The Late Garden

Having left Rhinebeck for New York City in mid-September, I was unable to come back until early October.  When I returned the house welcomed me as an old dog would have: “Hello.  So glad you are back.  It’s a beautiful sunny day.  Come into the garden.”

View Over The Garden Fence

The garden did not miss me.  The pots of herbs outside the kitchen door were still there, robust but hardly used.  I tend to forget about them even when I’m cooking, the very reason they were placed so close to the kitchen door.  The Sungold tomatoes, finally bearing a small crop, were not worth the real estate they occupied.  It is a dreary plant, not to be repeated next year. 

 

Our shared garden continues to look better every year, although the milkweed planted to entice the Monarchs to settle in with us, disappeared early.  One peony finally bloomed this spring after years of doing nothing. The lespedeza, always a dependable late blue, barely showed itself. It has been a stalwart of the shared garden from the beginning but is sulking this year.

 

I dipped my toe in the aster family this fall, starting with Aster x Frikarti ‘Monch’.  It was a lovely blue and will be perfect next year paired with Brown-eyed Susan and Goldenrod.  This year it was on its own; on trial as it were. Robin Lane Fox in the Financial Times (October 29-30, 2022, Got the Autumn Blues) covered several column inches with a round-up of suggestions for blues in the late summer garden, so I anticipate having more blues next year.

 

Cimicifuga

Cimicifuga is the star of my late summer garden.  The correct name these days is Actaea, but in my heart it will always be Cimicifuga.  There are two varieties – one with upright candelabra flowers, and a droopy one.  The upright (my favorite as you may have guessed) stretches out so slowly that if you sit nearby, you can almost watch it grow.  This year ‘sports’ have popped up around the garden – same foliage, different bud and flower shapes, different bloom times. An interesting puzzle. 

 

By October, Anemone Honorine Jobert is in full bloom – luminous white flowers catching the last of the light, brilliant alongside Fothergilla coloring up for Fall.  On the street, the Shantung Maples planted last year are earning their keep. They are still in full color, holding their leaves long after the other street trees have shed theirs.  The Winged euonymus, buried in the back of the garden, is a vibrant red as is the Aronia along the driveway.  

 

Shantung Maple

The lawn (a euphemism for Creeping Charlie and his cousins cut down as grass) is carpeted in yellow -- fallen leaves from the black walnuts first, then the maples.  Leaf-raking doesn’t start here till all the leaves have fallen.  Happily, what might appear messy to some is glorious to me.   Delfino Martinez and his crew have taken over leaf-raking -- what would be the householder’s task if the householder was someone other than myself.  

The Lawn Before Clearing

When the time approached to bring the potted tender plants indoor I balked; they had grown too large to winter-over in the house, and I turned the job over to Cheshire Nursery in Connecticut.  A truck picked them up and drove them down to Connecticut. The nursery will store them over the winter and return them in the spring – I hope.  One huge mandevilla, two sentimental plumbago, one tree fern, and one lemon tree.

 

Daylight Savings Time has ended and we are back to Standard.  Holiday catalogs are arriving with the anticipated selection of potted amaryllis.  If you are ambitious and have a space to store them, it is possible to coax amaryllis into a second flowering.  After they have finished blooming remove the flower stalk and fertilize monthly with Miracle-Gro or equivalent.  By mid-summer cut back on your watering schedule by one-half.  Once the foliage has yellowed cut the leaves back to an inch above the bulb and store the pots in a dark, cool location for about six weeks. Then bring them into a sunny window and start all over again.  

 

I should say that I don’t do any of this, but you might well want to.  I buy one fresh amaryllis each year and devote the rest of the winter to paperwhite narcissus planted in pebbles.  I always have a few bowls waiting in the wings, and one in a window with good light.

Paperwhite Narcissus

By the end of this month you should have completed putting the garden to bed for the winter, turned off and drained all outside water lines, coiled your hoses and brought them indoors.  Make sure your garden equipment and tools are clean; you can oil them over the winter.  When everything is cut down, put away, tidied up, mulched, wrapped and swept you can review your gardening year from a comfortable chair and plan for spring.

Covid In The Garden

In March of 2020, from my window in New York City, I watched families load up their SUVs and drive off not to return for months, if ever.  On the 16th, when rumors spread that Mayor DeBlasio would close the bridges and tunnels I too left, headed north, and remained in Rhinebeck till late Fall.  I left, feeling like a deserter.

 

The change was immediate.  First it was the quality of light.  In an apartment, even the best, there is usually only one good aspect and, maybe, a view. In a house there is light on all four sides. And I knew that within a few weeks, everything would start to grow again.

 

The garden was planned to begin in April, so I had a few quiet weeks ahead of me.  I’d planted daffodils for March in the border I share with my neighbor. Thanks to her, our shared garden is blanketed early with the most beautiful forget-me-nots.  Behind the house, the season starts with the earliest scillas planted long before I came here, surfacing every year no matter how disturbed the soil.  The scilla is followed by Phlox divaricata, mounds of blue, succeeded by amelanchier, astilbe, and by June/July the glorious Hydrangea arborescens White Dome, the anchor of the early garden.

 

Phlox divaricata

While the garden has been my joy, it is not my solace; it is too demanding for that.  Something is always saying “prune me, feed me, weed me, mulch me” and I am increasingly unable to comply.  I have helpers; gardening alone is a myth -- but that is a subject for another time.

 

The garden is in its sixth season.  We have had some losses, some surprises, and always something new.  The last surviving Japanese maples (two out of the initial six) succumbed to verticillium wilt. They have been replaced with four Sweet Gums at the north end and two Amelanchiers at the south.  

 

The Apple Tree's Final Bloom

The apple tree at the end of the long view died in its third year and has been replaced with a dogwood, Cornus florida, the least temperamental in that family.  Our losses are becoming worrisome.  There will be nothing left to try after this, only a stone monument to our failures.  We watch and wait.  

 

During 2020-21, I had visitors in the garden from earliest spring until winter set in.  Furnishings have come and gone.  I started out with six webbed folding chairs (first green and white, then a more sophisticated black), inexpensive, looking great, but too unstable for me.  After falling over the side a third time I replaced them with steel Windsor chairs that are almost impossible to dislodge.  A useful table will most likely be the next addition.

 

One of Four Sturdy Chairs

I suspect we all have a Covid misstep or two in our recent past.  My first was a longed-for equipment change.  After not writing for months, I was convinced that I was held back solely by the size of my screen and that a 21” monitor would change my life.  But what had been a merely languishing work ethic ground to a full stop in the face of a tangle of new equipment and cables.  The brains of the operation resided in my faithful laptop, which was always connected to the new equipment and thus closed, relegated so to speak to a back burner. 

 

This has proved to be too many moving parts for me, and I seem to be resistant to change. I don’t know what this means:

-       Do old habits die hard?

-       Do delusions of grandeur lead to diminishing returns?

I will not give up on this.  And my technical advisor, with the patience of a saint, continues to stand by. 

 

The second misstep was a true folly, and much more costly.  It was the dream of a Front Porch.  The huge maple street tree shading the house was so rotted it had to come down, providing the impetus for the porch.  The dream was to tie a front porch to the Livingston Streetscape, where every house has one.  The architect, much admired and deeply respectful of the historic district in which we live, drew up several possibilities.  My family was consulted.  All options were weighed, a selection made, working drawings finished.  When we realized that due to setback requirements, we would have very little usable space built at a very high cost, and that a porch would block the light into the house from the south, we went into full retreat. Instead, I replaced a hazardous sidewalk with new/old bluestone, planted two street trees, and – once again – revised the planting against the house.

 

One of Two Shantung Maples

Trish Pappendorf of The Valley Gardener transformed the bed with a silvery gray-blue palette new to me - lavender, calamintha, stachys, gaura, dwarf fothergilla - all keeping company with the existing Anemone Honorine Jobert.  The butterflies and bees form a cloud along the walk bordering this bed, too busy all summer to even notice you passing by, no less attack.

By late October it will be time to return to the city and answer the demands waiting there for me.  When a very young woman was asked why she lived in New York City, she replied “my stuff is here.”  I think it was her metaphorical stuff – her world, her dreams, who she is now and who she will become.  While I would love to stay here in Rhinebeck, my stuff is still in New York City.