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Asters and soldago.
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chris gang
red yellow twig dogwood
Red and yellow twig dogwood.
My favorite season depends on when the question is posed. In winter, I would wax on about my excitement when the first sprouts of spring push through the cool soil with an unstoppable force to find the sunlight. I imagine the fiery furnace in the core of the Earth getting hotter and the sun getting brighter until sleeping plants want to start singing and dancing on their seasonal stage.
Call me fickle, but in late summer when flowers turn into ugly seed heads and leaves lose vitality, I can hardly wait for the arrival of my new favorite season, autumn. As the days change from hot and humid to cool and crisp, working in the garden is almost a pleasure. Even better are special flowers and foliage that we behold only for a few weeks in the fall.
While it is our gardens’ last hurrah before winter, it is not, except for annuals, a prelude to their death. Most of our plants will take a winter nap, but in our climate, gardens and natural landscapes are never totally dormant.
If your garden peters out with-out a fall flourish, you might think about adding a few new plants or redoing some beds. Garden designer Tom Pellett likes to celebrate seasonal delights by dedicating a specific area to plants that peak in spring and summer and another to those that wait until fall and winter to shine.
“It’s easier to divide them instead of having one bed doing all of the work for a year,” he says.
Mystic Spires, a perennial salvia, could find a place in both beds because it produces true blue flowers on 18- to 30-inch spikes from spring until the first frost, provided the dead flowers are routinely snipped off and the entire plant is cut back by about a third in early summer. That may seem drastic but the flowers return quickly.
Two other worthy salvias restrain themselves until late summer and fall: Mexican bush sage with its velvety blue-purple flowers, and pineapple sage, whose fruity scented foliage and red flowers are nectar sources for migrating hummingbirds.
Two asters — the medium-size October Skies with light lavender flowers and Raydon’s Favorite, a taller one with dark blue flowers — are also fall charmers.
Those blue and purple flowering plants look even better when they have some bright yellow companions like Fireworks, a 36-inch-tall goldenrod with intensely yellow flowers on arching branches. Another option is the giant leopard plant, which sends up clusters of yellow daisy-like blooms amid its glossy solid green or variegated green and yellow kidney-shaped leaves.
Gardeners also can’t beat the fall foliage of Japanese maples like Osakazuki, whose bright green leaves turn to a brilliant crimson, or Lion’s Mane, which becomes a mass of gold and crimson crinkled leaves. And don’t forget the buttery-yellow fan-shaped leaves of the ginkgo tree that all drop at the same time to cover the ground in a gorgeous golden blanket.
Amsonia, also known as Bluestar, is a perennial most prized for its clusters of small blue flowers in the spring. But its feathery leaves take on an attractive goldish-bronze hue in autumn. This plant is tough enough to thrive on a median on Wolf River Boulevard in Germantown just west of the bridge over the Wolf River.
It would be difficult to ignore the seas of white, yellow, purple, and bronze mums that flood into our nurseries and big-box merchandisers every fall. A few well-placed pots of these flowers will certainly add pops of pizzazz to tired autumn landscapes. Although they are perennials, their tight and compact growing habit is not always as pleasing in the garden as it is in nursery pots.
But ornamental specialist Carol Reese makes room for some older varieties such as Ryan’s Pink, a lovely loosey-goosey plant with pale pink daisy-like flowers with yellow centers. She also likes plants in the newly developed Igloo series like Fireworks Igloo, Frosty Igloo, Dainty Pink Igloo, and Cool Red Igloo.
To my eye, Ryan’s Pink resembles the Sheffield Pink chrysanthemum I’ve been growing for years. It’s well worth waiting until mid-October to see its blooms.
I want to grow one of Reese’s other recommendations: Spirea “Ogon” or Mellow Yellow, a low-growing shrub with thousands of tiny white flowers in early spring, willowy yellow leaves in summer, and then brilliant orange/russet fall color.
Reese also likes the yellow foliage of the bottlebrush buckeye and the golden glow of leaves on coral bark maples in the autumn sun.
Winter-hardy edibles like emerald green curly parsley; yellow, orange, and red Rainbow Lights Swiss chard; and deep purple Red Russian kale are also great for their lush colors and tasty leaves from fall through winter.
Some gardeners make longto-do lists in the fall, but there isn’t that much anyone really has to do to prepare the garden for winter. One of Reese’s recommendations is great for lazy gardeners like me: Put the pruners down.
I always like orders that give me permission not to work. Prune nothing, she says. If you absolutely must have a tidy garden, go ahead and remove unsightly seed heads on the ends of the stems of echinaceas and other perennials. You won’t be depriving the birds that feed throughout the winter on those seeds if you scatter them on the ground after you throw the heads in the compost pile.
General pruning on shrubs and trees should wait until they are fully dormant in December. Most gardeners wait until mid-to-late February for major pruning. Early pruning can rob a shrub of stored carbohydrates, reducing its hardiness and vigor. It can also encourage new and tender growth that will be killed back by the next frost.
It’s a good idea to protect plants that are only borderline winter-hardy here, says Jim Crowder at Memphis Botanic Garden. He advises putting a modest layer of coarse mulch around the base of the plant out to the space underneath its longest branches. Avoid touching the trunk with the mulch.
Do not use finely ground hardwood bark mulch, which can form a tight mat that does not allow water and air to move through it. Choose coarse pine bark mulch, pine straw, or other grassy materials.
Autumn is also the time to sow seeds for poppies, larkspur, bachelor’s buttons, and columbines. Ellen LeBlond suggests mixing the tiny seeds with sand or cornmeal and sprinkling them on soil that has been loosened by raking. “After you sow the seeds, tamp them down with your feet or the back of a rake so they don’t wash away,” says LeBlond, who formerly worked in the horticulture department at The Dixon Gallery and Gardens.
Crowder is a fan of yellow and red twig dogwoods, shrubby plants that brighten fall and winter landscapes. They need a moist to wet site and some sun.
One thing the experts agree on: Fall is the ideal time to plant perennials, shrubs, and trees. The plants will get a jump-start on acclimating to the soil. Because September and October are typically dry months, however, Reese recommends waiting until November to install most new plants. Then, when Old Man Winter has left and spring arrives, just step back and watch your garden grow.
