In the meantime, we’ve had a remarkable beginning of November, haven’t we? The nice weather is great for admiring the glorious fall foliage (see my lovely fothergilla!) and for doing things in the garden before winter sets in. Fothergilla shining in the sun This season of changes brings revelations and opportunities. For instance, when their leaves change color, scores of tree seedlings that were hiding in the greenery show themselves, giving me a chance to remove them before the leaves drop and they become invisible little sticks. I enjoy pulling them out, tearing off the leaves, and scatteri ..read more

Fall cleanup ain’t what it used to be—like a lot of traditional gardening activities, it has changed with the times and with new information from horticultural and environmental sciences. Rather than cleaning up every bit of debris and dead plant material, the new emphasis is on leaving things to carry on as nature intended: leaves stay on the ground and dead flowerheads and stalks stay up to gradually senesce as the winter moves in. The nice thing is that (like abandoning discredited practices like tilling and double-digging) it’s a lot less work. But wait! What if I don’t want leaves to comp ..read more

Gardeners have many motivations for trying to grow more native plants: supporting insects, birds, and other creatures for their own sake; attracting beneficial insects to attack pests on our plants; choosing plants that are well-adapted to our region’s soils and climate; and simply enjoying the many and varied native plants that are becoming more available as interest in them grows. This growing interest extends both to our members and to customers at our annual plant sale. With the prospect of an in-person public plant sale next spring, we hope to be digging our own plants or other people’s t ..read more

Prior to selling her house, our club president offered divisions of nearly all the plants in her lovely garden to the Plant Sale. Member volunteers and the Plant Sale Committee arrived at her garden on a sunny day in early April to prepare hundreds of plants. While new leaves barely showed above the soil, we dug and divided hostas and peonies, thinned ferns and hellebores, and much more. About half were replanted in her garden and the rest were potted and labelled for sale. A month later, her garden was lush and healthy, as if we had taken nothing, and the potted divisions sold out quickly at ..read more

Last month I mentioned detecting the mottled green leaves of Phacelia bipinnatifida, a biennial that is quietly waiting for spring (aren’t we all?) to begin producing its attractive purple flowers. This is one of those plants that can self-seed prolifically in the right conditions, which turns out to be leaf litter under deciduous trees. (Another reason to leave the leaves!) The genus Phacelia includes about 200 species, and P. bipinnatifida is one of only six native to Maryland, according to USDA plants. (California, in contrast, has over 90 species—well, they’re bigger than we are.) This New ..read more

Every season in the garden has its particular delights. Winter is no exception. Perhaps the pleasures of the cold months are even more prized because they are many fewer in number. As with every other part of the year, winter’s fleeting glories bring moments to be savored before they pass into memory. Winter fairyland Some perennials and deciduous shrubs go so gracefully into dormancy, that they might be considered at their peak after frost. Among these are the grasses, especially broom sedge (Andropogon virginicus) which spends the cold months a stippled orange. Hakone grass (Hakonechloa macr ..read more

Several years ago I bought a book called “Use What You Have Decorating,” which provides useful suggestions about home decor based on the idea in the title: basically, look at your stuff and arrange it to achieve a pleasing result (while also fixing or avoiding common mistakes)—easier said than done, obviously. It occurred to me that this idea sums up much of my approach to landscaping, except of course that I can’t just move trees and shrubs around the way one might rearrange furniture (alas). But even assuming that a lot of the garden structure is fixed, we can still make decisions about prun ..read more

If you want to support the natural environment in your garden, you have to decide where you fall along the order to chaos spectrum. Clearly, a gardener who is trying to provide ecological niches for insects and wildlife is not going to produce a Versailles-like symmetrical tapestry of plantings (not that many of us aspire to that level of control, not to mention maintenance). But even the most nature-oriented gardener also wants a garden that is aesthetically pleasing, if only to avoid shocking the neighborhood. Whatever your chaos tolerance, winter is a good time to assess the features that p ..read more

Most of the November 4 volunteers at the Connie Morella Library. On November 4, an awesome group of BCGC volunteers executed yet another project at the Connie Morella Library in downtown Bethesda. We spread more than a cubic yard of Bloom Woody Blend into the soil in the islands and peninsulas in the library parking lot. In addition, we spread nearly 150 pounds of cured Bloom around 21 trees recently planted by BCGC. Since the library was rebuilt in 1976, the club has planted and maintained its gardens. Along the west wall of the parking lot and between the building and Arlington Road, well-es ..read more

I have reported on my experience with several low-growing native ground covers that seemed to be relatively immune to deer. I thought I’d revisit this topic, since it’s both perennial and evergreen (sorry, couldn’t resist). In fact, many of our shade-loving native ground covers are semi-evergreen: the leaves mostly hang on over winter, growing more or less battered depending on the species and the local conditions. In the wild, our Piedmont forests would have a cover of fallen leaves at this time of year. The leaf litter acts as a weed barrier, temperature regulator, and moisture retainer, mak ..read more