With overnight temperatures dipping into the teens the scattered buds of Encore azaleas and Knockout roses that showed a hint of color a week ago have turned to brown, and their foliage has faded so that there is no doubt that they are now dormant. The blooms of ‘Winter’s Joy’ camellia have changed to a…
Category: gardening
December color
Today I’m on the road, traveling through nurseries in the southeast searching for plants to fill the garden centers in March. In setting travel plans for the second week of December I presume that the weather will be warm, even if not sunny, but temperatures have been cold and breezy, and southerners are bundled in…
A surprising number of evergreens
Now that the fairweather deciduous trees and shrubs have dropped their leaves and gone into hiding for the winter, the steadfast and stalwart evergreens march to the forefront. If I were to guess, and I’m guessing, I would figure two-thirds of the garden’s trees and shrubs to be deciduous, with the remainder evergreens, both conifers…
Eleven months of bloom
The year’s blooms began late in February with the fragrant yellow, ribbon-like blooms of ‘Arnold’s Promise’ witch hazel, despite a few feet of snow that covered its base. Nearing the year’s end in early December there are blooming camellias and mahonia, and a few scattered and battered flowers on the Knockout and Drift roses and…
The last autumn foliage
In the week past Seriyu and Lion’s Head maples have dropped their brilliantly colored foliage, the maples and poplars along the border of the garden are bare, and with only scattered evergreens to shield the property neighboring houses are readily seen. I value the large evergreen hollies, cypress, spruce, and Alaskan cedars, in particular when…
American hollies and others
Along the southern border of the garden is a two hundred foot wide swath of forest bisected by a small creek. The mature poplars and maples are remnants of forest left to stand at the edge of farmland that has been converted into housing lots of an acre or more. In the past twenty years…
What to do with fallen leaves?
My garden is surrounded by trees, a mature forest of poplars and maples along one border, and on the opposite side (and scattered throughout) are an assortment of beech, katsura, hornbeams, black gum, cherries, dogwoods, and redbuds that drop an abundance of leaves each autumn. The dense plantings along the property lines capture leaves so…
Autumn colors – Japanese maples and more
In mid-November temperatures are regularly dipping below freezing, and late summer bloomers have faded. The late blooming camellias and ‘Winter Sun’ mahonia have only recently begun to bloom, and both will flower into December. The reblooming Encore azaleas melted with the first freeze with the exception of ‘Autumn Amethyst’ (below), which has weathered the cold…
Observations in mid-November
The maples and poplars in the forest that borders the garden are nearly bare, and with overnight temperatures below freezing the remaining vestiges of late summer blooms have faded. Leaves of smaller trees, Japanese maples, Franklinia, and Stewartia have not dropped yet, and though the colors in the forest trees have been muted the small…
Garden disappointments
Disappointments in the garden are considerable, numerous and frequent, and the gardener should not be at all surprised when a favored plant does not bloom as expected, expires suddenly, or suffers a slow, agonizing demise. Too much water or too little, too much shade or not enough, or a cow from the farm three miles…
Preparing the garden for winter
There are, at minimum, dozens of tasks that should be, or could be completed to prepare the garden for winter. I will perhaps get around to a few, possibly not even those that should be considered the most critical, but those are the ones that will be accomplished, like it or not. First and foremost…
Buds and blooms in early November
Today the golden yellow leaves of the ginkgo fell. I don’t know the precise hour, but when I saw the tree a day earlier not one leaf had fallen. This afternoon, it is bare. While most trees drop their leaves quite leisurely over days or weeks, ginkgo is in a hurry once the decision is made….
Ramblin' through Dave's Garden 