November harmonies

Here’s a combination which comes close to bringing the season of substantial outdoor flowers to a close. So long as the temperatures remain above freezing, there will be something outside to admire, but as we move towards the end of the year the flowers get smaller and smaller and closer to the ground.

Closer to the ground does not describe the two shown here. The Camellia sasanqua are now a twelve foot presence in the garden. The monkshood – this one is Aconitum carmichaelii – grows to four or five feet high. At the tops of those tall stems there are smallish clusters four or five inches long of blooms. This is the one monkshood which does well in our climate. (Aconitum uncinatum, native to western Maryland, is not an easy garden plant in my experience. ) The disproportion between the length of the stems and the comparatively small clusters of bloom has probably kept it out of the ranks of really popular flowers, but for this gardener its season of bloom keeps it in the front ranks.

The fragrance of autumn

A garden without plenty of plants which have the sort of fragrance which is free on the air is not much of a garden to me. Nothing about a plant quickens my acquisitiveness the way fragrance does. We expect it during the mild, growing months. In late winter I eagerly search out the first fragrant flowers of the nascent year. In the winter it's a fleeting and only occasional presence in our climate. But of all seasons it's the autumn when fragrance really moves me. The first wisps of wood smoke in the neighborhood, the scent of fallen apples, the moldering scent of oak leaves and the flowering of certain autumn blooming shrubs give this season a poignancy which I find uniquely and profoundly moving. 

Three shrubs particularly valuable in our climate for autumnal bloom and fragrance are shown here left to right: the autumn olive Elaeagnus pungens, the witch hazel Hamamelis virginiana and the hybrid osmanthus, Osmanthus × fortunei.  All are blooming in the garden now and make sunny afternoons all the more pleasurable with their commingled scents.

The Hamamelis is a part of the local flora, but the plants blooming in the garden now are the result of my sometimes unobservant gardening practices: they have grown up from the roots on which choice grafted cultivars are grafted. Last year one of these upstarts bloomed so handsomely that I was glad to have it. This year I notice that much of what I thought was Hamamelis × ‘Primavera’ is blooming now with small yellow flowers. A close examination shows that only a few branches of ‘Primavera’ remain. The big plant of ‘Feuerzauber’ can now easily be seen to be about 2/3 Hamamelis virginiana.

It’s time to make lemonade from lemons: I intend to cut a big bouquet of Hamamelis virginiana stems  to decorate the fireplace for the week end.

I’ve never seen Osmanthus × fortunei for sale locally, but the readily available O. heterophyllus is even better for scent. It combines especially well with the scent of wood smoke. There are parts of Georgetown where old gardens are full of it, and nearby fireplaces provide the other element of this enchanting combination.

The autumn olive (which is not an olive but rather an oleaster: aster in this sense means inferior or spurious) is the most potently scented of the three. So strong and free is the fragrance that it can be detected in interstate median plantings as one passes at 80 mph!

There is another fragrant shrub or small tree of the season which I have not mentioned: Camellia sasanqua.  It will get a posting of its own. 

Plants of interest on New Year's Day

Crocus ochroleucus

Crocus pallasii

Dryopteris sieboldii



Polystichum polyblepharum

Helleborus cf. torquatus

Arum italicum

Arum italicum

The New Year began pleasantly enough. When I walked Biscuit this morning the sun was warm on my face, and the air had a bit of the scent of fallen leaves. Here and there patches of grass were still brilliant green in the low slanting light. The weather forecast had called for a progressively colder day, but even now at about 3 P.M. the temperature is agreeably above 50º F.

And there are still flowers in this New Year’s Day garden: one of the Camellia sasanqua is still full of shapely, colorful bloom. And in one of the cold frames, Crocus ochroleucus and C. pallasii are blooming. The latter is a surprise. Although I check the cold frame in question daily, I did not see this one coming. Crocus pallasii is not one of the more prepossessing species of Crocus; it’s a member of the saffron group, and as it usually blooms here it has a stringy, skinny look about it. But the plant blooming today has produced a fine, well rounded bloom which has the characteristic fragrance of its group.

In a season such as this one, marked as it has been by relatively mild temperatures, one would expect snowdrops of one sort or another to be in bloom. There is one clump of Galanthus elwesii in advanced bud; but the flowers, already hanging, have not actually opened yet.

Flowers are not the only source of interest today. Several winter green herbaceous plants are worth a look. The very unusual fern Dryopteris sieboldii will generally get the attention of garden visitors. It’s one of those plants which does not look real. First of all, it does not look like what most people expect a fern to look like. Then there is the texture of the plant: it looks as if it might have been made of plastic or rubber. It’s a good garden plant here, and that continues to surprise me. However, it never seems to have more than two or three fronds at a time.

Another fine fern now is Polystichum polyblepharum. This one looks like a typical fern, and has the added advantages of being evergreen and having a seemingly lacquered finish. I’ve seen more than one garden visitor reach down to touch it – to check if it is real?

Many of the hellebores are in fine shape now, too. Shown here is one bought as Helleborus torquatus. Many hellebores are worth collecting entirely for their foliage, and this one and similar forms are good examples. Another hellebore well worth having for its foliage is Helleborus multifidus; the forms I grow here have good foliage but do not seem to stand up to the winter well – and thus no image today.

This is peak season for the Italian arum, Arum italicum: the foliage has not yet reached its maximum development, but it has already reached that most improbably lush phase which makes it hard to believe that it can be a hardy garden plant. This is another plant well worth collecting for the variations in its foliage. Two forms are shown here; there are others in the garden.

The Tweed Months

It’s not just the shift from daylight savings time which distracts me at this time of year. There is something else going on, something a lot more subtle. Each year at this time my aesthetic sensibilities undergo a change. Sometime in November, when the oaks begin to color, the autumnal perspective begins to prevail: I think of this time of year as the Tweed months. The broad spectrum and varied intensities of summer color and early fall leaf color are replaced by a palate which is much narrower in scope and generally much more subdued in intensity. Summer is an ever changing piano, early fall a harpsichord, and these weeks before the arrival of really brutal weather a clavichord. And each year it surprises me that these diminished means have the power to evoke such intense feelings. This is the beginning of my favorite part of the year. The improbably lush greenness of Italian arum makes such a fitting contrast to the newly fallen oak leaves, especially after a wet period when the leaves not only take on a richer color but also yield their sweet fragrance. All of my life I’ve loved the fragrance of damp, newly fallen oak leaves. If heaven has a fragrance, this is it. It’s a fragrance which is nearly duplicated in the flowers of Camellia sasanqua, and since the camellia blooms when the oak leaves are falling, the comparison is easy to make.
Just those three elements – the Italian arum, the oak leaves and the camellias - work together to form a seasonal garden as deeply moving as any. The appeal of this combination is not merely visual. You can certainly place those three plants so that they fulfill whatever design aspirations you might have. But that’s not the point. The oak leaves and the camellia flowers have the ability to move me on a much deeper level, as fragrances often do. And there is something very uplifting about the camellia and the arum at this time of year: as the days grow shorter and other plants are closing down for the season, they seem to be defying the general trend by surging into growth or bloom. They are doing something when the rest of the garden is dying. It’s this doing something which makes the difference: there are plenty of evergreen plants both herbaceous (such as Rohdea japonica) and woody (Skimmia and Sarcococca are favorites here) or neither one nor the other (Ruscus and Danaë) which are lovely at this time of year. But they are not doing anything right now (unless you count the static fruiting of the Ruscus and Danaë ). If you look around carefully, you’ll see lots of other little odds and ends which are wintergreen and have taken on a renewed glow as the deciduous trees lose their leaves and the light levels, overall dropping quickly, actually increase under the deciduous trees. Suddenly it seems there are tufts of vivid green mosses and liverworts. Surely they weren’t there all summer?
It’s when I begin to notice these things that I realize that I’ve finally made the transition from summer into late fall successfully.

Birthday plants

I celebrated my birthday this week. Over the years I've added a number of plants to the garden which bloom on my birthday: these are my birthday plants. Two are near the top of my list of favorite plants of any season: Crocus speciosus and fall-blooming Camellia sasanqua. In recent years another improbable one has emerged: Brugmansia 'Charles Grimaldi'.

Crocus speciosus is virtually a wild flower here. It seeds itself around a bit, comes up here and there, and I'm never sure where I'll see it each year. Although this plant gives the impression of being as nearly permanent as any crocus in our climate, it's not. For years I watched plants reappear and bloom in the same places in the garden. This gave me the impression that it was capable of surviving over the long term under our conditions. Encouraged by this, years ago I planted them by the thousand in the lawns. For the first several years these plantings were spectacular. But over the years they have thinned out to the point that the viewer would never guess how many there once were. A big part of the problem is that when densely planted, the pickings are easy for the squirrels and probably voles, too. I've seen the squirrels dig them from the lawn. I've never actually seen a vole eat anything (in fact, I've actually seen voles only a few times).

The camellias here have a history which makes me proud: I raised most of them from seed. Nearly forty years ago I visited a local public garden with an extensive camellia planting in October. The plants were full of seed, seed being enthusiastically collected by squirrels, chipmunks and rats. I asked permission, got it, and filled my pockets with fresh seed of Camellia sasanqua, C. oleifera and C. japonica cultivars. Back home, I built an impromptu cold frame, sowed the seed, and then mostly forgot about it. The years passed, they accumulated into decades, and eventually the camellias began to bloom. Most are Camellia sasanqua, a few are clearly C. oleifera, and three or four are C. japonica.

The Camellia japonica have few-petaled flowers of a sort of pink-red. When a snowstorm catches them in bloom, the effect is very poetic. The C. oleifera seem to be typical examples of that species: white fragrant flowers on plants with foliage distinct in small ways from that of typical C. sasanqua.

The Camellia sasanqua are one of my birthday plants. The flowers, in various pinks and white, have only a few petals and an unusual and very agreeable scent. I esteem them more for this scent than anything else. When the bushes are in full bloom, they enliven their corner of the garden; but it's the scent I crave.

In recent years I've added another plant to my birthday list. This is the improbable one. Who would have thought that Brugmansia 'Charles Grimaldi' would have survived outside 24/7/365 for nearly a decade in this garden? But it has, and each year it goes up to seven or eight feet high and then, with each full moon of late summer and fall, produces its prodigiously fragrant flowers. These start out pale yellow orange and mature a rich pumpkin orange if the weather is cool. It's in bloom today in the cool rain.

The rain: finally it's raining. I won't complain if it goes on for another week. But the overcast sky means no pictures for now: I'll post photos of the Crocus, Camellia and Brugmansia later. I hope 'Charles Grimaldi' waits.