Wordless Wednesday: End of Summer, Start of Autumn...

Skywatch Friday meets Belated Bloomday

With all the weather scudding around these days, my gaze isn't turned so often skyward as it is to the colourful flourishes in my gardens, so this Skywatch Friday is meeting up with Garden Blogger's Bloom day. I guess I'm one of the lucky ones, because as visitors to my garden have remarked in the past several weeks, "Wow! You have lots of colour happening here!"

Yes, it's true, there's still plenty in bloom here. Part of that is planning on my part, by having selected a variety of perennials that come on later in the season. Part of it is because we normally have slow, cool springs but then we have wonderful late summers and autumns. Things are slower to bloom here, and they last longer, because they're not bludgeoned by too much heat. Mind you, the coming of September normally means the coming of much wind off the water, and this September is being no exception. However, although some things get a bit battered by the winds and rains, there's still a lot of happy colour happening.

It seems there are two predominant colour groups, flower-wise, at this time of year. The first is yellow, varying from the delicate primrose colour on the waxy bells, to the more robust golds of the fall chrysanthemums. Above, clockwise from left: fall mums; waxy bells (Kirengoshoma); a variety of rudbeckias, and echinaceas, along with golden agastache and Efanthia euphorbia; 'Sungold' buddleia; yellow patrinia (Patrinia scabiosifolia); 'Herbstsonne' shining coneflower, with only Miscanthus giganteus reaching higher in the garden. Centre, the gentle yellow of Solidago 'Little Lemon', a fabulous goldenrod if there ever was one!

The other predominant colour of this season is magenta-fuchsia-pink. These are the bright eyecatchers, bee magnets all. Clockwise from top left: Chelone, turtlehead; 'Jenny' aster; the Explorer rose 'Martin Frobisher'; 'Josephine' double clematis; NOID colchicum; One of the heathers (Calluna vulgaris) just finishing its bloom; 'Purple Bush' eupatorium; Tricyrtis 'Samourai'; centre, Vernonia crinita 'Purple Bowl'.

That's not to say these are the only colours in the garden, of course; while the gentians are mostly finished with their cool-blues, there are still eryngium, echinops, and agastache with blue blooms, and there are certainly other colours happening too. Clockwise, left top: 'Pastel Patchwork' wallflower; two double echinaceas, 'Secret Passion' and 'Pink Double Delight'; 'Cloudy' aconitum; 'Coconut Lime' double echinacea; despite already having berries on the female holly, it's flowering some more; a pink potentilla shrub, which I only grow because it was a breast-cancer shrub one year and I planted it in memory of my mother in law Marilyn; one of the tall sedums, 'Frosty Morn', with its cool pink and white flowers; and the pristine, sparkling star of a white Nigella.
Some of my grasses are just coming into their own, and since their foliage is as delightful as their flowerheads, I've combined the two charms to include in one post (for Foliage Followup); Centre, Japanese Bloodgrass; top, Japanese anemone in front of Panicum 'Dallas Blues'; right centre, Pennisetum 'Fireworks' varigated purple fountain grass, NOT perennial here; Miscanthus purpurescens, purple flame grass, bottom right; bottom left, 'Malepartus' miscanthus flowers; centre left, Panicum 'Shenandoah's' foliage glows burgundy. I'll have more to say about grasses in a few days.

Thanks to all who visit, and to those who host these fun memes!

Always making an aster of myself

The beginning of aster season is always one that finds me with a mixture of delight and dread. The delight, of course, comes from the fact that asters are floriferous, colourful, and present a wonderful flourish of colour when many gardens are starting to wind down.

It goes almost without saying that the dread comes from the fact that they are one of the finales of the main gardening season. They're a valuable part of what Nancy Ondra and Stephanie Cohel refer to as 'Fallscaping', in their wonderful book of the same name: focusing on designing your garden so that autumn is one as rich with colour and texture as spring or summer. While part of me loves the cooler weather and the richness of autumn colours, there IS that part that quails at the thought of winter. But we're focusing on the good things today, and asters are one of the joys of the fall garden palette.

One of their charms for me is how their colours are quite different from many shades of September. At a time when foliage on shrubs, hardwood trees and some perennials, along with many of the flowers still blooming in this month, are alight with bronze, copper, gold, crimson, orange and red, asters erupt with sometimes cooler, sometimes even hotter shades. This purple New England aster in my friend Jerry's garden is a perfect contrast to the brighter yellows and golds echoed by its central florets.

I like white asters for their cooling appearance, and in the case of the calico asters (A. lateriflorus), the tiny flowers that festoon lateral branches of these plants can almost completely cover the plants. Despite the tiny flowers, the calico asters are one of my favourites, reminding me of pagoda dogwoods or the plicatum tomentosum viburnums such as 'Mariesii' and 'Summer Snowflake', with their layered, lateral-branching effects.

Asters don't all bloom at the same time. There are petite, earlier-flowering forms, often alpine, which gladden the gardeners heart during summer, and the distant cousins that are annual 'asters' (Callistephus). I don't grow the annuals, but do have a wide variety of perennial asters, some of which are just as delightful while in bud as in full bloom.

'Woods Pink' is a dumosus aster, one of the lower-growing, even ground-covering, forms. It's wellnamed, being a powderpuff-pink shade, and a nice addition to borders.

A word about genus nomenclature. In recent years, DNA typing and further study has led taxonomists to move some former members of genus aster to other genera, including Symphytotrichum, Eurybia and Eucephalus. It's always so encouraging to gardeners to have an easy-to-pronounce name switched to something more cumbersome, isn't it? (Or not...) However, for simplicity's sake I am going to refer to all of these as asters, and you'll find plenty of websites and books that do the same, offering the newer name as synonym. No one will scold you, unless it's some taxonomist with nothing better to do.

I used to have a perennial problem with asters, in that I would buy a couple and plant them out, then forget where they were, and inadvertently weed them out in the spring. I would also invariably leave several wild asters, of which there are at least a dozen species in Nova Scotia, (plus the infinite interspecies hybrids that form from these promiscuous plants), to come into bloom instead. Now, I simply leave them all to grow, and whether they are cultivated types like this tall, NOID New England aster...
...or wild varieties like this white wood aster (which now is classified in the genus Eurybia rather than Aster, but it's close enough), they are all welcome to put on a show in my borders. Asters are great pollinator plants, often covered in bees, bee-mimics, and butterflies during warm latesummer and autumn days.

One of the newly added, lower-growing named asters in my garden is 'Anneke', a dumosus variety. You can make these as well as the taller varieties bushier and even more floriferous, though a bit later-flowering, by cutting them back in June or early July to about half their height. They will then be less prone to blowing over in the rains and gales of September, and produce even more stems of brilliant blossoms.

One of my favourites is 'Jenny', which is planted under a 'Snow Pavement' rose, and the hot pink of the aster is cooled and charmed by the pale lavender of the rose. Again, the buds just opening are as delightful (in my mind) as are the fully-flushed blossoms that will be here in a couple of days.

In my front border, a Michaelmas or New York aster named 'Dragon' (A. nova-belgii 'Dragon') is producing a vivid display of bright purple-blue flowers. It's new this year, and I've marked it because I want to move it a little more mid-border; this year it's only about a foot tall, but I've found in subsequent years the Michaelmas daisies can get fairly tall, especially if I happen to forget to prune them in late spring or early summer.

A. nova-belgii 'Puff' is another of my favourites with its pure white flowers that resemble miniature shasta daisies. I first located this plant at the garden centre at Kingsbrae Garden in St. Andrews, New Brunswick, where it charmed me on sight. It has continued to be a delightful addition to my garden for several years, although 'Winston Churchill', a deep pink-wine variety I bought at the same time, shuffled off its mortal coil (or was possibly victim of my pre-laissez-faire aster weeding of years gone by).

My absolute favourite New England Aster, 'Alma Potschke' is not yet in bloom because of where it's planted in less than full sun (and I keep forgetting to move it until it's too large), so we wrap up this little ode to asters with an almost-as-brilliant variety, the delightful 'September Ruby'. I forgot to prune this one this past June, and it gets somewhat rumpled by catching the west wind in my back garden, but its hot-magenta flowers create a blaze of colour that never fails to cause a smile on my face.

Skywatch Friday: Stormy Waters, Sunflower Skies

I am almost fashionably late with my Skywatch Friday post, but since I popped up for air from working and started reading other blogs, I realized what day it was!

As you know from other posts, including my previous one, Hurricane Earl was pretty much a non-event in my part of the world. We did get some rain, and some wind, and it did make for a few good waves on both the Atlantic and Fundy coasts of Nova Scotia. This is a scene at Halls Harbour, a few miles down the coast from me.
As a nice juxtaposition from that bombastic weather, some blissfully smiling sunflowers that I saw today while visiting a local home for special care. The people who own that facility have huge gardens all around the grounds, and they are well cared for and interesting--and much appreciated by both the residents and those who visit loved ones there. A sunflower to me is always a cause for smiling, and these basking under blue skies made me that much happier.

Post Earl Beauty: All is well

As Saturday afternoon gave way to evening, I paraphrased an old expression from the 1970s "What if they gave a hurricane and nobody came?" Earl was pretty much a non-event for us; some wind, some rain, happily no damage to crops or properties around here. A few trees uprooted or broken in other areas, some power outages, but really, it could have been much worse. Thank you all for your good wishes and caring; I hope everyone got off as unscathed as we did.

Ironically, we had more wind on Sunday and Monday, of a more damaging kind because it came out of the west southwest, than during Earl's visit. I was pretty cranky when I walked around the garden on Monday and saw some of the perennials had been beaten around by the wind, by banging into other plants, but I soon got over it when I noticed some of the marvels that were happening.


Starting with the blooming of 'Sungold' buddleia, one of the most beautiful of flowering shrubs. Here in Nova Scotia, buddleias are not only NOT invasive, they are often marginally hardy. They will die down to the ground and come back fresh for some, but I tend to treat them as annuals, buying small plants each spring and tucking them into spots where they will hopefully be happy. Obviously, this one has been happy.

While I don't have drifts and drifts of Verbena bonariensis, I have half a dozen good plants from transplants this year, and I'm optimistic that we might get seedlings. If not, I'm sure a visit to my friend Terri next spring will yield some new seedlings. This is such a great plant, beloved of butterflies and other pollinators as well as by the gardener.

'Lemon Princess' spirea has decided to throw up a number of new blossoms along with some freshly gold foliage. I normally don't even pay much attention to the flowers on most of my spireas, as I chose them for their foliage colours rather than their blooms.

After years of battling with Russian sage, I decided to simply treat it as an annual, and buy it every year. I've placed it in the best-drained garden, where the echinaceas live, and if it survives the winter and comes back next year, great. If not, I still like it and will plant it again next season.

One of my favourite roses is the rugosa hybrid 'Polareis', which I bought at Cornhill Nursery about seven years ago and which is a spectacularly floriferous and well behaved shrub. It does get some aphids on its buds, but I just spray a blast of water from the hose on them or let their predators feast on them.

This is the season when perennial grasses are really coming into their own. Some of them have finished flowering, but others, such as the miscanthuses, panicums, molinias and schizachyriums are just coming on.


I have half a dozen or more miscanthus varieties around the property, not all of them clearly identified. Since this one came from Baldwin's Nurseries and is the earliest to flower, I'm fairly sure that it's 'Malepartus'. It was unperturbed by the wind, whoever it is.

While I am kicking and screaming about going into rapidly shorter days, I do like the light of September, especially when it plays on foliage such as in this garden. This is a garden in Wolfville that I discovered today; along with numerous low growing shrubs such as barberries, there are Japanese blood grasses (Imperata) and fountain grasses (Pennisetum) catching the light.

Although some of the echinaceas were battered and petal-bruised by the weekend weather, 'Secret Passion' decided to comfort me by producing several new blooms. It's not quite as awesome as 'Hot Papaya', but it's pretty close.

To go along with my lovely yellow buddleia, here's another late-blooming shrub: Caryopteris, or blue mist shrub, sometimes also called blue spirea. This is a small plant, bought this summer from a nursery that had brought it in thinking it was somehow a perennial (I think the nursery they ordered from screwed up their order). I love caryopteris, though it can be really slow to bloom here; its cooling blue flowers work beautifully among the hotter colours of many of September's blooms.

Skywatch Friday: The calm before Earl...

Thursday morning I went outside just after sunrise, when the sky was simply heat-haze coloured as opposed to blue, to take a walk around the gardens and record what they look like while we wait to see if Hurricane Earl comes a-calling. It seemed like a good idea to have a look at the mass of bloom still happening in my garden, when things are relatively tidy and floriferous and there wasn't a breath of wind to disturb the scene. So although it's not really sky-oriented, this is my offering for this week's Skywatch Friday.

A variety of hydrangeas provide a backdrop for this wash of perennials, evergreen and deciduous shrubs. I refer to this as my mini-prairie-in-progress, with panic grass, rudbeckias, and other coneflowers consorting with bee-enticing plants such as agastaches and eryngiums. The bees were extremely busy this morning, loving the heat, and perhaps knowing that there is inclement weather coming. They bustle around the garden, diving into flowers and essentially ignoring me. I listen to them and smile a lot.

My coneflowers are still going very strong in their bed. I mentioned on Facebook that Longsuffering Spouse kindly edged around this bed on the weekend, cutting out a good foot of sod and then adding well-composted manure to the bare ground. In a few weeks time, it'll be perfectly suited for tucking in some springflowering bulbs, and next spring I'll spread the perennials out, moving some of the coneflowers forward and letting the taller ones work as a backdrop.

The outburst of gold in the centre foreground is Solidago 'Little Lemon', a cultivated goldenrod sent to me last year by Dugald Cameron of GardenImport. It's thriving beautifully, and is becoming one of my favourite later-season flowers. I plan to divide the plant and move it to another bed where it can spread out and consort with eupatorium and other later-season stars.

Signs of the closing down of summer: some of the miscanthus are beginning to put up their tall, wispily elegant flower heads over their fountaining foliage, while Actaea 'Pink Spike' is in full bloom. Tanacetum 'Isla Gold' is blooming enthusiastically, although I plant it more for its gold foliage, which is starting to fade to a bright lime green now, and Monarda 'Raspberry Wine' is still providing lots of food for the lingering hummingbirds. It'll be interesting to see if they stay beyond tomorrow or if they take off on their migration before the arrival of Earl.

We're not terribly concerned about Earl, whether he arrives as a hurricane or a tropical storm. Living in a rural community on the shores of the Bay of Fundy means that we expect bombastic weather from time to time, and we are generally prepared for it. Those of you who are regular readers know that we get truly rude winter storms, and usually at least one tropical storm or diminishing hurricane as summer winds down. So things may be messy on Saturday, and there may be some flattened flowers and defoliated shrubs come Sunday, but I'd sooner that we took the brunt of it than the apple and pear producers down in the Valley below us. It could be a difficult weekend for them.

Virtual Book Tour: Hothouse Flower & the Nine Plants of Desire

A few weeks back, I was contacted by a publicist who wondered if I was interested in participating in what is called a Virtual Book Tour, in which a number of us would read and review a particular novel. Based on the blurb about the novel, I agreed to do so, and read Margot Berwin's Hothouse Flower and the Nine Plants of Desire.

In my real life as a freelance journalist, I write for a variety of publications and clients, and about a number of different subjects. Despite the fact that it’s time-consuming and doesn’t pay well, I regularly review books for the provincial newspaper, occasionally for other publications, and occasionally put up a review here on bloomingwriter. Normally, I review books of nonfiction in my areas of interest: gardening, nature, science/environment, occasionally history; occasionally I review a work of fiction. I have interviewed numerous authors, including Canadian icons Margaret Atwood and David Adams Richards, (two of my favourite authors) and have long taken my philosophy of book reviewing from something Ms. Atwood wrote some years ago.

“I still won’t review a book I don’t like, although to do so would doubtless be amusing for the Ms. Hyde side of me and entertaining for the more malicious class of reader,” Ms. Atwood wrote in the introduction to her essay collection, Moving Targets: Writing with Intent, 1982-2004. She goes on to say that if a book is really bad, it ought not be reviewed at all, or if it’s good but not to her taste, someone else should review it.

This isn’t a bad book, but it’s not a particularly good one. I will stress that it’s mostly not to my taste, which runs the gamut from science fiction to thrillers to hardcore literature, so maybe I'm just being a grump. However though not entranced by it, I see some flashes of delightful ability in the author, enough that I will be quite willing to read a future work by Berwin even though I won’t re-read this particular one.

If you’ve been following the virtual book tour set up for Hothouse Flower, you may have already read the book, or at least know its premise: Lila, the narrator/lead character is newly divorced, lives in New York City, works a sort of dull job in an ad agency, has a bright but dull apartment. She has no commitments—no relationship, no pets, no plants, no real life outside of her McJob—until she buys a tropical plant from a smooth-talking street vendor. She then meets an odd but somewhat intriguing man who has a Laundromat filled with exotic and wonderful plants, and through her own errors in judgment, she causes this man to lose his plants. Her ensuing quest to replace his plant collection leads her to the rainforests of Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula.

The premise is intriguing, and the book blurb sounded promising. And while Berwin writes quite well at times and has a quirkily fun sense of humour, her characters simply don’t work for me. My amusement at some of the dialogue, events and descriptions in the book was completely overshadowed by the characters, none of whom make me care about them even a little bit, and several of whom are reprehensible for no apparent reason related to the storyline. When the little bits profiling each of the plants at the beginning of chapters are the most entertaining parts of the novel, there’s a problem with the work.

At times, there’s a bit of a magic realism feel to events in Hothouse Flower. But unlike Gabriel Garcia Marquez with his One Hundred Years of Solitude or Jack Hodgins’ brilliant romp The Invention of the World, there’s not enough mystery between the covers of Berwin’s novel to make me really wonder about the odd things that do take place here and there. Rather than be fetchingly mysterious and ineffable, they come across as jarringly annoying and contrived, as if the author was trying overly hard to be clever.

Normally, when reviewing a book I avoid any reviews done by others, lest my opinion be in some way coloured by the comments of more learned heads than mine. Because I was completely unfamiliar with Berwin prior to reading Hothouse Flower, I did seek out more information about her. She has said that while this is her first published novel, it’s her third work, and does draw on some aspects of her own experience. Although it spans mere months as opposed to years, Hothouse Flower could be considered a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age novel of self-development, by an author still fledging her wings. With this in mind, I do genuinely look forward to reading future work by Berwin when she has had a few more years of honing her skills.

Drifts in the garden...Other People's Gardens.

It can be said that I read too many blogs and websites when I can't remember who coined the term OPG (Other People's Gardens) so that I can't give them proper credit here. Let's just rest assured that when I remember, or when that person pokes me to remind me, I'll make the correction.

Anyway. The point is that I love visiting Other People's Gardens almost as much as I love puttering in my own. If you scooped up a dozen people from around the province--or a hundred from around the blogosphere--we might grow some of the same plants but interpret how to plant them in very different ways.



A couple of weeks ago, I went to visit the garden of a woman I've corresponded with intermittently over the past number of years. For a while we had lost touch with one another, but I actually met Betty back in the spring, and finally got to visit her garden in mid August.

In a word, Betty's garden is spectacular. She lives in a rural spot and has plenty of space, and actually began building the garden long before she moved there to a permanent dwelling. She used to have a small travel trailer on the site, where she camped out to do her gardening, while working and living in another community.

When you have plenty of room, you can create broad, sweeping gardenscapes of colour, texture, form...and Betty has done that masterfully here. She has the art of creating 'drifts' down to a fine science, incorporating wildflowers, perennials, ornamental grasses, shrubs and even some annuals into this (to my mind) perfectly created garden.

She uses a huge variety of perennials, including many with colourful foliage, such as 'Golden Jubilee' agastache, which has become one of my favourite perennials for its long bloom period as well as its luminous foliage.

She also has a wickedly fun sense of humour, with amusing and charming bits of garden art and other accents throughout the property. How do you like her 'lawn chair', made of sods?

Of course there would have to be a photo of one of her several drifts of coneflowers. This garden is awash with colour, and also with life, with bees buzzing through the flowers, butterflies winging around on the mild summer breeze, and birds chattering in the shrubs and trees.


Long perennial borders incorporate plenty of new cultivars along with old fashioned favourites and more than a few native plants.

For example, her bed of chicory both delighted and caused great envy in me. She laughingly said some people ask her why she's growing 'weeds' (chicory grows along the roadsides throughout several counties in Nova Scotia). I understand perfectly. Pale blue flowers, wildly attractive to pollinators...what's not to like? (My chicory drift has a long long way to go to be as fun as this).

Betty has several perennials that I love but that don't do well for me. In a photo above, there's an impressive drift of Gaura, which is often best used as an annual or tender perennial in our province. But Betty has good drainage and other conditions that suit it, and it has come back beautifully for her. She also has several fine plantings of various balloon flowers, which I have given up on. They're late breaking dormancy here, and I've probably dug them up half a dozen times, thinking they were weeds or dead. So I just enjoy other people's balloons now.

I was delighted to see a big drift of Mexican hat, Ratibida, another type of coneflower, in one of Betty's borders. She also has a lot of perennial grasses, but most of them were just preparing to put up flowerheads, so as I've lamented before, they're a challenge to photograph well and look appealing.

Some people get intimidated or even discouraged by visiting OPGs. I do not. I love to see what other people are doing with their plantings, how they cope with weather or other growing challenges, what they like for plants...it's a treat and a joy for me to visit gardens like Betty's, and I plan to put up more posts of OPGs in the coming weeks.

What about you? What happens when you visit OPGs? What's the best inspiration you've taken away from visiting a fellow gardener?