at night of course after the cookout – to help settle it all in. Happy planting!