Fabulous Foliage, and Spotlight Saturday...on Sunday.

To coincide with my Chronicle Herald column for today, I thought I'd blither on a bit more about the joys of foliage for autumn. But before we get too far into my rhapsodic ramblings about leaf colour, a brief public service announcement. It's been far too long since I did a 'SpotLight Saturday' post, primarily because life got in the way what with garden season being full steam ahead, coupled with book writing and other work that pays the bills whilst book writing...Something had to give, and so the amount of time spent reading blogs fell off. Now that gardening is winding down and the days are much shorter, there's more time to read...and I like to encourage and promote other blogs, so I'll try to do these more often.

I first became aware of Dirt Gently's Horticultural Adventures because the blogger appeared in my Twitter feed as a new follower. Naturally, as a Douglas Adams fan I was completely smitten with the blog title...and a quick visit showed me this was a fun blog to follow. Great photos, and some self-effacing humour about gardening skills. The blog was only started in September, so a little encouragement from fellow bloggers is always a good thing.

Disclosure: I look after the blog for Baldwin Nurseries, and it's a work in progress. Baldwin's is one of my favourite nurseries in the province, and Robert is a good friend who loves plants, especially natives and those that are good for pollinators. So while 'he' may not comment much on other people's blogs, I do hope you'll visit and leave comments for him to enjoy. And come see the nursery, of course. It's getting a bit late in the season now, but he has plenty of great shrubs for fall and winter colour.

For those of you in Canada who watch CBC, Rob is participating in Debbie Travis's show All for One, tonight at 9 pm. I know very little about the show as I'm not a fan of home decorating shows, but I do know that tonight's show was shot in Windsor, NS. So I hope fans will tune in!

Which brings me back to blathering on about foliage. Dawn redwood (Metasequoia) is one of my favourite of non-native trees, with its graceful growth habit and interesting history. Before the needles of this deciduous conifer fall, they turn bronzy gold, and their spring colour is also bronze toned. The winter interest is in its striated, striking bark and elegant form.

A four-season beauty, the native red-osier dogwood (Cornus sericea) has some excellent colour in its foliage. Once the leaves drop, the twigs show off brilliant red colour all winter. The cultivar 'Flaviramea' has golden twigs. You need to keep this shrub well-pruned so that it has plenty of new growth--older trunks lose their winter colour.

This photo is NOT mine. Although I have two burning bushes (Euonymus alatus) in my garden, getting decent photos of them has been a challenge since they began turning colour, because of the incessant wind. So I decided to turn to Google for help, and chose this Botany Photo of the Day shot so as to also promote UBC's excellent website. In today's column, I mention how I receive regular emailed photos at this time of year, wondering what "that" shrub is with the great colour. This is "that" shrub.

I wholeheartedly recommend ninebarks to everyone wanting a great four-season shrub. Most of them have interesting coloured foliage all gardening season, deepening to richer shades as autumn comes on. This is 'Diabolo', a purple-leafed cultivar that is an excellent, hardworking, easy care shrub.

The deciduous azaleas turn colour before losing their leaves, although they've been highly annoyed by the wind this autumn and have been more battered than colourful. This is an unnamed variety from Bill and Sharon at The Willow Garden. I have a number of their tough, beautiful rhododendron and azaleas, including several crosses that haven't been named.

Kolkwitzia is one of those plants that some refer to as old-fashioned, commonly planted and just sort of "there" in the garden. I love it for several reasons, not the least of which is the delicately luminous colour in fall foliage. 'Dreamcatcher' has richer colouring throughout the season, but mine was mown down by an errant lawnmower last year and is slowly recovering. So this is the common variety, given to me by a friend several years ago.

Barberries are excellent for fall colour. This is a seedling shrub from one of the purple leafed varieties in my garden. It's getting redder day by day.

Although the fall colour of my copper beech isn't showstoppingly brilliant, I include this photo for another reason. Beeches and oaks display a trait known as marcescence, meaning they retain their foliage for months after it has died. Usually it's younger trees that will do this, and my copper beech is only a few years old. Come winter, its coppery-brown leaves will look quite interesting--especially when there's a four-foot snowdrift surrounding the tree!

Many perennials will display some interesting fall colour as they wind down for the year. This is 'Alma Potchsche' New England aster, flowers faded but foliage still providing me with a smile.

And to wrap up, the always-wonderful foliage of Virginia creeper, catching some rays of sunlight on a day when the wind WASN'T screaming--a circumstance that has been rare this autumn, as I've mentioned before.

The montage at the top of this post includes Miscanthus 'Malepartus', showing great tints in its foliage; euphorbia 'Ascot Rainbow', which I'm hoping is going to make it through the winter here with a little care; and 'Brilliance' autumn fern (Dryopteris), which has gorgeous foliage all through the growing season.

Okay, it's over to you, fellow bloggers: what are your favourite plants for fall colour?

Spotlight Saturday: Have you visited This blogger? Introducing Cindee

I have endless amounts of admiration for those who have the ability to maintain more than one blog. My brain feels like it's turning to 3 bean salad some days with only ONE blog to maintain, so for those with two or more, wow, my writerly hat is off to you for your dedication. It also gives me two or three times as many posts to read from them, so that's always good.

With that in mind, I would like to introduce Cindee, who writes about gardens past and present, about crafts...and about cats, too. I found her first at Moonstone Gardens, which is, a she puts it, a "gardening blog based from a 17-acre resort garden." The resort is in Oregon, one of those places I dream of visiting because it's home to many great gardens and garden centres/breeders. For now, I content myself with reading about these places via blogs.



From there, I traipsed over to the wonderful and whimsical Our Grandmother's Gardens, where Cindee celebrates not only gardening but a variety of crafty endeavours, some of them based in garden-inspired art.

And how lucky are the cats who share life with Cindee, because they have their own blog at The Cat House! This one isn't updated quite so often, but it's lovely to visit Cindee's feline friends. My only worry is that OUR cats will demand their own blog. You know what Mungus is like. And Spunky too. I'd have to create a blog for each of them, and put little kitty cams on their heads, and they'd want to write the blogs themselves, and I'd have to share my laptop with them...

Whew. Like I said, one is enough for me.

So that's a bit of a look at Cindee's blogs, and you can see how they'd appeal to me. I think they'll appeal to many of you as well, so I hope you'll pop by one or more of them and say hello!

Spotlight Saturday: Have you visited This blogger?

First of all, thank you so much for your good wishes and thoughts. My health issue is an ongoing one, annoying and incapacitating at times but not lifethreatening, for which I'm deeply grateful. I've reminded myself of that especially this week, as we across the gardening blogosphere have had thoughts and prayers focused on our dear blogging bud Katie, who is fighting a serious illness. We send her much love, virtual tulips and healing thoughts across the time zones, states, provinces, countries, continents. (#fightkatie!) The sun is out here in lovely Nova Scotia this morning, so I hope that when it wakes on the far West Coast, it streams in Katie's window and helps her healing.

Two of my favourite things in the world are plants, and the pollinators that help their life cycles, especially bees. A third favourite thing is botanical/nature art. I can't draw or paint. At ALL. But I have a huge appreciation for and love of good botanical themed artwork, from the time of Pierre-Joseph Redoute to the artists of today.


Through the wonderful world of the Internet, I've found some amazing garden artists who blog, and have been following a few of them faithfully over the past several years. One of my favourites, and this week's Spotlight on Saturday choice, is Valerie Littlewood of Pencil and Leaf. I don't remember exactly when I discovered her blog, or by which means--I always figure it's synchronicity when I tumble upon a new blog that really hits me in the heart--but I love her work and especially her current area of interest.


Lately, Valerie has been combining two of my favourite things in her recent work: bees and plants. It's no secret that I'm a huge fan of bees (one of my favourite twitter-peeps is @HelpSaveBees) , and it's even less of a secret to the wider world that bees of all kinds, both wild and domestic, bumble and honey, are in trouble due to a number of factors. So I figure anything that educates us more about these gentle, essential creatures and about what we can do to help save bees, is a very, very good thing. So I hope you'll buzz on over to Valerie's site, check out her paintings and sketches and her Flickr page of more of her work.

Spotlight Saturday: Have you visited This blogger?

We have had some amazing participation in encouraging people to visit new, or new-to-them bloggers since we all began the conversation about encouraging our fellow bloggers about a month ago. There were some very good suggestions and actions made by people who left comments here, and once again, I thank you all for being such good blogger-neighbours around the world.

I took up Teza's method of promoting other bloggers, but I've found two problems in it for me. One has to do with my blog template, which has some flaw in its code so that titles of widgets etc on the sidebars often run into the widget, photo, etc. I can control that with some sidebar items, but with the 'Have you visited this blog?' photo/link on the right side, I can't make it any larger or space it better than it is. And being a chickenheart when it comes to template code...I don't dare tinker with that, or I'm apt to warp the whole thing into Tralfamadore, and I'm not ready to go there yet.

More importantly than that wee bit of tidiness quirks, my brain is somewhat cluttered with a lot going on right now, as you know from reading previous posts. And like I forget to take something out for supper some days, or where I've put my iPhone, or that I was supposed to finish writing a letter I drafted two weeks ago to a friend...I am afraid that I'll forget just who all I've put in that side 'visit' link, and put the same person in twice, or neglect to put up someone because I think I've already done so.

This is my solution. Once every couple of weeks, I'll do a 'Spotlight Saturday' post, introducing you to a fellow blogger who I've encountered and whose blog I really enjoy. That way you'll get to 'know' them a bit before you pop over to visit (and I KNOW you'll all visit because you're awesome that way) and I'll have a regular record of who I've spotlighted. And of course the blogger will get some new visitors and then go visit other bloggers and it will all be good.

Without further ado, let me introduce you to Ceara, who lives and gardens on the beautiful Gaspé peninsula in eastern Quebec. Ceara's garden is zone 4, so you can imagine the various climate challenges she has to deal with in her gardening adventures. She just started her blog a few weeks ago, but she visited here and left a comment about sea holly, so I returned to write a comment in answer, and was delighted with her blog. So please go visit.


One other thing you might be able to help with. Ceara wrote in her comment on my Eryngium post that she has been unable to get seed or plants of this genus to try in her garden. I've offered to send her E. planum seedlings, but I'm also curious: has anyone in a zone 4 garden been able to grow any of the Eryngiums? I've seen various zone reports on E. planum as being hardy to zone 4, others say zone 5, so I'm throwing it open to what Mr. Subjunctive always calls The Hive Mind: what say you, fellow gardeners? Can Ceara find happiness with one of the sea hollies in her Gaspé garden?

Oh, I'm sure you're wondering what the sunflowers have to do with this post. Not a whole lot. The bucket of sunflowers WERE at a market in Montreal that I visited in October during my visit, and I just thought we could all use some cheerful colour on what's another dreary weather weekend here.

One MORE thing. (sorry, I told you my brain sometimes is like swiss cheese.) If you haven't done already, please consider taking part in Jan's (Thanks for Today) Sustainable Living Giveaway challenge. She's extended the deadline and got some very cool prizes to give out (sadly, only in the USA, boo to companies who won't ship outside the US). But even without being eligible for prizes, I hope you'll take part in her challenge. There have been some very wonderful posts about living sustainably already, and that in itself is reward enough for many of us--if we find even one small way in which to make our lives more green, it's a very good thing.