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?

Just as Gail and I teetered on the edge of overwhelmed, Cathy (Harvest Meister) and Lilah (Weed Woman) came back to lighten our load and lift our spirits -and not a moment too soon! Non-gardeners never believe me when I describe this time of year as “stressful”. I mentioned to someone that I spent the weekend “madly gardening” at home and was told that that must be an oxymoron – after all isn’t gardening supposed to be contemplative and therapeutic? Fellow gardeners, I know you know the frenzy that can overtake just now (let’s call it a Maynia). Not only is there an endless list of must-do-right-nows – like planting and digging out weeds that grew 5 feet tall all of a sudden when we were focused on planting – but we must also remember to notice and appreciate all of the returning plants and blooms – as if they’re old friends back for an annual reunion. I don’t know how many nights I’ve woken up worried that I might have missed a favorite plant’s peak (and right now they’re all my favorites). I almost snubbed the tree peony this year… I have some catching up to do with you all from before the long weekend. Here are some things I would have been disappointed to forget to welcome back and show off to you:

Hover over for captions/identification and click on for larger image.

Last Friday, Gail, Linda (one of the Rockettes) and I were “madly” planting/weeding in the North Garden when some visitors up on the north porch called our attention to the enormous red-tailed hawk taking a bath in the fountain not 30 feet from where the three of us were working. I’m so glad we didn’t miss that spectacle – although the hawk might have preferred a little privacy…

Are you feeling stressed out at all? Are you remembering to stop and contemplate the leucothoe?

One of the most frequently asked questions lately is “what is that pretty groundcover that’s … everywhere?” Some people seem to ask the question with the “I want that” eye twinkle. (You don’t really want it.) Others appear to cringe as if they’re afraid to know the answer. (Be afraid. Be very afraid.) Goutweed (Aegopodium podagraria) is a scourge and a plague on all our houses – if we have been unlucky enough to inherit it. Bishop’s weed was introduced in this country by early European settlers as an ornamental groundcover and quickly established itself as a weedy invasive capable of out-competing our natives. (It is described only as “weedy” on RI Natural History Survey Invasives List because it hasn’t escaped cultivated areas here. Yet. It is listed as an invasive on Connecticut’s Invasive Plants List.)

It is pretty, no doubt about that and some nurseries actually sell an even more attractive variegated variety (Aegopodium podagraria ‘Variegatum’) – which, like many variegateds may be slightly slower to establish but may also at any time revert to plain green and perform a hostile takeover of your garden and the neighboring woods. In the AHS A-Z Encyclopedia the plant size is listed as 12-24″ x indefinite. That kind of says it all.

Goutweed is blanketed throughout Blithewold, particularly in the Bosquet and continually inserts itself in the gardens where we declare War. When the Idea Beds in the Display Garden were first designed (before my time – and before our current redesign of that garden) the beds spent an entire growing season beneath heavy black plastic before anything could be planted. The North Garden was entirely un-planted and replanted (also before my time) to remove the weed from infested perennials and volunteers combed roots out of the beds. And still it emerges where it isn’t welcome. The roots, bright white and as easily recognizable as the equally obnoxious bright orange bittersweet, break with the merest tug and resprout. For that reason it is uncompostable and evicted from the property.

Fred (dir. of hort.) and Dan have been waging their own war with the goutweed. Each summer they weedwhack it all before it can set seed – the flowers are pretty little white lace flower umbels – and wherever they’ve been able to beat back the goutweed, they plant creeping myrtle a.k.a. periwinkle (Vinca minor) and other less aggressive groundcovers, like this patch of native creeping phlox (Phlox stolonifera) and foam flower (Tiarella cordifolia) behind the summerhouse.

Groundcovers are generally thuggish by nature – we want them to be to a certain extent – and goutweed is certainly not the worst of what can be found infesting the property – we’ve got English ivy and lily-of-the-valley too. And we all have different demons. I could tolerate the spread of creeping phlox for instance, and others I know abhor it as a menace. Do you have goutweed in your garden? Are you plagued by it or something else? How do you manage your overtakers?

It’s all about the little things again. Yesterday Gail spotted an adorable flock of Cedar Waxwings feasting on inchworms and pooping on me (nailed twice, lucky me!) and today Gioia spied the Oriole sweetly serenading as we weeded the Display Garden. I was also lucky enough to spot this little guy today hunkered down against the wind (it’s blowing a gale out there!). Anyone know if it is what it looks like? – I think it must be a new baby dragonfly. (click on pictures for a larger view)

We’re shifting our focus this week from planting to weeding.

It happens every year like a bomb went off – last week’s rain sparked a flash flood of seedlings that are all of a sudden big enough for us to name (with names like “a weed” and “not-a-weed”).

It takes practice to recognize the wants and the don’t wants and patience to extract them from each other. Some of us would like to take a hoe and wipe out the whole lot and start fresh but others of us enjoy the surprises and the challenge. The cutting garden is full of volunteer annuals (and we love our volunteers almost as much as we love our volunteer weeders) like Snow on the mountain (Euphorbia marginata), Bupleurum, Papaver somniferum ‘Peony Flowered’ and in the North Garden we came across some cosmos and bachelor buttons amongst our usual thugish favorites like Milkweed (Asclepias). Occasionally, sometimes, every now and then, even we don’t recognize a weed when we see it – Gail sighs, “Professional horticulturists that we are…” and shakes her head in dismay. We let some things become specimen-sized before we yank them out with a hot blush of embarrassment (“yikes! Hope nobody noticed that!”) or we’ll miss something completely until it’s a suddenly giant horsy thumb poking up out of the back row. We hope that visitors see the humor too… How well do you know your seedlings?