When the potted tropicals were brought indoors this autumn I decided that fewer would be overwintered in the dining and kitchen areas, with more being stashed by the double doors in the basement. This was done for practical reasons, mostly. The bananas and variegated gingers grew considerably through the summer, and the yellow striped agaves…

Wait, Wait! Perhaps the garden isn’t finished for the season. Until a few days ago November temperatures were milder than normal, but just barely so. The past week has been much warmer, and the Autumn Amethyst Encore azaleas (below) that bloomed only sporadically through September and October are beginning to flower again. Encore azaleas routinely…

At the end of November there are camellias blooming, and ‘Winter Sun’ mahonia (below) is still a few weeks from its peak flowering, but otherwise the garden is pretty much kaput. Despite somewhat warmer than average temperatures in November (but not by much), the flowers on the Knockout roses have shriveled in the cold nights….

With gusty breezes a few days ago the Japanese maples suddenly shed their leaves, and now only flowering pears (Pyrus calleryana, below) in the neighborhood, and Chinese and Rutgers’ hybrid dogwoods in the garden have not dropped their colorful foliage. The autumn foliage of the pears is extraordinary, with leaves that color by mid October…

I’m afraid that the preponderance of evidence is sufficient to conclude that I’m a slow learner (as if you hadn’t figured this before now). Through the years I’ve planted a handful of camellias in the autumn, and each time my effort is rewarded with failure by mid winter, though a few have survived with a…

I guestimate that every autumn two hundred tons of leaves fall on my property. Well, perhaps a bit less, but it seems like it. With three hundred feet of property line bordering a forest of towering maples and tulip poplars, and fifty or more smaller trees that I’ve planted, there are plenty of leaves. So…

I first planted edgeworthia despite concerns that this deciduous shrub was not sufficiently winter hardy for my northwestern Virginia garden. I had seen its marvelous blooms somewhere or the other (and now I don’t recall where), and decided that planting it was worth the risk. Over the years I’ve planted many marginally cold hardy plants,…

For the past ten days nighttime temperatures have been around freezing with a day or two dipping into the mid twenties. With a brisk breeze this afternoon maple leaves are drifting across the garden, and soon the forest that borders the rear garden will be bare.  A shrubby bottlebrush buckeye (Aesculus parviflora, above) grows in the…

Along the southern border of the garden are tall tulip poplars (Liriodendron tulipifera) and swamp red maples (Acer rubrum) that straddle a narrow spring fed creek. In autumn the foliage colors of these forest trees are unremarkable. The poplars turn yellow early and leaves drop in a hurry, and the maples change to a sad…