Everything has a name. And thank goodness because it’s so much easier that way. Just think if Linnaeus hadn’t shared his system for classifying everything we’d have to identify things through a key-full of qualifiers (you know that tree with the leaves? - No, not that one - I mean the one with the glabrous twigs and leaves that have 5 lobes which are slightly dentate …. oh nevermind.) Or we’d be left with common names and those can be frustrating too - one person’s kinnikinick is another’s bearberry and it makes my head hurt how many flowering plants are called by some kind of “lily” name.

I spend a lot of time with plants and names and labels. And no matter how diligent I am, there is always something unlabeled along with someone -like me!- who will want to know its name. If I see an unlabeled unfamiliar plant, I’ll need to know what it is. Need to know! The thing that gets me is that my desire to know the name doesn’t always have anything to do with wanting to acquire the plant. I seem to just need to know what it is for no other reason than to know what it is. It’s as if knowing a name reveals some sort of hidden treasure of knowledge. And it does - It’s the key that unlocks the door to a good google search! Take this plant: its genus-and-species name is Cardiandra formosana.

If I knew more Latin I might be able to infer something about some characteristic of the plant that inspired the taxonomist. Something to do with a heart shape somewhere maybe? It takes some research to find out that this plant is related to hydrangeas and might survive a mild winter here.

I’ve recently tried to get in the habit of including the common names of plants on the labels because a lot of people ask for those too. Common names can illuminate an interesting feature on the plant and some refer to a plant’s particular usefulness and that’s all fun stuff to learn. I think it’s good to know the Latin name if you’re wanting to buy a certain plant - it’s more likely you’ll get exactly what you want. That said, it’s a lot easier to remember (and spell) “trout lily”, for instance, than Erythronium! (Nevermind that it’s also called “adder’s tongue” and “dog-tooth violet” among a bunch of other names that might not all fit on my label for it…)

How do you feel about plant names? Do you like to know the common names or the Latin or both? Which name do you use when you shop? Do you like to see labels in a public garden? Do you label the plants in your own garden? And just for fun - do ever re-name your plants like pets or the Harry Potter herbology? (I remember reading something somewhere about a garden full of Bobotubers and fanged geraniums… How fun is that?!)

It’s been another dry week of desiccating wind, worries and ragweed allergies. All over the property difficult choices are being made about what to water and what to let go - the guys are looking pretty grim lately. Most of the major collection trees and newly planted trees and shrubs are on a water rotation but there places where the weather is having an obvious effect - the periwinkle in the Bosquet (shown at right) has seen better days. Even the goutweed (Aegopodium. - Not shown) is wilting - not that we’d mind if some of that died… (I think it’s made of tougher stuff) We’re starting to hear the word “drought” in the news and are crossing fingers and toes that a forecasted “chance of showers” for the beginning of next week becomes a full soaking rain. Water restrictions are certainly around the corner and we’re watching our well.

A couple-three corrections: The Giant Sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) which we all thought was only suffering damage from a weird winter does have a fungal problem. The guys have been watering it to keep it from becoming more stressed and they believe that it will recover without having to spray it with a fungicide.

The plants in the bed surrounded by recycled iron from the greenhouse are most likely NOT stunted from leaching iron. Evidently, grass can be a canary-in-the-coalmine for toxic iron levels by turning black. The sod around that bed is perfectly healthy! Could be the early summer heat that slowed the plants down.

And Hydrangea paniculata ‘Limelight’ is quite green! - and white and pinkish these days. A glaring sun does bleach it out but it’s really a whitish shade of green rather than a greenish shade of white now that I’ve taken a better look!

Another greeny white beauty is the Moonflower that just opened in the Rose Garden. I’ve noticed it on my early morning rounds and by 10AM or so they’ve already closed up. Come early or late in the day for an ethereal and fragrant display.

Nicotiana sylvestris are also adding their fragrance to the evening air - brides-to-be take note: September evenings are just as sweet as June!

And a tree by the south end of the house caught my eye - The Golden Rain Tree (Koelreutaria paniculata) is full of green and buff seed pods - gorgeous.

Visitors have been asking about a very late blooming, very tall, very floriferous daylily blooming just now in the North Garden. It was purchased probably 20 or so years ago from Tranquil Lake Nursery in Rehobeth, MA and we think it’s either ‘Autumn King’ or ‘Wee Willie Winkie’. ‘Autumn King’ is the taller of the two so that’s my guess (our plants are a good 5+ feet tall) but the name ‘Wee Willie Winkie’ rang bells for Julie (who would have ordered the plants originally).

Here’s a selection of pics from my foggy walk this morning (mouse over for names and click for larger images):

A new grass (new to us) in the Cutting Garden (love it! I want a hundred next year)

A Cutting Garden giant (6′ plus) with delicate flowers - but just wait for the seed pods!

A washed out Dahlia ‘Karma Fuchsiana’ - I’m not sure why my camera refuses to capture bluey pinks and pinky blues… This is the dahlia we’re considering for the North Garden. What do you think?

A four O’clock in the morning

Fog lift on the bay

A Joe Pye weed walk (a path from the bay to the Water Garden)

And the Franklinia is starting to bloom!

Have a great weekend!

I could have sworn I heard my first cicada yesterday. It was that kind of blazing hot day you’d expect to hear a chorus of them. So maybe I heard it through wishful thinking (auditory halucination) because I haven’t heard it again! There are a few things that herald full summer for me and that’s a major one. (The first swim in the ocean is another; first minor league baseball game… anyone else care to add to the list?)

How about a picnic on the lawn? Blithewold’s second Soiree was held in the North Garden and this time almost everyone brought supper! What a good idea - and some of it looked really tasty! Everyone sampled California wines and cheeses while listening to the smooth crooning of Jeffery Thomas, a local musician who serenaded us from the porch. His singing was so melifluous and his song choices so sweet that it seemed to me that love was in the air. For the couple of couples who looked inclined to dance (but were too shy) and the Japanese beetles picnicing and cavorting on the climbing hydrangea, the evening was definitely romantic! Since I was unaccompanied, instead of strolling arm in arm and sharing bites of cheese-n-cracker with a cutie, I wandered in search of soiree-ers with garden questions. And I found some FAQs! First question: “What kind of mulch is that - it’s so delicate and attractive!” Answer: Buckwheat hull mulch. Although it’s a bit pricey (around $12/3 cubic feet), we love it in that garden and the Rose Garden because it’s elegant, organic, mold resistant, and adds an excellent fluff to the soil as it gets mixed in over the season. Next question: “The edges are beautiful - how do you keep them looking so crisp?” Answer: Fred Perry, Groundsman extraordinaire, cuts the edge every spring with a sharpened spade and trims it weekly after mowing using a string trimmer held vertically. There were appreciative comments all over the place - everyone raved about the food, the music and the garden - it just doesn’t get better than that!

Rain was forecast for that evening but never materialized. Good for the Soiree; bad for the gardens! The Petasites (poorly sited) look like I feel after blazing days spent watering! It has stayed hot (90’s) but at least whatever system came through that night blew in a breeze and blew out the muggyness.

Here are a couple of choice bloom pics before I leave for the weekend (it’s Garden Blogger’s Bloom Day this Sunday but I might not make it in for a post - this and another on Monday might have to suffice!) Please let me know if you get tired of seeing Lotus pictures because it’s so cool I can’t seem to stop!: The second bloom opened this morning and check out the fruit from the last one! Someone told me that it’s edible - anyone have a recipe? (Not that I would harvest any of these beauties… I wouldn’t want to deprive anyone of a photo op!)

The Balloon flowers opened this week - they are such a beautiful deep french blue (cobalt with a little rose madder thrown in maybe - are any of you painters who mix colors as you walk the garden?)

And click on the picture below to blow it up - the flower is wee (a little purple on a snakey green stem). I love Stachytarpheta (porterweed) for its weirdness. It’s in the verbena family, doncha know.

A lot of visitors have been asking lately “what’s wrong with the Giant Sequoias?!”

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Blithewold, we have one of - if not the - tallest Sequoiadendron giganteum this side of the Mississippi. Ours is a just a baby, not quite 100 years old and only 90 feet or so tall. It’s definitely a feature on the property - people who don’t notice it rising above the Enclosed Garden asked to be directed to it and just last week I heard that a (must have been very romantic) marriage proposal had occured right under it (and was accepted).

Anyhoo, this winter took a noticeable toll on the tree as well as the dozen other smaller babies on the property. They’re brown! Sequoias are prone to Phytophthera fungi which can destroy terminal growth. But that’s not our problem (knock wood). We suspect instead that it has to do with the bizarre nearly non-winter. Temperatures remained weirdly warm through December and a lot of plants didn’t get properly notified to quit growing for the season. We think that the sequoias had tender growth that was hit by the late but sudden freeze.

They’re starting to green up again so never fear! The big one is still a beauty and well worth a gaze and maybe even another romantic moment…

It’s already been a weird week of elfish triumph, freakish nature and things that nightmares are made of.

First the triumphs: our garden elves and selves yesterday planted the cutting garden and spread leaf mulch (every one of us was eyeing it jealously - why can’t we all have arboretum leaves for our own gardens?!) and the Rockettes changed venue to attend to post-planting details in the North Garden. A fresh layer of buckwheat hull mulch makes that garden look extra fancypants!

The leaf pile gave us this little treasure yesterday — qu’est-ce que c’est??

And I noticed this little sporty thing in a North Garden Clematis integrifolia today – it’s hard to tell but it seems to be one of the petals choosing a different path in life. (”I always felt like a leaf in a petals body…”) Anyone else notice this sort of thing ever?

As for nightmares - I was too bereft to take pictures: we lost a bunch of dahlias to rot. I was feeling so smug for packing them so diligently and - I thought - so successfully in sawdust last fall. As a matter of fact, I unpacked some and potted them up on the 18th and they were fine! Less than a week later Gail went to unpack more and noticed the wildlife (gnats… a family of mice…) and rot… What happened???!!

and I had to take a picture of this because if anything causes me to question my calling in life, it’s a tangle of garden hose…

But miracles bring me back from the brink — the bamboo shoots are up! We’re often asked if we sell it — we don’t. It’s the kind of thing that makes neighbors angry when it runs to their side of the fence and under foundations! (say it with me — “it’s invasive!”) There are nurseries that stock it though if you’ve got the space to let it run. We (I mean, the guys) mow the edges of our grove to keep it in bounds.

Memorial Day is the official opening of the summer season - especially in New York resort towns like Rhode Island - and today’s weather, instead of being an appropriately crisp (or rainy) farewell to Spring, is a muggy slide into the middle of Summer. We had our chance yesterday to acclimatize - it was only 80 something…

The Florabundas took the temperature in stride and without the least sign of wilt, forked out more tulips and planted 219 more plants in the Rose Garden — it’s really going to be specacular this year! We placed 90 Heliotrope (an old fashioned variety that’s hard to come by which is strange because it’s vigorous and super highly scented. Why isn’t it the one that’s widely available??) all over the garden rather than just in the entrance beds. If the fragrance was cloying, it might be too much but I think it will be a delicate wash of vanilla nostalgia to linger in.

A note on forking out the tulips: Visitors have asked - what do we do with them? Of the new ones we buy every year, we try to save about half to replant for next year. (We try new ones in the Visitor’s Center beds and the North Garden every year and last year’s go usually to the Cutting Bed. Because the 2nd year show tends to be less dramatic, we also buy new ones for the Cutting Bed.) To save the tulips that we fork out, we allow them to slowly dry with the foliage attached for a couple of weeks. (It’s best to let them dry in the shade rather than leaving them in the blazing like we did this year - Oops! Do as we say, not as we do!) Then we paper bag them by variety and store them either down cellar or in our pot cubbies until we’re ready to replant them in the fall. The viable extras are snapped up by staff and volunteers (there have to be some bennies for all their hard work!)

Here’s just one bloom for today because it stole the show: Paeonia suffruticosa ‘Yachiyotsubaki’. I had to put my hand in for scale because how else would you know that it’s the size of a dessert plate and that I didn’t need the macro setting to fill the frame!

And to tempt you and the kiddies to visit — I wonder what’s behind the bamboo?!….

We are asked - fairly frequently - what do we do to make our gardens grow so lusciously? - What do we use for fertilizer? Our answer “not much” is hard for fellow Rhode Islanders and New Englanders to believe. When we really want to push plants along, we use Neptune’s Harvest Fish Fertilizer which is OMRI listed organic. We also add Electra to the potting soil we use for our container plants and we feed the Rose and North Garden roses with Electra once a year. We’re lucky because our gardens are blessed with dreamy dark fluffy cake mix soil - only a mile and a half down the road at my own house, I can’t jump on a digging fork without a teeth rattling bounce against a pile of rocks embedded in clay. These gardens though, have been under cultivation - ornamental and otherwise - for almost 100 years - just think if your own garden had been annually ammended with compost and an arboretum’s worth of leaves…

The plight of the honey bee has been all over the news lately (Colony Collapse Disorder) and with garden chemicals being one of the possible causes, we all (I’m editorializing) should really think long and hard about how our choices impact the eco-system. For years now, Gail and I have refused to use chemistry on our infested roses - not only would our visitors and volunteers be in constant contact with it, but the beneficial insects and organisms would suffer. So we have plucked spotty yellow leaves and squished aphids and drowned Japanese beetles in soapy water. Last fall, Dan (one of our groundsmen) applied Milky Spore to several patches of lawn for beetle grub control. We’re crossing our fingers that that works! And instead of fighting a losing battle with blackspot - if the only way to win is with destructive chemistry or a weekly regiment of organic solutions that we haven’t got the time to apply - we’re raising the white flag, taking out some of the most disease prone roses and starting to interplant the rest with a healthy-garden mix of shrubs, perennials and annuals. Why fight it? (and don’t get me wrong - I love roses!)

In a nutshell (and there’s so much more to say but the greenhouse beckons - there’s a plant somewhere in there rasping, “waaater… cough.. cough … I’m thiiiiirsty…”), I think Blithewold’s gardens are gorgeous because we try to make sure our choices are healthy for everyone - creepy crawly or otherwise.

If I’ve raised more questions - please ask them!