Fall color is here!

The O Isami

I've been looking forward to the fall color for the last month, and it started a couple weeks ago with the first yellows, and my big O Isami. It showed a bit more red this year, but it's pretty much gone now. Then some of the grasses and the grape arch lit up, and now the dogwoods and some of the A. palmatum Japanese maples are picking up the color. We haven't had any sharp cold nights here yet, so the colors are just trickling through the gardens and woods a little at a time. That's fine--a nice long fall is a lovely feature. And after the astonishing 8" of rain in September, I haven't had to water anything but my potted plants, and that's been nice. I've had a chance to catch up on my garden chores too, and now I'm leaf-ing the garden, even as I get to murder the young weeds that sprouted after the big rains.

But I'm way behind on my posting, so this is a long one:

Red Dragon, Miscanthus sinensis Zebrinus, and Hydrangea Merritt's Beauty

This early morning combination of the Zebrinus flowers, the Merritt's Beauty dried flower heads, and red tints of the A. palmatum Red Dragon was irresistible.

Disanthus cercidifolia

The big Disanthus showed the most color ever this year, and lots of red.

Fog at sunrise

Just a little ground fog on the Christmas trees on the hilltop east of here.

Mixed Panicums and Helictotrichon

Three Panicums turned gold (a fourth on the far right edge) to contrast with the Blue Oat grass.

I love red leaves in the fall

The A. palmatum Hilleri, now taller than I am, and the first palmatum I planted here.

Another view in the afternoon light, showing the bright lime green of the young bark. I had never noticed this color contrast before. While I was weeding around it, I found a tiny baby red-leafed seedling! I marked it with a stick and next year I'll move it to where it'll have a bit more room. Hope it's like its mom!

These were translucent, with delicate sawtooth edges

An old chunk of fir stump or root sprouted these pink mushrooms the other day, and they were so pretty I snapped the photo, not noticing the two big and one tiny slugs having a meal! In the spring and fall I get about a dozen species of mushrooms in my garden, and I have a pretty good photo collection but have only managed to identify a few of them. I've found both poisonous and edible ones, but the slugs and mammals beat me to the edible ones. I'm okay with that.

Anna's? It was 2" - 3" head to butt

This morning while I was planting my winter broccoli starts, a hummer came to sample the pineapple sage hedge next to the veggie bed. When it noticed me noticing it, it flashed its bright red throat at me.

I had my camera with me and miraculously managed to get these photos.

Hosta Guacamole

Hosta Guacamole

I got a nice photo of my Guacamoles today and I don't think I've ever posted them before. They really look great this year, better than ever. I love their colors and vigor and unattractiveness to slugs, especially for green hostas.

Time for Fall Haircuts

Bronze sedges, all trimmed up

The bronze sedges (Carex comans) have had a great year. The new babies all grew well and the established ones outdid themselves, growing their long, golden tresses out to amazing lengths. But when I'm out doing fall weeding and breaking up the small branches that have fallen over the summer, I can't do much without getting tangled in those strands, which are frequently as long as three feet. Last spring, just to make things easier for myself, I cut the long leaves off my three bushiest, hoping I didn't mar them for life. I didn't need to worry—those plants were fully as furry this month as they had ever been. So yesterday I broke out my heavy garden scissors and went around giving haircuts. The strands are tough enough that they could tangle and conceivably, in sufficient numbers, choke up equipment, so rather than throw them whole into the recycling bin, I just cut them into finger lengths and left them on the ground for mulch.

I usually don't have to give full haircuts to the orange sedges, because except for their seed stems (which I will cut off when they get in my way), their leaves rarely grow more than 12-14". However, over last winter I bought half a dozen seedlings at a couple of stores that were labeled "Orange Sedge" but turned out to have leaves twice as thick (1/8" compared to 1/16") and twice as long as my old standby orangies. The only thing I can guess is that the polite, refined ones I've had for years are a cultivated variety of C. testacea, and the ones I (and another friend) picked up this year are the original species, substantially larger and a bit rougher-looking. Their coloring is almost exactly the same, and the leaves on the young plants were narrow, so I was easily fooled. I've pulled my miscreants out of the small bed I'd placed them in and moved them to an area where they can compete with each other for space, and not overwhelm their heuchera neighbors, as they were doing.

Fortunately for me, my original orangies, a good seven years old now, had a bumper crop of their own babies this year, which I'm still moving to new locations in the former meadow.

A wonderful summer

Grape arch over the Nikko Blue hydrangea

This has been the loveliest, mild-but-warmest summer I've experienced since I moved here eight years ago. The weather has been very obliging, not too hot, not too windy, not too cool—very dry, but that's no surprise. The heleniums are blooming, the daisies are passing, the crocosmias and some of the daylilies are still going, and the hydrangea blooms are maturing and starting to show their fall hues. The paniculata hydrangeas are in full bloom now, and my oakleaf one bloomed for the first time this year. The Pinky Winky has a dozen big blooms and even my White Dome has one tiny little bloom.

Phloxes watching over the veggie garden

I'm still moving things around that turned out to be too close, and I still have too many plants that I haven't gotten planted yet. But I made a few small improvements in the watering system, and there have been several days when I've been walking through one part or another of the garden and my breath catches because I can't believe how beautiful it is. The lushness of the plantings and the way so many of the plants just keep getting better and better seems a reward out of proportion to the effort I've put into it. I've been working on it the better part of seven years, but it's the plants that turn a planted place into a garden. If they didn't grow, or flower, or come back every year, or change colors in the fall, the garden really wouldn't be much. But they do, and because of that, the jungle and weed patches I used to have, are now a garden.

Merritt's Beauty hydrangea—the three darkest flowers in the
lower right show the actual color of these blooms

Summer morning ground fog

Our summer weather is going to hit tomorrow, and that probably means the end of our spring showers. Warm temperatures, dry air, and soon, dry soil, will be the norm for the next 3 months or so. Honestly, it's been long enough since we had a decently warm summer, even I'm looking forward to this one. But a few mornings ago I walked out the back door into a really wonderful late spring morning, with the warm sun and the cool, moist meadow making a mist of ground fog that glowed for a few moments with the pink light of the morning sun.

First light hitting the understory

When the first rays came over the hills and hit the side of my trees, I got these beautiful colors.

Heuchera Licorice flower towers

I have a strip of "Licorice" heucheras in my central back garden, and this is their fourth year there. They are outstanding performers, and look beautiful pretty much all year. If they're getting leggy (hard to believe they're not after such a long time), you can't tell by looking at them, and they make a mass of bloom now that makes me think of fairy pagodas. They're so delicate, but so plentiful that they're still what I'd call a mass, just an airy mass.

Hydrangea Oregon Pride almost in full color

And last but not least, another sign that summer is here is the deep purple heads on my Oregon Pride black-stemmed hydrangea. They start out bright chartreuse and take about a week to color up to this point. My Nikko Blues and half of my other hydrangeas are in bloom or showing their first color. I haven't turned my heated bedpad off yet, but at least I don't have to put my gardening clothes in the dryer to warm them up now before I put them on. Welcome, summer!

Workshop with a Master

I was lucky enough to get to attend a workshop this morning with Patrick Gracewood, a noted sculptor, dancer, gardener, and teacher in Portland. The workshop was on how to site sculpture in a garden, both to show off the sculpture most effectively, and to enhance the garden, particularly by solving problems.

Sculpture arrangement at Gracewood Studio

This arrangement is the first sculpture you see as you enter his garden at the end of a long walkway. It demonstrates how to use sculpture to lead your eyes through a garden, to make you look and move in one direction, or from one place to the next. It also shows how you can combine permanent (as in, heavy and hard to move) sculptures and supports with temporary elements such as this beautiful braided wreath and fresh alstroemeria flower stems.

One of the other demonstrations was how to use a screen to make a feature stand out from the background and focus attention on it. The feature could be anything that has meaning for you—in this case, a beautiful bonsai.

Bonsai Acer circinatum

This large Miscanthus grass makes a great textured background for a special display, but sadly, this bonsai dwarf vine maple doesn't work with it because the texture and level of detail are so similar.

Patrick (right) and friend Tait with teak screen 

However, this oriental-style screen which Patrick made out of scrapped pieces of teak that were to be thrown away both frames the feature and makes a beautiful background for it, with the added benefit of the shadow play of the little tree on the wood.

You can see more about Patrick at www.GracewoodStudio.com, and if you ever have a chance to visit and see his incredible sculptures up close, I humbly suggest that you drop what you're doing and GO. His presentation was unusually interesting and gave me a lot to think about in my own garden. He talked about using sculptures in layouts specifically to make you sit down in your garden and just be in it.

One of the principles he mentioned was the concept of sacred time, or kairos (greek), as opposed to chronos, measured (chronological) time. A garden isn't just decorative, it's profoundly functional in that it can pull you out of the hurry and bustle of your "real" life and make you slow down to the speed of nature, which is much, much slower—like the speed of deep, relaxed breathing.

Trees minus one, plus two

Our Hardy Plant group made another shopping excursion to H&L Nursery here in Beavercreek a few weeks ago—our fourth trip there, I think, in three years. They specialize in Japanese maples and unusual conifer trees and shrubs, but they carry a few other types of trees. I was thinking of getting an Amber Ghost maple and a couple dwarf cryptomeria, but instead I fell for two other Japanese maples. The Tsumagaki has actually been on my shopping list for a while, but I had never seen a Pixie before. The Tsumagaki is in front and the Pixie behind. The Tsumagaki will lose the red edge as we get into summer, I'm told.

Two days ago I went on a garden walk-around in the morning and found a new arrangement of one of my Japanese maple seedlings I've had for four years or so. It was about 5 feet tall and turned orange in the fall for a couple years, but this last year it went gold. The four inch by fifteen foot fir branch that fell smack dab on top of it was heavy enough to split the trunk down the middle, leaving one large branch on each side. I would love to plant one of my new ones there, but what if another fir branch lands in the same spot? That's the problem with gardening under fir trees—occasional death by branch.

I had a really nice moment out one afternoon when the afternoon sun caught the sword ferns and the new leaves on the Forest Pansy redbud. I love the bright colors of spring. Unnamed camellia (beautiful) on the left side, and Rosy Lights azaleas at the bottom.