I will also pitch, shred, and rake on election day.  The morning is gloriously warm and delicately sunny but I woke up tense and nervous and am still having trouble relaxing.  I won’t be able to head to my favorite polling station until much later so until then my remedy will be to throw myself heart and soul into the garden.  For anyone else suffering as I am, I would also recommend a long walk away from TVs, computers and radios and towards the sounds of crows and crisp leaves and the scent of cinnamon fern.

We’ve still got gardens to put to bed - the last of the dahlias came out yesterday and we’ll work on taking out more melted annuals from the Display Garden beds today.  Yesterday too, Fred and Dan brought me a beautiful pile of dry leaves - twig and dog poo free! - to shred.  I can think of no better way to clear my mind than to hurl leaves into a noisy shredder.  I know that I won’t be able to really rest easily until I can cast my vote but I hope at least I’ll be too exhausted to still feel the nervous jitters.

What do you still have to do in the garden?  And what will you do to relax today?

Go vote!

I’ve gotten out of the habit of writing lists.  Even though I carry a notepad with me at almost all times I apparently find every excuse not to write in it.  (Usually it’s for lack of a pencil.)  But this time of year, just like spring, I’m so easily overwhelmed with all the things that seem to need to be done this instant - or at least before frost that I really ought to write it all down.  There are so many to-dos floating around in my head it almost feels as if I’m walking around under a threatening thunder cloud - and I’m afraid my demeanor lately reflects that.

So just now I finally wrote a list.  And wouldn’t you know, it’s remarkably short and entirely do-able.

The mansion is open for only one more (long) weekend so we’ve had to begin to say goodbye to the gardens.

We’ve made some telltale holes  - a few stock plants and planted container beauties have come into the greenhouse to roost and the Rockettes began the great container bed move today.  The teasels finally came down yesterday but with any luck you’ll be able to see them again soon reincarnated as Christmas decorations in the mansion.  Next Tuesday will be a Display Garden doomsday as we take out the Cutting Garden to make way for tulips (which arrived yesterday - wahoo!) and we’ll begin in earnest to un-furnish the other beds as well.  My to-do list for the next week or so looks like this:

1. Take more cuttings

2. (which really ought to be #1) Pot up rooted cuttings to make room for new ones

3. Bring in and pot up a few more stock plants - in case my cuttings don’t take

4. Continue to move containers into greenhouse

5. Help Fred and Dan put up the bubble wrap again (maybe)

6. Make room to store dahlias (and decide on a storage medium - saw dust and shavings again?)

See?  Not so bad!

My weekend to-do list for home looks like this:

1. take out stinking cabbages and yesterday’s tomatoes before the neighbors call the pretty police

2. dig out and pot up tender keepers

3. think about cutting the grass

4. make a cup of tea

It’s so easy!

And If I were you and I lived nearby but hadn’t made a visit to Blithewold in a while, I’d add that to my list.  This weekend promises to be gorgeous and this will be the last chance to catch the hat exhibit in the house and an amazingly riotous abundance of color in the gardens.  But if you visit the greenhouse too, make sure you use the “other entrance”.

We know a gardener whose most sublime view of her garden is from the bathtub on the second floor of her house.  From there she can look down on her borders laid out like blankets of color.  The last time we took a bird’s eye look at the Display Garden was in 2005 when the greenhouse was being restored.  Gail and I perched on the storage container that was parked next to the cutting beds and for the first time we really saw the patchwork laid out.

From our own eyeball height off the ground we generally see the gardens as waves of horizons and as precious vignettes but from a second story the character of the garden totally changes.  From fifteen or so feet up, we can really start to see the whole rather than just garden parts.  We see different patterns from up there and all the threads that stitch the garden together.  It’s really helpful and I’m not sure why I haven’t asked to borrow the ginormous pruning ladder before this!  (No, I know why:  I’m a little bit afraid of wuthering heights… - but the view was well worth the teetery feeling and adrenaline rush.)

The Display Garden is very different from what it was in 2005 and the changes Fred has made in the last couple of years are even more apparent from above.  The grid of small rectangular Idea Beds (just visible on the middle left of the first picture above) has been replaced by a couple of large beds with paths, a fountain, game table and crowned by a gracious shady sitting area.  The cement pond is surrounded now by a spacious lawn rather than narrow beds and the other beds in the Display Garden have been recreated to better tie to the whole quilt.  The layout of the Cutting Garden is the only piece that hasn’t needed to be resewn.

I don’t have a second story on my house and am certainly not inclined to go traipsing around on my roof - but if I could get an overview of my own yard (which is still rather blank-slate-ish) I think I’d be better able to wrap my mind around how to knit the whole thing into a garden.  Can you view your garden from above?  Have you used that vantage to the garden’s advantage?  Have you designed any part of your garden (like our friend with the bathtub windows has) to enhance your view from upstairs?

Kudos and many thanks go to all who made the Celebration of a Century Gala such a whopping success. Gala volunteers were able to raise more money for our operating budget (salaries, etc) - as well as extra for a new roof for the mansion - than any of the other wildly successful galas in previous years. That’s truly astounding especially considering our country’s current economic funk. I am constantly amazed and gratified by just how supportive Blithewold’s supporters are.

I’m also endlessly gratified by our every day visitors - we wouldn’t be in the garden (or on-line) without them either. It’s not just their praise that we live for (and if I may take a moment for horn tooting, we are told almost every day that this is the most meticulously maintained public garden they’ve seen. Many many thanks to our amazing volunteers!), but their questions definitely make the days more interesting. One of our garden docents passed along a few questions from the weekend and I hope the askers watch the blog for the answers:

Q: What kind of grapes are on the arbor?

A: They are New England’s finest - Concord - and the vine is about 100 years old.

Q: Where are the beehives?

A: It’s been a couple of years since we’ve had busy domestic honey bee hives on the property but there is a thriving wild hive in a Horse Chestnut stump just off the path between the Enclosed Garden and the Display Garden.

Q: Why do bees like the pond?

A: Bees need water for making the brood food and to regulate the temperature in the hive. They keep the hive at a steady 95 degrees Fahrenheit or so - any warmer and the wax will start to melt. Some of the worker bees are given the job of bringing water to the hive and will make upwards of 50 trips a day. They like our cement pond because it’s close to the hive, a consistent source since it never goes dry, and it has plenty of convenient landing pads.

High praise also goes to Fred and Dan for making such a fun games table in the Display Garden. Not a day goes by without a game played and yesterday Margaret (our fabulous curator and 3rd floor archivist) and her grandchildren from the U.K. came over to play a round of Giraffes. (”Giraffes” is Thomas’ name for Draughts which is English for Checkers.) Team Thomas and Margaret took gold and Sophie won the silver.

And finally, kudos and a shout out to my friend Sarah who has started a public garden at Firehouse 13 in Providence, RI and is blogging all about it. Visit Green Zone to read posts which range in topic from WWII victory gardens to container planting in shoes. (Sarah’s day job has her out and about awarding state preservation grants to places like Blithewold for projects like our greenhouse restoration in 2005. Yay, Sarah!)

It was really really good to get away. It always is. It’s not that I don’t love my work — you know I do! — Rather, it’s that after a little while in the blaze of summer, gardening starts to feel like a job. Taking a break reminds me that I really need to slow down and drink it all in to thoroughly enjoy it. After all, we garden because we love to, right? Sure it’s laborious sometimes and dirty but that is all part of the fun - at least until it starts to feel like work with a capital W. Over the weekend I met a Little Compton gardener who showed me around her garden and apologized for its “messiness”. But she also explained that she’s come to be able to actually relax in her garden - her hammock might even hold her in a nap now and again. I’ve got to say that that garden was one of the prettiest “messes” I’ve seen and I really envy her “work” ethic. It’s important to keep up with the weeding but we also need to stop and smell the cardoons. (Truly! - Have you ever leaned in for a sniff? Sweet honey but mind the bees…) At home I have decided to try to enjoy my “mess” without feeling frantic and here I am smiling again even as I help Ann deadhead the stinging eryngium. Do you ever need to take a vacation from gardening?

It also takes being away from it to really see what the garden is and how it’s grown. The first thing I noticed at Blithewold was how big and beautiful everything had gotten in just one week. Just like last year, the Stapelia opened for my return!

And the rain brought a chill to the air and long sleeves out of the closet.

And the cabbages are fully cabbaged. And the sunflowers are stratospheric.

At home I noticed other things like giant weeds and a decided lack of late season color. I’m glad I was able to get away from my garden long enough to see it with fresh eyes and I’m glad that I’m relaxed enough now to think it’s a thing of beauty anyway! What do you notice about your garden after you’ve been away from it?

Sometimes the garden resembles a well thought out mix-tape that keeps you swaying and singing and other times it looks like we put the ipod on shuffle. Sometimes the needle hits a scratch or we just can’t find the right song to follow the daylilies. I think it’s one of the reasons we keep gardening - to get it right, we rewind, start over and press record again season after season. And every time we get a song or two closer to a perfect mix.

Here are some of our current clunkers:

A river of Swiss Chard running through the Plectranthus fruticosus seemed like a good idea when we planted them together but there’s not enough contrast between them to make it interesting - it’s like a Hank Williams and Patsy Cline mix - not to mention that the plectranthus (Patsy) has overwhelmed the chard (Hank).

The record is skipping in this corner of the North Garden. For too long we have let plumbago (Ceratostigma plumbaginoides) and various nepetas asters and chrysanthemums play on and on and to me, there’s just no tune there anymore.

Daylilies plague me like an earworm - we keep looking for the right plant that can shift the focus away when the foliage starts to drive us crazy. - What do you plant with your daylilies (and moldy Phlox!) to hide the leaves?? (Really, truly - I’d love to know!)

We often allow Nature to add to the mix and occasionally her choices are a little on the funky side. A wide bluestone path narrowed by sticky Nicotiana is perhaps a little like mixing Motown and Mozart…

And this dodder (Cuscuta spp.)- a parasitic weed that the Rockettes discovered yesterday in the Water Garden is just like fingernails on a chalkboard!

What do you have in your garden that doesn’t sound quite right?

Sometimes when I’m doing something tedious like watering I’ll get a random song on repeat in my head - usually a catchy ditty that I can’t stand and can’t tune out and I never know all the words so I can’t cut the loop. I am plagued by ear worms! But today I saw music while I was watering and wasn’t irritated by it at all.

It occurred to me that planting a garden is a bit like making a mix-tape. (– I mean cd - I’ve just dated myself, haven’t I? I am a good deal older than 26…) We gardeners take a bunch of different plants that we love to look at (or smell or pick or eat) and place them all together where we can thoroughly enjoy them. Sometimes we put together visual medleys within a genre - like a particular color scheme or food group and sometimes we go a little wild and mix country with punk. And just like with a mix-tape, in a garden there can be jarring clunkers that don’t quite fit along with seamless and surprisingly perfect segues. Here are some of my favorite mixes: (mouse over for names/captions and click on for magic picture enlarger.)

What are your favorite mixes? If you have pictures, please send a link! I promise to also show the clashes and clunkers (yes, we have some dissonance) in a later post… You too?