The First Ones of Fall

Beautiful weather. Sunny, in the 60s. The recent rain has refreshed things, but it only made a slight dent in the overall dry conditions from this summer, and many plants are still showing stress.

The 'Tardiva' panicle hydrangea looks better now, though.

Right on cue, with the start of fall, some of the leaves start to turn colors. Here are the ones that go first every year.

The sumacs on the hill are always early.

Some red maples on the back hill turn scarlet before the others. The big red maples in the yard are still green and won't change for weeks yet.

The funny tiered sassafras draped in orange on the right is always one of the early ones, even as the sassafras right next to it remains deep green. This has always been the oddest pairing of the same species tree. They look completely unrelated.

The twiggy tuliptree in the meadow is yellow now. A wild species tuliptree came down in a storm in 2011, but this little one is a cultivar I planted called 'Little Volunteer', and it has small leaves and a much smaller size overall. It seems to be a slow grower too, unlike the wild rangy lirodendrons that leap up quickly.

The sweetspires in the middle of the Birch garden are deep red already and this seems earlier than other years. It is not usually noticeable until October, but this year it is eye grabbing a month earlier.

Geranium wlassovianum is multicolored now. In some years it has great fall color, other years it doesn't, and just looks brown and tired. I did not shear it after bloom this summer. I did take off the tangled flower stalks a few days ago to tidy it up.

All the spicebushes are glittery now. They are among the first of the shrubs to turn fall colors, always a lemony yellow and the leaves turn droopy which gives them a fluttery look.

The doublefile viburnum is among the first to color each year but it doesn't do it very dramatically. It gets brownish a few leaves at a time, but then slowly deepens to a rusty red brown color. It is definitely not as bright glossy red as the maples standing behind it, but it is nice in its own muted way.

When it comes to being first, the red buckeye gets the job done. Leaves turn yellow, and then drop completely before the end of September. The first year I thought it was drought stress or transplant adjustment, but it has done this each year (it's still a very young tree), so I guess it's just an early leaf dropper. The season's first, in fact.

Once fall starts to put on its show of color, it races by so fast.

Minerva

Minerva in much younger days

She was 19 years old and that's the equivalent of mid 90s for a Siamese cat. She was an old lady when we lost her today.

Her sister Margot, from the same litter, is now the only reigning cat in the house. She is just as old, but not quite as frail as Minerva had become.

It was a full and long life for a cherished and pampered cat. 

So sad, especially for Jim. He got to say goodbye and see her off, and will miss her a lot. I will too.

White in the Window

Nice September weather, barely 70 with a breeze and some sun. After the nice rain, the ground is soft and workable. I have been removing sod in a project to expand some of the beds. It's so easy when the ground is damp.

I also cleaned up -- took out the too-big pink zinnias in the Birch garden, removed spent basil and parsley, weeded, added mulch to bare areas.

The white Rose of Sharon outside the dining room window keeps stopping me in my tracks. For years I fussed that it would never get tall enough to reach the bottom of the window and be seen from inside. It grew wide and bushy and spread out.

I'd peer out the window to see a few blooms teasing me at the bottom of the window frame. I had to crane to see them.

But now it is large enough to fill the window and be seen everywhere in the house.

I can't photograph how clear white and attention grabbing it is. The camera won't pick up the deep blues and dark wood of the inside at the same time as the pure white flowers sparkling in the sunshine outside. The lens washes out the flowers as it tries to light the interior and I don't have the skill to make it see both.

Here the dining room is flooded in sunlight and the window is bathed in white chiffon flowers, but the camera is awash in confusion.

In reality the flowers seem to come inside, shimmering more so when the sky is cloudy and the inside of the house is gloomy. It frustrates me that I can't show how glorious it looks!

The white blooms fill the porch window too. The hummingbirds adore this plant and hover in and out of all the blossoms drinking their fill. It surprises me that they go for white flowers or for Rose of Sharon at all, but they do.

This cultivar is 'White Chiffon'. It was advertised to be sterile, but I find little seedlings nearby and, as with all Hibiscus syriacus, the unwanted seedlings are really tough (impossible) to pull up.

I am concerned about it this year. Although the flowers are spectacular seen framed in the windows, the plant is stressed. The dry summer has left it with skimpy foliage and an open, see-through form.

It also tends to be wide and spreading. My attempts at pruning the sides off for more of an upright vase shape seem to have backfired, and the plant is spreading out even more.

It had such a promising shape when first planted. Here it was in 2009 looking quite upright.

In 2011 I could still barely see any flowers through the window. What a tease it was to catch only a few blooms in the bottom corner.

Now white flowers fill the window, shine into the whole house and please me every time I see it from inside. From the outside, though, its condition this summer and its generally wide floppy form have me concerned.

I think I'll try a severe pruning this winter and take out a third of the branches for shape and rejuvenation.

Unexpected

It is so much easier when water falls from the sky all over my gardens and the meadow and the woods. Easier than hand watering for hours which only dampens the soil about a quarter inch down in a small area.

A 60% possibility of some thunderstorms was predicted for this morning, but all summer "possibility" has meant "no rain" and "thunderstorms" meant only rumbles and wind but no moisture.

Early this morning we got an inch and a quarter of rain. A deep steady soaking for everything.

It was unexpected but very welcome.

As I have my coffee and breakfast it is gloomy and dark, but so beautifully, wonderfully wet.

Beetlebungs

Nyssa sylvatica is a native tree that has fascinated me. I have planted several -- two in the front yard, one at the bridge by the dry creek bed, and a couple on the back hill.

Fall color is stunning, the form is shapely, and the leaves are deep green and glossy. A nice tree.

It is stiffly branched, with hard wood that does not break in heavy snow storms. The lower branches sweep down gracefully, like a pin oak's. Even my young trees want to drape their lower skirts, and as a yard tree I have to limb them up.

For some reason Nyssa has several intriguing common names. Many know this as black gum, and that's how I usually refer to it.

But this tree is also very commonly called tupelo, or black tupelo to distinguish it from the well known southern tupelo.

It is also called pepperidge, and the cookies you buy from Pepperidge Farm feature a silhouette of a big pepperidge tree on the cookie bag.

Now I learn it has another common name.

While touring Martha's Vineyard this week, we found out that the islanders refer to black gums / pepperidges / tupelos by another name with an interesting history: they call these trees beetlebungs.

The wood of Nyssa sylvatica is a perfect material for the bungs (stoppers) in casks. Martha's Vineyard was a whaling powerhouse in the 1800s and needed lots of casks for whale oil and lots of bungs to stopper them. Local tupelos provided the best material for bungs. The wood is hard, and won't shrink when dry or swell when it is wet.

The beaters they used to pound the bungs into the casks were called beetles, back to Shakespeare's day. The very hard wood of the local tupelos made good mallet heads, or beetles.

So the cask makers on Martha's Vineyard referred to these native trees by their usefulness: they called them beetlebung trees.

It's very specific to Martha's Vineyard. Nearby Nantucket Island was a whaling center as well, and tupelos grew there and were used for stoppers and mallets, but no one on Nantucket calls them beetlebungs. It just caught on with the islanders on Martha's Vineyard.

Our trip was great. We saw Polly Hill arboretum, which is a treasure. Polly began planting trees on an old sheep farm she inherited in the center of the island. She began this when she was 50 years old. She planted everything from seed -- oaks, hollies, beetlebungs, stewartias, conifers of all kinds.

And she lived to see her seedlings become 50 year old specimens, as she died at age 100, still sharp and by then a legend in horticultural research.

There was even a sassafras grove in Polly's arboretum, well maintained and limbed up. I would have liked to meet Polly Hill.

We also got to tour several private gardens on the island that were professionally maintained and opulent. There is money on Martha's Vineyard.

We visited Oak Bluffs, of course. And Gay Head. And we saw boats and yachts and schooners in the harbor. We had ice cream in Vineyard Haven and seafood on the dock in Edgartown.

We saw the lace walls that the sheep farmers built all over the island. Apparently sheep go nuts when they can't see what's on the other side of a wall, so farmers built their stone walls with little views through them.

The mid September weather was lovely, but Martha's Vineyard is in one of the worst droughts the islanders can remember. They've had less rain than we got here this summer. Irrigated private gardens were lush, but everywhere else the lawns and fields were brown.

The summer crowds that swamp the island were gone, and the President and his security retinue had left, so Martha's Vineyard was quiet, the air was cool and nice, and we enjoyed it immensely.

I particularly enjoyed learning about beetlebungs!

Our Dry Summer

The heat came on this morning.

It was in the mid 40s when I got up and with yesterday's gray cool weather, the house had retained no warmth.

Yesterday a rain front moved through western and northern New England but delivered no rain to us. It sprinkled and wet the furniture, but did not dampen the soil.

This keeps happening. Albany NY and western Massachusetts have gotten soaking rain after rain storm this summer, but all season the edge always skirts us, sliding by just tantalizing miles to our west or north.

This is the weather service's chart of the last 30 days of precipitation -- the slope is the accumulated normal rainfall for 30 days, and the brown area below is how much below normal we are. The little green bars show tenths of an inch of rain -- the only noticeable amount was a quarter inch on the 31st of August and then just under a quarter inch on September 1, but it came down so hard and so briefly in short bursts that it mostly ran off the hard dry baked soil.

The earlier part of the summer looked just like this chart except for one storm in mid August that gave us two inches of rain. Those two inches were pretty much it for the entire season, and it all fell at once.

Some plants in the garden look okay with all the supplemental watering I've done. The clethra doesn't, though. It has crispy, curled leaves and I simply can't keep it hydrated enough. Hydrangeas are not at all happy. Not at all. The redtwig dogwoods by the creek bed have curled their leaves and turned silvery.

In the meadow I have watered the newest little saplings, but all the big maples and oaks and gums are looking limp. The persimmon, with its big glossy leaves, is really droopy.

All of the tall weeds in the meadow -- the fleabane and oxeye daisies and the pink smartweed which usually forms big upright arching stands, are really limp and bedraggled. Except the goldenrod. That seems indestructible.

2014 has been a rainy, wet summer for areas just to our north. Not here, though.

But . . .  it's not California! I can't even imagine.

Growing Wild

The weather has been either sunny, dry and pleasant or gloomy, dry and overcast. There have been some great late afternoons when the skies are a lovely blue, the breeze is gentle and the temperatures are perfect, with a sharp, clear light.

But no rain.

I moved everything around. The table and chairs are now on the patio and the set works better there.

The space is cramped. It fits and there is no real problem -- four people can sit at the table well enough, but there is not a lot of room around it.

The teak rockers are now on the front porch. We cleaned them and applied teak oil to them and they look okay, although not great. As I noted in an earlier post, the front porch is not really for sitting anyway. I just didn't know what else to do with the rockers after I took them off the patio.

The gravel garden now has a glider bench that I like a lot, and I returned the folding Mayan chairs to this space. They need a good cleaning and re-staining which is on my list of fall chores.

The compost row has been overtaken this year with wild growth. Jim is no longer bagging grass clippings, so there are no piles of heavy material to suppress the weeds, and the decaying vegetation that was there has been fertile ground for tall weeds to take over.

It's been interesting to note what has shown up in the tangle of weeds where the compost pile had been. Earlier in the summer I found lobelia cardinalis that had escaped the garden, and a crocosmia too. Both were bright red pops of color blooming in the mess.

Now I am finding Karl Foerster grass growing well where I had tossed a discarded clump last year. It's a great plant, but it didn't belong in a mixed border the way I was using it. In the wild, on its own, it looks perfect.

And a flowering tobacco has grown, blooming like the ones I have in the garden, and making the old compost pile fragrant at night.

I fuss with my plants all season and I move furniture around and I am always not quite satisfied with what I have created -- and then the wild compost pile does its thing all by itself and looks great.

What I Learned This Summer

I absorbed a few lessons this year that I simply must remember in future:

Wear polarized sunglasses.
In the height of summer when the garden is washed out and tired and dry and limp, polarized lenses make the colors pop and everything look rich. I like my garden so much better when I am wearing Raybans.

Water often.
Water when it is very dry, but water when it is just a little dry too. My mistake in past years was to let things carry on by themselves with just a little help from the sprinklers. Everything looks better when very well watered with hose and watering can as well as sprinklers, and it takes more than you would think.

"Drought tolerant" doesn't mean what you think it does. It means a plant will typically not die when it gets very dry -- it will survive and come back when conditions are better. But it does not mean the plant will look good at all. It tolerates dry weather but does not perform well.

I also learned that a plant tolerating dry conditions is not producing enough nectar for pollinators. The plant is alive and there may be flowers, and it will come back when it gets more moisture, but there is not enough hydration to help the wildlife.

Fertilize a lot.
Same thing as with the watering. Pots and annuals need much more feeding than I had realized. Fertilize often.

Make summer easier.
I found the terra cotta fountain Hope gave me has to be near a water source even though it is self contained and solar powered.  It can't be out in the gravel garden where I originally had it. It needs to be right near a hose where I can clean it out often and refill it easily. I moved it to the deck and I like listening to the bubbling while I am on the porch even though I find I am getting up to use the bathroom often.

I learned the hard way that containers out in the garden or along the front walk, and pots lining the gravel garden are hard to keep watered. Just put any pots on the deck near the hose and be done with it. Make summer easier.

Stake adequately.
I need to invest in lots of larger, sturdier stakes that can stand up to the tension of the small bungee cords which I found work well to bind up floppy perennials. The little bamboo skewers I have been using are far too rinkydink.

I learned What Not to Grow:

Morning glories. I discovered I do not like them. They climbed the arched gate to the gravel garden but were unattractively wild and splayed about and the thin twining stems turned brown and ratty looking. The flowers --- meh.

'Beach Party' sedum. Advertised as a compact sedum that doesn't flop like 'Autumn Joy', but I learned it was an odd brown colored thing with no shape or size. Maybe it just didn't like my garden. Meanwhile after I took out 'Autumn Joy' it reappeared in another part of the garden.

Vegetables in containers. My deck container farm was great, but I found I had too many peppers, way too much basil, wildly prolific parsley, less mint than mojitos required, and not enough lettuce. Carrots were paltry and tasteless. Farming in tight spaces is all about appropriate quantities, and I misjudged.

And What to Grow Again:
White flowering tobacco.
Nicotiana alata bloomed all summer and still looks fresh even as the iteas behind are fading. It's tall enough to be seen from a distance and it's a clear, delicate white. Grow more of that again.

Dahlias.
They are simply flower machines all summer. I don't like the tall giants with blooms that look like frisbees. But there are many that are small bushy things like the dark red 'Black Beauty' that I have grown before, and the orange-pink-apricot pom poms that were new to me this year. I grew both from seed and I'd grow them again.

I learned that nasturtiums can be transplanted, but will look awful all season if you do that. Transplanting doesn't just set them back, it affects their habit the whole season. Put the seeds in the ground where they are going to stay. Don't start them indoors or move them. Wait. They'll look much better all summer if unmoved.

I learned I will have to net the blueberries. There was one year that I had unmolested access to the whole crop, without losing a single berry to bird thieves -- but that did not repeat this summer. They have found them and they leave me none.

I am going to have to build a hoop system to put netting over, something like this maybe.

You can't just drape netting over blueberry shrubs, it gets tangled. So I'll try to create a portable frame system to cage the bushes, just for the time they are producing and then I can remove it. I predict a failed science project next year and new "lessons learned" from that.

I learned a lot this summer. I'll learn even more next year and the year after that.

Hummzinger

September seems to be more summery than July and August were. Hot days (80s and 90s), a lot of humidity, and warm nights so far.

It rained a half inch in a brief downpour on Sunday, the only time in ages I had anyone over for a cook out, and the rain came just as we sat down (inside) to eat!

This summer I have been having issues with the hummingbird feeder.

The little tube feeder that I always liked has attracted too many yellowjackets and it drips. Bugs and drips were never such a problem in past years, but this summer the hummers are tormented by aggressive wasps at the feeding hole and there is always a drop of sugar water hanging off it.

So a new hummingbird feeder (researched for wasp deterrence, ant avoidance, and ease of cleaning) is now up, hanging where the old one was.

It's a "Hummzinger" model. It has an ant moat in the center, upward facing deep ports that wasps can't get into and a plastic weather shield over it.

I watched this morning and the hummingbirds have found it and accepted it.

The yellowjackets still fly around the area -- they know sugar water is there -- but they are no longer all over the feeder driving the birds batty. There are no drips or stray sugar beads to attract any insects.

I liked how unobtrusive my old tube feeder was, nestled in by the clematis at the patio. The new Hummzinger one is plasticky and large and garish, but I think the hummingbirds will be happier.

I dunno about the big clear plastic umbrella thingy overhanging the feeder. That may have to go.

A hummingbird buzzed me and hovered in my face this afternoon, looking directly at me while I sat on the patio. Was it in thanks for eliminating their tormentors, or in anger for taking away the old familiar feeder?

I probably should have waited til next spring to change things up, but the insect pests were such an annoyance.

The hummingbirds will be gone soon, headed south. I hope they go away happy that I tried to make their summer a little easier, and not mad at me for making changes so late in the season!