During the spring and summer most of look at the trees surrounding us and see a generally undifferentiated green. The tree foliage grows full and heavy; for the most part we don’t see the individual hues, or shapes.  That changes in the autumn.

            During the past few weeks I have been particularly aware of the changes in the trees, partly because of the color changes each hour with the fluctuation of sunlight and shadow. Then, each day the color and hue change as chlorophyll slowly drains away leaving unsuspected color that was there all the time.

            As the wind begins stripping trees of their foliage, the shape of each individual leaf becomes clear. There are those with lobed edges, others are serrated. Some are   round or heart shaped, others are oval or elongated, some grow in clusters and other are quite separate. So many individualities.

This year I am newly aware of the drama and beauty in the progression of the autumn, that isn’t appreciated fully when the TV weatherman reports on ‘peak’ foliage season, alerting watchers to the best and most brilliant panoramas that are waiting to be viewed, preferably in glowing sunlight.

            I have turned to an old book, Autumnal Leaves published in London in 1881, that I bought at a book sale years ago.  I could not resist the author’s name, Frances George Heath, but I  found a man so taken with the transience of foliage color:

            “The rich luxuriance . . . of every view,

            The mild and modest tint, the splendid hue,

            The temper’d harmony of various shades,

            Alas! Whose beauty at once and fades,”

that he filled his book with detailed descriptions of every type of leaf, and suggested the best places in England to take an autumnal ramble and admire the blossoming of fall.

Grove of Beech

            Here in New England so much attention is paid to the flaming maples that other trees get short shrift, yet this year it is the beech that has attracted my attention. The wooded road leading to my house is lined with many small beech trees. I have been amazed to watch the leaves of summer green metamorphose and gain sunny yellow stripings, shifting again until the golden leaves are only slightly marked with green, before the gold turns tawny and finally a dull dry brown. Heath noticed this characteristic detail, with “the veins being the last to give up the normal green hue.”

            When I moved to Greenfield in  1971 I was occasionally treated to dinner at the Copper Beech Inn. Henry (not yet my husband) and I would look out and admire the magnificent ancient beech tree with its dark leaves, more burgundy than copper. There is a housing development there now. I don’t know if the tree survives.

            Beech trees are noticeable and identifiable in the winter because they retain so many of their leaves. They are dry and brown, rustling in the winter squalls, but are not abscissed, or torn from the branch.  In the spring, new leaves push the old leaves off.

The term for this process is marcescense.

            While I am talking about new vocabulary words, I must mention that the ancients considered beech trees a symbol of the written word, and thus of learning and wisdom. In fact, before there was paper, thin beech boards were used to make books. Books allowed  knowledge to be passed from generation to generation. The Old English word boc and Old Norse word bok meant both beech and book. As a former librarian and reader I am happy to know about this connection between the trees in my landscape, and the books lining my shelves.

            The pagans considered the beech to be the Mother of the Woods and felt that she brought prosperity and wisdom. Part of that wisdom was the ability to keep an open mind and not be rigid in thought.

            Beech wood has other practical uses. Though without a decorative grain, it is used in furniture construction, flooring and plywood manufacture. As a hardwood it is as good a  firewood as the sugar maple and oak.

            Beech trees do produce small nuts, called beechnuts or beechmast. They are bitter, but edible and very nutritious. In Europe in the days when pig farming was a very different proposition from what it is today, pigs were allowed into the forests to eat the beechmast. Foraging pigs must have made quite a noise because one of the characteristics of beech leaves is their dryness. Of course lower levels of leaves in a beech grove will decay, but the upper leaves will remain dry and rustling.

            According to Heath, the dry leaves retain such resiliency that common people in Switzerland and France used to stuff their mattresses with beech leaves. In colonial times here in the United States we often used corn husks for mattresses, and I have to say that beech leaves sound less rough and more comfortable.

            As I drive along our roads in Heath I am amazed at the differing rate among the beeches and their changes in color, even when they are growing right next to each other. But no matter what phase of autumnal color they are showing off they are worth our attention and admiration. 

Between the Rows  November 7, 2009 

On their most recent exploration of the woods they  found – drumroll please – a truffle. I know nothing about truffles, except that they are a kind of underground fungi, but I usually think of them being found by truffle digging pigs in the Perigord region of France.

Heath is no Perigord, and Ted is no pig, but somehow, he found a truffle, ‘the diamond of the kitchen’, so prized for haute cuisine.  I haven’t talked to him, but I wonder who takes possession of this rare culinary delight. Ted? The school cafeteria? Will the kids soon be lunching on risotto with leeks, shiitake mushrooms and truffles?

This red Austin rose is climbing the fence at the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden at the New York Botanical Garden. It is just one of the more than 3000 roses growing in the newly designed garden with the goal of showing all visitors what roses can be grown in that climate without a lot of fuss.

Peter Kukielski, Curator

I got to spend the afternoon with Peter Kukielski, the Curator of the Rose Garden, who arrived  in New York from Atlanta three years ago, just when the garden needed reorganization and renovation. He is a charming and knowlegeable gardener with delightful tales about roses, hybridizers, and rose gardeners. His affection for the roses and the people who love them is palpable.

One change was moving all the Heritage Roses to the other side of the garden where there was sun fewer hours of the day. Peter wanted visitors to be embraced by bloom when they entered the garden, whether that was in May or October, and old fashioned roses only bloom once.  Now, on both sides of the main entrance are 14 foot deep beds filled with David Austin’s everblooming roses. I wasn’t good at keeping names straight as we toured, but this is a yellow Austin rose, still blooming in November.

Rainbow Knockout Standard

There are a few standard roses in the garden like this Rainbow Knockout. Peter said the Knockout roses are great disease resistant roses. In their ancestry is Carefree Beauty, one of the Buck Roses bred for hardiness. I can testify to the hardiness of Carefree Beauty and my Double Red Knockout. Knockout was chosen as a winner in 2000 by the All America Rose Selections (AARS) and now include a range of colors. They are easy to grow and care for.

Peter explained that new New York State regulations now make it illegal to use many of the sprays and insectides that have been required for healthy roses. Many roses have been removed from the garden and have been replaced with disease resistant varieties. They are also constantly being evaluated.

The climber New Dawn is a sport or mutation of the Dr. Van Fleet rose. Peter said that New Dawn can revert back after about 10 years. However, New Dawn mutated at one point resulting in this new pink climber, Awakening, which is more stable. It grows on the lovely gazebo in the center of the Rose Garden.

There were so many roses in bloom, and Peter Kukielski had so many stories that that I couldn’t keep them all dependably straight. but I can’t resist closing with this bouquet on a branch.  I will be posting more about the NYBG and the special KIKU exhibit of amazing Japanese chrysanthemums.

The  city is left behind. I’m home and the first trip out to visit friends we see a porcupine in front of the house eating an apple falled from our old apple tree.

Bok choi

We had a delicious lunch of homemade tomato juice (with a few additions) carrot and parsnip soup, little chicken salad sandwiches and tiny fruit tarts. One of the best things about having a wonderful lunch at this house is having a tour of the vegetable garden before we leave. I took away a bag of bok choi, and 

Tuscan kale and wild kale.

I admired the last of the artichoke foliage. Can you believe there is a gardener skilled enough to grow artichokes on a high Massachusetts hill?  A bag was filled with leeks too. This will be Heavenly Soup and Bread Week at our house. Thank you Mary Kay and Earl.

Then it was back home. The porcupine was back too, but I don’t think he found the weeds and roses as tasty as the apples.

Happy Halloween! One way to strike terror into this night of goblins and ghosts is to think of the fears that plants have generated over the centuries. Deadly nightshade was rightly understood to be a poison, but other members of the family, tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant and peppers were less deadly and more delicious. The large pale flower of datura, another member of the family, is beautiful but equally deadly.

Not all peas (Lathyrus sativus) are benign, or all members of the corn family. Elderberry wine is good, but don’t put raw elderberries on your cereal, or you’ll be ingesting cyanide.

Amy Stewart’s book WICKED PLANTS: The Weed That Killed Lincoln’s Mother and Other Botanical Atrocities will keep you awake nights with its full catalog of Deadly, Dangerous, Destructive, Painful and Offensive plants, many of which  could be right in your own garden.  Boo!

In my youth I only admired brightly colored maples. I don’t think I am alone. When people talk about the New England fall and set off leaf peeping, it is the brilliance of the maples that they are looking for.

But even maples cannot be counted on to be consistently scarlet. Now that I am older, and spend so much time driving up and down Route 8A which winds through woodlands and along a stream, then onto Route 2, the famous scenic Mohawk Trail, I have become more appreciative and admiring of the other trees that are so common.  

Golden poplar trees line the last bit of road leading to our house.

White barked birches scatter gold across the cerulean sky.

Dense burnished leaves of the young oaks glow in the afternoon sun along the roadside.

Right in my own backyard I have brilliant blueberry foliage to enjoy

in its myriad shades.

Our woods are full of beech trees, but I’ve never hear anyone write an ode to the beech.

I have come to a special admiration of the beech and the progression of fall color. The summer green becomes striped with a sunny yellow. Then it seems those colors change places and the yellow leaves are touched with green. Soon the yellow is tinged with a lively brown before it turns a dry rustling brown. These two beeches growing right next to each other show how unpredictably the color changes.

An interesting aspect of the beech, especially young beech trees is that the leaves are not abscissed in the fall, which is to say, the leaves do not fall off the tree. In the spring the new leaf buds finally push the dead leaf off the branch. If you want to add a new word to your horticultural vocabulary, the term for this process ismarcescense.

Soon the trees will be bare, all the colors dimmed and blown away. Only the dreams of autumn will be left to me. Until next year.

Cold Compost

Some people curse the falling leaves. Not me. Of course, since the wind blows all the leaves off my hill, the only labor I have is to collect the bags of leaves from industrious neighbors. I can never get enough.

I learned the technique of Cold Composting from the late Larry Leitner. He collected leaves and pressed them down into fence wire frames that he made in various sizes and shapes. He prepared these cold compost piles in the fall, and in the spring, he planted seedlings right in the pile.  The leaves would have broken down substantially, and sunk down. The piles would not be as fluffy as they were in the fall. He would make a small indentation in the pile, fill it with a quart or so of garden soil and put in the seedling. Large vegetable plants worked well, like the coles, or summer squash, but herb and flower seedlings did just as well.  Since there is nothing but leaves in this compost pile it does not heat up. There is nothing to harm tender plant roots. The only thing leaf compost beds need is sufficient watering during the growing season. They will dry out quickly.

Larry liked these beds because it used the leaves for free fertilizer, and because neighborhood dogs  didn’t damage his garden.  I have planted in these beds when I didn’t have good soil. The harvest was good, and I ultimately ended up with good soil where I used these beds.

These days I mostly make cold compost in a compost bin that I got a few years ago. As the leaves break down (and they break down faster than you might imagine) I can add more leaves to the bin. You can see I have several bags of leaves waiting in the wings.

Of course, at this point in the fall I have lots of garden clean up items to put in my regular compost pile. I do not manage it in a very scientific manner, but I do add occasional layers of chicken manure to the weeds, vines, dead annuals and regular kitchen waste. It will break down eventually, and I will always need compost, early or late.

Composting gives me a sense of thrift, making fertilizer out of scraps and free leaves, and of environmental responsibility, working with the natural cycle beginning with the seed which grows, dies, rots and makes the nourishment for the next crop.

The Monday Record was intended to show what I had accomplished in the preceeding week, possibly including Monday itself. However, this week I spent a lot of time looking out the window at rain, and wind, and even snow muttering that if I were a Real Gardener I wouldn’t let poor weather stop me from attending to all the chores that needed attending to!

After five days of below freezing tempeatures, the low temperature today was 27 degrees. After the first two hard frost the dahlia foliage was killed, but I haven’t yet made it out to dig up the tubers and let them dry. Last year I packed my increased number of tubers away in barely damp peat moss and left them in the basement (a fairly constant 50 degrees. I used an unclosed plastic bag and a defunct picnic cooler as the storage unit.  I checked them a couple of times over the course of the winter and they remained firm. By the time I thought about potting them up to get a head start on the season, they were already sending out shoots. The weather this week is supposed to be fine, even warm. I hope the tubers will be sound when I dig them up. This year I am planning to mark the dug tubers with an ID, variety, or at least color name. That will make next year’s garden less haphazard.  Add ID tags to the to-do list.

The freezes that killed the dahlias made the gingko trees lose all their leaves at once. Add raking to the list.

I thought I had ripped out all the annuals, but here is whats left of the red zinnias, behind the puple asters. All dead. All needing to be ripped out or cut back for the winter.  Alma Potschke along with various other perennials, needs cutting back, too.

The peonies are dead, too. My to-do list for the past two weeks has noted the necessity to cut them back. This week for sure. My list is growing.

I haven’t been totally idle. I’ve been weeding and digging vegetable beds, adding compost and lime. I’m not done yet. Add that to the list.

The vegetable garden isn’t quite done. The deer snacked on the Brussels sprouts foliage, but most of the sprouts are intact. Some years we have picked the last sprouts for Thanksgiving dinner.

Even in the rain I could pick up bagged leaves from a neighbor for my compost piles. I put three of these huge bags in the black plastic composter, used earlier for a blighted potato planter, The other bags are on and around my regular compost piles. I have a separate compost pile for rough green struff, heavy stems, and questionalbe weed roots.  I do try not to put any weeds with dangerous roots, like quack grass or mint, or tansy, in the regular compost pile. I am looking forward to a spring with lots of available compost.

Anything else on the list?  Well, just a few things. Plant some bulbs, spread more wood chips, put away the hoses, empty, clean and put away flower pots?  What’s on your to-do list?

The Fairy 10-19-2009

Bloom is gone, EXCEPT for The Fairy. Both bushes are still blooming. A testament to their hardiness, as well as their loveliness.

I

4-H exhibit at the Big E

You never know what you’ll run into as you surf the garden blogs. Or where. Yolanda, in the Netherlands, on her beautiful blog Bliss is celebrating vegetables with a Beach Boys serenade. Check it out.

These apples may not be the most beautiful, but they are pretty sound inside which means I spent the afternoon peeling, chopping and boiling them down to make 5 quarts of apple butter, a delicacy I only discovered last year.

Two quarts have already been passed along to my oldest daughter and her family. They like apple butter on black pumpernickel bread, we like it on French toast.  There is hardly any way to use apples that is not delicious, in sauce, in stuffings, in chutney, in ‘mincemeat’, in oven pancakes, in pies, cakes and cookies. Oh, and you can eat them right out of hand.