WHAT TO DO WHEN THE GARDENER IS READY TO WRAP UP BUT THE GARDEN ISN'T

This is a challenging time in the garden for me. We've not yet had a frost, so although things are looking a little ragged, there's nothing that's dead and looking terrible. Which means I'm faced with the conundrum of going against my gardener's gut reaction to do everything I can to keep plants looking good and the practical voice in my head reminding me that there is a lot of work to be done in the garden before the snow flies.

And of course, the lovely fall weather we've been having makes it all that much more difficult. Because when it turns, it's going to turn quickly. And even a hardy Wisconsin gardener like myself doesn't really relish being in the garden with winter gloves on.

The Calamintha 'Montrose White' in the foreground of this photo has finished flowering, but it still looks good otherwise. It will be difficult to cut it back at this point, but there's so much to be done in the garden. 

I was formulating a plan of attack for the fall garden chores the other night at 4 a.m. as I stood in the back yard begging the newest member of the family to pleeeeaaaase go to the bathroom. We got a 3-month-old Newfoundland puppy last weekend so we are in the throes of potty training, which is far more tedious than I had remembered. Anyway, I was noticing that other than a bit of flopping here and there, most of the perennials are looking fine and it seems a little sad to be planning to go in there and hack things back.

I know this picture is blurry but little Dorothy is in the perpetual motion stage of life so it could be awhile before she sits still enough for a good picture.

There are a lot of different ideas about cutting back perennials in fall, and from what I've read I believe it probably is better for the health of the plants to let them stand for winter. But sometimes the health of the gardener is more important that the health of the garden (which probably will be OK no matter what), and in my case I know that spring is so busy that anything I can do in fall to decrease the spring workload is well worth doing.

So, even though things are still green, I think this weekend I'll start dismantling beds one by one. I'll cut back things like Nepeta, but I will leave Sedums and Echinacea standing for winter interest. Dahlias, of course, have several more weeks in the garden. Not only are they still flowering, they need to be killed off by a good frost before you can dig them for storage.

As I go through, bed by bed, I'll also pull as many weeds as I, again so it's one less thing to do in spring. In a few weeks, when we're drowning in fallen leaves, I'll run them through the chipper-shredder and create a lovely mulch for my beds. The areas that I mulched with chopped leaves last fall had noticeably fewer weeds in spring, so that's another investment in my spring time.

Still, cutting back plants that still look OK is hard to do. But the knowledge that it will be far more tolerable a job at 60 degrees than at 35 degrees is enough for me to get over it.

THE BEST PLANTS IN THE EARLY FALL GARDEN

It's an unsettling time in the garden. Part of me looks around, thinks about all the tasks that must get done before it gets too cold out to want to do them and wants to just get on with it, and the other part of me realizes that the garden is still looking fantastic. 

And a walk around the garden shows that the best looking plants right now are also, in general, among the easiest to care for. In fact, with one exception, the most I have deal with any of these plants is once a year. That's it. One tiny little bit of attention paid to them once.

Anything that requires that little care and provides this much pleasure is surely an all-star.

Korean feather reed grass is full of the most lovely fluffy flowerheads right now. The only thing I do to it is cut it back in late winter or very early spring. I supposed some day I'll have to divide it, but that's a rarity.

It provides a great backdrop to the thick, ruffly leaves of Gingko biloba 'Gnome'. Or is it the other way around?

Hydrangeas are the gift that keeps on giving. I can't imagine a garden without them. The panicle hydrangeas in particular shine at this time of year. This is 'Bobo', which is now in its fourth month of bloom (seriously, it started in June) and is now showing almost neon pink coloring.

'Quickfire' hydrangea has been pink for at least a month (hence the name), and is still looking great.

Hakonechloa is a good-doer all around, but 'All Gold' in particular shines in autumn light. Again, all I do to it is cut it back in late winter and I only divide it when I want more of it, which it happily provides.

Hakonechloa macra 'Stripe it Rich' gets great seed heads this time of year.

While all the plants around it are starting to look tattered, especially the slug-damaged hostas and the deer-munched 'Incrediball' hydrangeas, the groundcover Lamium maculatum 'Pink Chablis', seems to always look fresh and lively.

It wouldn't be early fall in the garden without Rudbeckia. It's the standard by which all fall-blooming perennials should be measured. I cut it back in spring, leaving the stems standing for the birds and winter interest.

Sedums just sit back as the unnoticed wallflowers all summer, but come early fall, they are stars. I also leave the standing over winter and I try to cut them back in about June to keep them a little stockier and prevent flopping.

Not all that is beautiful in the early fall garden is foliage or flower. These berries on Viburnun x juddii are so bright and shiny. I will enjoy them until the birds find them. I literally do nothing to this shrub other than admire it. What more can you ask for?

Roses hardly fall under the "low maintenance" category that the rest of these plants fall under, but it would be remiss of me to ignore them in a listing of the best plants in the garden in early fall. Here in zone 5, now is the time when most roses get a stunning second flush of flowers, so long as the gardener has been diligent about deadheading earlier in the year. This is 'The Alnwick Rose', which I planted in late spring.

Nature has a way of reminding us to enjoy every day and not rush to what's coming next. Plants like this are proof.



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A NEW WAY OF THINKING ABOUT STRUCTURE IN THE GARDEN

When I hear about structure in the garden, my mind immediately goes to what I consider the backbone of a garden design: trees, large shrubs and structures. These typically create the framework around which the rest of the garden falls into place.

But a relatively new-to-me plant has me rethinking the idea of where structure comes from in a garden. I don't know its name (and if you do, please enlighten me because I've been looking), but it's some kind of perennial allium. I received it as a small plant from a woman whose garden I visited a few years ago (she has a small annual plant sale) and I didn't notice it having particularly noticeable bulbs, although as an allium I'm sure it has some kind of bulb lurking under the soil. 

Here's what it looked like the first time I spotted it in her garden. 

There are a lot of plants in that photo but I don't even need to tell you which one I'm talking about because your eye is immediately drawn to it. 

Mine is obviously much smaller and is just starting to flower (bees seem to love, by the way). 

I'd say it's about 30 inches tall and it's thick, hollow blue stems are unlike anything else in my garden. What caught my attention the other day is that the stems have arranged themselves in a very artistic crossing pattern that is quite pleasing to my eye. 

But the architectural form of this plant makes it more than a focal point; it provides structure. I love loose, natural and even wild perennials that have a tendency to flop (but not too much, please) and go their own way, but without structure, they can look messy and out of control. Add in a structural element, like this strong-formed allium, and it all starts making sense.

In my garden, above, it's near the 'Orangeola' maple, which in itself provides structure, but to me, it's the allium that makes the structural statement. (And the bare spots you see are where the rabbits have done their worst.)

And I think you'll see it does the same elsewhere. You can barely see it in the photo below but I think this garden would be much less successful if it weren't there.

It's not the typical kind of plant one associates with structure, but there's no doubt that's what it provides. Sometimes you never know what a plant can do for your garden until it's there.

FRIDAY FINDS

What a crazy week here. So much that was supposed to get done, didn't. Work was nuts, the garden needs attention and there is this little voice in the back of my head that keeps whispering, "Hurry up and get on with summer."

This is standard operating procedure for this time of year for me and so many other people. There's nothing to do but to just do your best. So this week, that meant that a lot of blog posts that should have been just weren't. Hopefully next week I'll be able to catch you up on all of it. What I can guarantee you is that there will be a giveaway next week that you won't want to miss (that's me dangling a carrot).

I'm facing what is probably my busiest weekend in the garden of the entire year. Having finally amassed all of the plants I need for various containers, those will all be done (14, at last count). And then there's tons of other planting that will happen to. I'm hoping that by the end of the weekend the dozens (possibly hundreds, but I'm not about to count) of plants sitting in my driveway will be in their summer homes. In part because it just needs to happen but also because we're due for a hot weekend (80s in June here is not the norm) and I'm spending a lot of time just watering all those plants. I have some really cool ideas for plantings so I can't wait to show you.

Just some of the plants looking for homes in my garden.

It's been awhile since we've done a Friday Finds, so let's get on with it, shall we?

I have a love-hate relationship with this plant. I've decided to love its foliage but never its leaves.

Here's a roundup of some interesting outdoor dining tables. I like to eat outside as soon as the weather  and mosquitos allow it, but I just cannot get behind the idea of an outdoor dining set (which we'll use for about three months of the year) costing more than an indoor table and chairs.

I want a dutch door so badly, but someone tell me how this functions if you live in a place with bugs, because I don't get it.

I snapped a picture of the 'Guernsey Cream' clematis the other night (isn't it great that we can be in the garden until after 8:30?) and it was positively glowing.

Do yourself a favor and grab a coffee or a cocktail and spend some time reading this beautiful and well-written article. It is an amazing story of a life and a death, one that involves, a small way, the love of a garden. And grab a tissue.

Good stuff in the latest GardenFork podcast: Mushroom growing, good router info and a bit on drones (which I have a decidedly uneasy view of).

And lastly, a favor to ask of you. As you might have noticed I've been trying to do more videos. Figuring out filming them and editing them has been a huge learning curve, but if you're like me, you're forgiving of these things if there's something in the video worth watching. I've been uploading them to my YouTube channel (here's the latest one) and Facebook, but here's the deal: I can't get a "real" URL on YouTube until I get 100 subscribers. If you wouldn't mind popping over there and subscribing to my channel you could save me from the terrible multi-character-slash-random-numbers URL my channel is currently saddled with. Thank you!

What's on your agenda for the weekend? Is this an insanely busy time in the garden for you like it is for me?

HOW TO BUY PLANTS THE DEER WON'T EAT

One the biggest challenges gardeners face, particularly in certain parts of the country including the Midwest, is wildlife damage. It is soul crushing when you go to your formerly beautiful garden to find plants mowed down overnight by deer.

The deer in our neighborhood are so bold they basically give you the stink eye if you interrupt their meal.

There are ways to prevent damage in the first place, and the best, and perhaps only, truly proven method is a tall, sturdy deer fence. But that's not practical for a lot of people, so we're left employing various deterrent sprays and homegrown methods to keep the buggers away. Regardless of what method you choose—be it homemade or purchased spray, soap, water sprays, large dogs or maybe water gun—growing deer resistant plants goes a long way toward decreasing the damage.

I say "decreasing" because deer don't read plant labels very well and they've been known to nibble (or worse) on plants that they aren't supposed to like. A lot of that has to do with how much other food there is, but with deer populations increasing, they seem to be more than happy to pull up to the buffet we provide in our yards.

There's a reason all the cedar trees in our yard don't have any foliage below about 7 feet. They are like crack to deer.

Our house is a quarter-mile from a state park that is full of deer. Combine that with the rural terrain and it's safe to say we have a very healthy and large deer population in our neighborhood. When we first bought our house 15 years ago, we'd see groups of three or four deer standing around. Now when they come, there can be dozens. So I've gone through the ringer with figuring out which plants they like and which they'll avoid.

I'll offer some specific plants suggestions in additional posts, but there are a few characteristics common in plants that deer avoid.

1. PLANTS WITH SCENT

I'm using "scent" instead of "frangrance" not because it's necessarily a bad smell, but because deer can  and certainly do enjoy plenty of plants with fragrant blooms, including roses (apparently they don't care about thorns). But plants that have a distinct scent when you crush the leaves seem to be unappetizing to deer. Monarda, nepeta, most herbs, and anything in the onion family, such as chives and ornamental alliums, are off the Bambi menu.

2. TEXTURED LEAVES

Deer don't seem to be fans of textured leaves. Fuzzy leaves, such as you find on lamb's ear (Stachys byzantina) are a no go, but even crinkly-leafed plants fair well around our resident deer. This can include, believe it or not, very thick-leaved crinkly blue hostas, which also happen to be the same hostas that the slugs avoid. Ferns also fall into this category.

3. MOST SPRING EPHEMERALS

I tend to think of spring ephemerals—those plants that disappear and go dormant after they do their thing in spring—as woodland plants, although not all are. For whatever reason such plants seem to avoid the wrath of deer. Bleeding hearts and epimediums come to mind, but there are others, including trillium, but not all trillium. The trilliums that are not native to my area have been tested by deer. They don't seem to like them, but it's almost as though they recognize as different from the native trilliums and can't resist (and then seem to say to their friend, "Ew. Oh my gosh, this is so gross. Taste it!"). I can't explain why deer don't like these, but I tend to think, especially in the case of native woodland plants, that we wouldn't have them around if deer liked to eat them, so they are pretty safe to plant.

4. GRASSES

This one flummoxes me as well. If you've ever watched a deer eat, perhaps as you sat there paralyzed with horror as you watch it eat your enormous hosta, you'll notice the whole process is reminiscent of how horses eat. And horses eat grass. But for whatever reason, deer avoid ornamental grasses. Sometimes it's better not to question things and just go with it.

5. POISONOUS PLANTS

No one has ever given deer credit for being particularly intelligent creatures—although I swear to you the deer in the state park look both ways before they cross the road—but they know when a plant is going to make them really sick. Anything poisonous, including monkshood (Aconitum), castor bean (Ricinus) and daffodils, is pretty much guaranteed to be safe from deer browsing.

Deer are finicky and nothing is certain when it comes to what they will eat if they are very hungry or very lazy, but these characteristics are a good starting place to know what they'll probably avoid.

It's all well and good until they do this.

FORMAL STYLE + A RIOT OF COLOR COME TOGETHER

Although it was a major topic in fall, I've not said much about the circle garden lately. To catch you up to speed here's the deal with the circle garden, which is not at all a circle, but "oval garden" is not the least bit catchy. When we bought our house it was a derelict vegetable garden that was mostly weeds with a few random shrubs thrown in. I dug it up, put in a poorly designed garden and as my love for it waned, it got worse each year. It lacked focus and was trying too hard to be all things in a very small garden. 

It was a visit from my garden blog friend Linda from Each Little World that spurred me to action. She mentioned that she noticed that at the time she visited (early July) there were many shades of green in my garden, but not a lot of other colors. And she was right. So I worked to come up with a way to really have a blow out of color that was still structured. 

The oval garden is a departure from the rest of my garden. Now redesigned with straight paths in an X pattern, it is far more formal in a structural sense than any other place in the garden. It is divided from other gardens by floating in the lawn near the front door, but it can't feel like a foreign place.

So the goal in designing this garden was to be a departure from the rest of the yard while not looking out of place. That's a tall order. And the only way to do that was by having a combination of informal plants in the confines of a formal design. Like all gardens, I fully expect this garden to be a work in progress and I think this first year will be largely experimental. I'm sure there will be things that work better than others. Perhaps the whole concept will be a flop. But hopefully it will be a riotous entry to the yard.

Four paths (created laboriously by me in fall) lead to a center circle and create four sections. Each section will have a small boxwood ball in the center and have three segments that radiate out from it. Each segment will be planted with a single plant. Deciding what should go in each segment was a bit like a Sudoku puzzle. I wanted each section to have a seasonal flowering aspect (such as a flowering perennial or shrub), a foliage element for texture and a flowering annual that should bloom all summer. I wanted a combination of warm and cool colors and I wanted some serious play on texture. And each segment had to play well with the segment next to it and across from it to balance the garden. Complicating the matter is the fact that although this is a smaller garden—about 30 feet long—because of the large trees that line our driveway, part of it is part sun to part shade and the other part is full sun.

There is a budget for this project. Not a specific budget, but I can't run out and buy all new plants just for this. So some of the plants need to be divisions from elsewhere in the garden or grown from seed to make it reasonable. 

So here's what I came up with. What you don't see in the diagram is the chive hedge, saved from the previous design of this garden. Each segment will be "outlined" in chives. Although there is no repetition in the plants save for the uniting ties of the boxwood balls and the chive hedges, I'm hoping repetition will come in the form of texture and color rather than actual plants. 

Moving clockwise, starting at 12 o'clock, here's what will be in each segment:

• 'Bobo' hydrangea: I've been hoping to work this diminutive hydrangea into my garden for a few years and I think this is the perfect opportunity. Its fluffy flowers will contrast well with the rest of the plants plants for this segment.
• Hakenochloa 'All Gold': This is certainly one of my favorite plants and I'm happy that it likes my yard. When I redesigned the back/side yard a few years ago I used 'All Gold' divisions from another garden there. Now those division have grown enough that I can divide them to fill this bit for free.
• New Guinea Impatiens 'Orange'

• Dahlia 'HS Flame': I'm a sucker for dahlias with dark foliage and I love the simplicity of a single flower. I chose this one to balance out the pinks from the bottom of the garden. It's also a short dahlia so I shouldn't have to worry about staking it.
• Lady's mantle (Alchemilla mollis): This is probably my No. 1 go-to plant in my garden because it so good both as a foliage plant and as a long-bloomer with chartreuse flowers. It also divides easily so I'll have no problem finding plants for this section.
• Verbena bonareinsis 'Meteor Shower': I grew this for the first time last year and I'm head over heels in love with it. It grown much shorter than your usual verbena—more like 2 feet instead of 4 or 5 feet—and blooms absolutely nonstop. 

• 'The Alnwick Rose': Ordered from David Austin roses.
• Rhubarb: I relocated two rhubarb plants from the old garden and I hope to get several more crowns from my grandmother's garden. I love it for its huge leaves but obviously also for eating. It will take a bit to establish this section so I don't anticipate this part looking great this year.
• A white annual: I've shown a low-growing nicotiana here, but I may use a Profusion zinnia or something else. 

• Dahlia 'Serkan': This is another low grower so I hope to not have to stake it. I love the waterlily-type dahlias and I think the relatively simple form of this flower will contrast well with the multi-petaled rose in the segment next to it.
• Egyptian walking onion: I think this plant is one of the most interesting forms there is. I dug out and potted up several of them from the garden last fall and I'm hoping they'll overwinter well. This is a rather experimental choice, but if it works, I think it could be stunning.
• Signet marigold 'Lemon Gem': This is one of my must-have flowers that I grow from seed. It blooms like crazy, smells delicious and has the most lovely small textured leaves and flowers. The flowers are edible as well.

Other plants that will play a role in the garden are the two clematis in the center circle—'Venosa Violacea', planted last year and 'Avant Garde', which I randomly ordered Sunday morning after seeing a photo of it. Around the outside of the inner circle, I'm envisioning a ring of lime thyme, which is a lovely groundcover that looks better than it tastes, in my experience. And then I'd need a more upright but still low annual inside of that to hide the ankles of the clematis. Of course, the chives (upper right corner) are a factor and I think I'll probably go with 'Green Gem' boxwood for the centers of each section.