Since when does anything get pink stems for Fall?  (And for that matter, pink stems for Fall?)



Fall is the triumph of red, orange, yellow: Halloween and Thanksgiving. But tell that to this tree peony.

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Ludlow's tree peony is grown even more for its enormous and ferny foliage as the charming but only modestly-sized single yellow flowers.  I plant it a lot, and am very proud to pay my respects whenever I see it. (These shots are of a long-established client garden in Wellesley, MA, just yesterday.  It's clearly had a few frosts but not yet the Big Kahunah.)

And yet, somehow, I never realized that this peony has an Inner Rhubarb.  And that each Fall it comes out to play.



Is this Ludlow the only pink-friendly one?  Or are Ludlows in general rhubarb-proud.  I had to get from Wellesley down to Manhattan without checking on my garden's own Ludlow in Rhode Island along the way.  My hunch is that, as a tribe, Ludlows love to pink-up.  (If I were named Ludlow not Louis, how might that have affected my taste in colors?  My overall deportment?  I might have had an Inner Rhubarb too.)

This I know:  This Ludlow has shown that I've been overlooking an entire locus of Fall foliage display.  I've been fixating on the foliage—the leaves—when I should have also been checking out the leaf stems.  ("Petiole" is the Latin for the stem that connects the leaf to the branch.)  Is it only because Ludlow's petioles can be a foot and a half long—and are fairly shouting "Pink & Proud!  Pink & Proud!  Rhubarb Forever!—that I finally noticed?

What other petioles are coloring up for Fall that I haven't yet discovered?  Or already missed for the year?

Fall is a season that confirms how much of your garden you really notice.  Humbled as well as inspired, the first thing I'll do tomorrow morning, when I'm finally back home, is to check out my own Ludlow.

Stay tuned.

And now that sensational ivy!  Could any tree trunk be more dressed up?



This is Persian ivy, Hedera colchica, not the usual Hedera helix.  And this is the Persian's easiest and hardiest variegated form, Sulphur Heart.

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True to the name, the center of each leaf is bright yellow, shading outward through lime green to dark green at the rim.



My colony is just old enough to start blooming; checking out the database, I see that it—heavens!— took ten years for it to start wearing long pants.  Yes indeed, ivies certainly enjoy their youth, skampering along the ground, racing up trees or houses or chimneys along the way.

Sulphur Heart is even more vigorous than English Ivy, at least where it's hardy (downtown Boston and South), so give it room or be prepared to clip.

Because climbing seems to be what it loves most, you can control the horizontal spread by distracting it with the vertical opportunities it really craves.  I chose the trunk of an old weeping cherry that was losing another of its limbs each year.  Soon the cherry had finished weeping altogether, leaving just its six-foot trunk:  A perfect "scratching post" for Sulphur Heart.

It's just as happy to climb thirty feet when it can, and Sulphur Heart doesn't seem to get inspired to "go adult" until it's reached the top.  Perhaps there's some message formed as the top stems keep growing up and trying to grab even higher—but just wave into thin air instead.  The back-and-forth motion?  The gravity-laden reality that if they grow more they'll just be wagging out and down farther and farther?

As the ivy stops being able to take hold farther up, it does a Zen-like end run around that set-back by switching games entirely.  It just stops climbing.  And through whatever its own chemical consciousness is, it now realizes that it's got other fun to have anyway.

It doesn't stop growing at all, it just branches out, literally, into other games.  Mature ivy is a shrub instead of a vine, and the stems it grows are now thicker as well as self-supporting.  (Thicker?  Self-supporting?  Sounds very adult already.)

And in September and October, those branches blooms.  Ping-ball-sized spheres, like lilliputian fireworks tipped with greenish knobs that, even close-up don't say "flower" to us.  But they must trumpet the news to bees and pollinators, who dance for joy at the late-season meal.



The ivy flowers hang around much of the Fall, so the show continues even after the meal is over.  And so another advantage to having ivy planted on a support that's only as tall as you are is that you've got the hope of being able to harvest the occasional blooming branch for bouquets: Ivy tends to bloom (or at least to bloom first) only at the top, and if you've got yours climbing a forty-foot tree you'll have to get your bouquets from a cherry-picker.  Or wait another twenty years until the lower portions of the plant finally start into bloom.  But few of us think to plant our most important ivies when we're in elementary school.

Ivy, then, is quite the role model.  A rambunctious and sometimes hard-to-control youth can still (most of the time) lead into a sturdy, self-supporting, attractive, and even generous adulthood for the entire neighborhood.

This particular one of my oak-leaves is interesting right down to the linoleum, so to speak, because it's surrounded by white-striped hakonechloa.

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Unlike the traditional yellow-striped hakone, let alone the newer All Gold, white-striped isn't shy at all about marching outward.  It was in fact so enthusiastic elsewhere that I've brought every last bit to this firmly-constrained bed at the front of the house.  If it spreads four feet in one direction, it hits the house.  Eight feet in the other, the road.  (We're in an 18th-Century house, in an 18th-Century hamlet, where the houses are right on the road.)

And so it can only spread side-to-side with true abandon, where anything it could encounter is so much taller that a new pair of striped socks, so to speak, is just what those bare ankles have been pining for all along.

And so it's a great show around the oak-leaf.  When the hydrangea leaves are in their Spring and Summer green, the white stripes of the grass are the wow-factor.  And then when the hydrangea colors up for Fall, the synergy just ramps up even more.



True, in the Winter, the pair are no more than bare sticks and dead grassiness.  But with the short days and the occasional snow-cover, this dreary scene is minimally on-show anyway.  And I'm more often as not inside by the wood stove too, not prowling through the less-accessible reaches of the garden.

Any normal soil and, if it gets some afternoon shade, no supplemental watering.  And because everything else in front of the house is so tall that white-stripe is no more than ankle-high to any of them, I never even feel the need to cut its old stems down in the Spring.  And it couldn't be easier to divide (Spring only please), so there's plenty to cover more ground, to donate to plants sales, and for friends.

No one who sees hakonechloa for the first time doesn't covet it.  Even your grass-o-holic gardening friends, who of course already have the yellow-striped as well as All Gold, will be thrilled with this white-striped rarity.  It's perfect for their pink-friendly bed, where the yellow-striped may be too much of a Pepto Bismol moment.  Or that all-green spot that needs a lift.  Or, now that I think of it, the red garden that needs some light.  Or the yellow garden that needs the same.

Perfect anywhere.

This year, my oak-leaf hydrangeas are firing up the Fall landscape as never before.



They are positively pyro-phillic.  Flaming-fabulous.  Intensely incendiary—I mean interestingly incendiary.

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(If all we valued were Fall-foliage power itself, pure and simple, we'd still be pushing hateful "burning bush" instead of, well, burning it.  Check if burning bush is already on your state's Noxious Weed list.)

Ah, but oak-leaf hydrangeas: Like burning bush, oak-leaves' Fall foliage is fluorescent, vivid, and thumbs-it-nose-to-a-gray-November-day.  But also nuanced.  Not just one color bouncing next to the Sulphur Heart ivy that has so happily taken over the dead trunk (and more about that marvelous plant on Friday).  Instead, a whole catalog of color...



...from burgundy wine to red to rose to pink to orange to yellow.

Moreover, it seems the hydrangea's habit that the top leaves of the bush flaunt the darkest Fall colors, the bottom leaves the lightest.  As in this picture: Burgundy above my hand, orange and red behind it, and, just peaking out at the bottom, yellow.  Well waddaya know.



But maybe there's more to the story.  The top leaves of any stem are the youngest and the newest—and not only are they new themselves, the very stem they've grown from is also new.  So leaves farther down could be growing from old stems that have reached their mature height or from the older and therefore lower portions of the stems whose new top growth also sports the large dark burgundy leaves.

If a leaf's Fall color is related just to its position on the bush, only the top leaves of the bush will always be the darkest.  Stems that haven't yet gotten that tall, or never did, will never have the burgundy leaves; their leaves will instead fill out the ranks of the lower-down lighter colors: red, orange, pink, and yellow.

But maybe a leaf's Fall color is more related to the age of that portion of the stem from which it sprang.  Then the top leaves of any stem—no matter how high or low or new or old the stem is—will be darker than the lower leaves on that same stem.

Or maybe it's all about the sun: Leaves at the tips of the branches will always more light than those further down.

Or maybe it's just about the primacy of youth:  The leaves at the tips of the branches are the youngest.

Or maybe it's just about temperature:  The top leaves would always get the brunt of Fall's increasingly colder and therefore denser air that falls down from the sky, while the lower leaves would, by comparison, still be warmed by that day's remaining heat radiating up from the ground.

Drat: It's way too dark now to check out my oak-leaves further.  Tomorrow morning at dawn, though?  I'll be the tall guy still in his robe, padding about the garden checking on who's high and low, and what color they are at each elevation.

THE DAWN REPORT:  Burgundy leaves are generally at the tip of every branch, regardless of height or age or location:  The tips of even the lowest branches have burgundy leaves.


This branch is right above the low striped grass (which I'll tell you all about this week too) that carpets the ground.  It's leaves don't get nearly as much sun as those at the top of the bush.  But they're reasonably dark anyway.

Is it height, age (or youth) or yet another factor I haven't thought of yet?  The answer is probably Yes all across the board.  I may never be able to suss out the mind of this shrub when it comes to Which Leaf / What Color, but it's a snap decision to affirm the beauty of oak-leaves hydrangeas in the Fall.

On either side of the Nellie Stevens holly, this green-white variegated euonymus bush.



As sometimes happens in horticulture (let alone life) the actual name makes me cringe as well as smirk: Euonymus 'Emerald Gaiety'.  No, really.

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Some might wonder if this is the shrubby mascot of a group of Irish guys who are a bit light in their Leprechauns.  And now that they already have a mascot tree, Cercis 'Forest Pansy',  they want to, so to speak, branch out in bringing even more of a flouncy flavor to gardens everywhere.  OK, maybe it's just me who might wonder so.

Its inadvertently-entendred nom de plante notwithstanding, Emerald Gaiety's perky foliage couldn't be more welcome year-round.  And in Fall, the curious orange berries bring some colorful eccentricity—always a positive in my book.  (Maybe it's still just me.)



The pop-corn sized "kernels" open counter-intuitively.  (Another "always a good thing" in my book.)  The white covering splits neatly into quarters just like a quartered orange, except...




...that inside there are four orange berries not one.



And in more isolated splendor:


(Yes, I've moved over to one of my plain-green euonymus standards here, but the berries' configuration and coloring is just the same.)

And to think, if I were gardening in a much milder climate—let's say Ireland, since I brought up the subject—where (I can vouch personally) the roses are generally blooming just fine at Christmas, would I ever get around to looking at such obscure subtleties as The Configuration of Euonymus Berries?   Indeed, if roses are always on the menu, are they as delicious the hundredth day as the twentieth?  As the first?

Or are there just so many tremblingly-voluptuous flowers (my list: roses, camellias, peonies, wisteria, and dahlias) that one can look at without needing to go on some sort of purging and ascetic regime: The garden-gazing equivalent of a health spa where you drink nothing stronger than non-caffeinated tea, chew nothing tougher than tofu, and hear nothing more interesting than wind chimes.  Or maybe boot camp, with push-ups at dawn, grub washed down with swill for lunch, and lights-out at dusk.

In this sense, Fall and Winter are my cleansing months, my "purging and ascetic regime."  I dial back from the over-the-top profusions of Spring peonies and Summer dahlias.  I look around for something—anything—that's interesting, and grow not just intrigued, not just relieved, and certainly not just resigned that all I find are the minutia of berries.  Or that this patch of bark is a tad more green-tan than its brown-tan neighbor.  Or a catkin bud that has—I think, maybe—swollen a bit since last week, and maybe next month may start to pop.

And I realize that these small and often modestly-hueful happenings are not, at best, just as exciting as roses and peonias and wisteria and dahlias and camellias.  They are more exciting, because they also bring the thrill of discovery.  (Any vulgarian can see a flower from across the street if it's blood-red and six or eight inches across.)  And yes, these off-season excitements also bring the self-satisfied knowledge that I'm a creature of discernment, finely-tuned enough to know that tiny details are the most telling.

So take that, you peony-pushing philistines.  I "top up" quickly with such trembling voluptuousity.  Instead, please, the quirky, the blink-and-you'll-miss-it, the off-color (in any sense), and the out-of-its-normal-habitat.  And then the occasional faultless rose and peony is a revelation, not the norm.  And isn't that the respect that a perfect peony deserves?

And when the roses and peonies and wisterias and dahlias finally do come back into bloom, I'm lean and ripped from my Winter's marathon of garden aesthete training in the bottomless beauty of ever more-minute garden goings-on.  I'm ready to fall off the wagon, to wallow in Big And Voluptuous.  Bring 'em on.

When my Bartzella peony is out next June, no one is more of a vulgarian.  And it feels great.

Callicarpa fulfills the need you didn't even know you had: For a bush that does nothing (trust me) but bear thousands of BB-sized metallic-lavender berries for just a few weeks in Fall.



Then again, you'll never know how essential it is to have thousands of BB-sized metallic-lavender berries of your own for just a few weeks in Fall—and it is essential—until you finally do.  Trust me on this too.

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You don't just call the bush "beauty berry" because that's what the Latin means: Callicarpa: calli (beautiful) carpa (fruit).  You call it beauty-berry because your eyes bug out in delight the minute you look at it.  Who could imagine such The-Jetsons-go-to-South-Beach hues on anything that grows further North than Boca?  And with the lime-yellow leaves to give even more dazzle.  Callicarpa may only be interesting in the Fall—you can't confidently tell that the impressively minute mid-Summer flowers are pink until you've squinted at them with your reading glasses—but at least its Fall performance is defiant, abundant, and jubilant.

And variable.  Even on the same bush, each branch reaches its own local consensus on just which shade of lavender to adopt.  Some branches opt for a more saturated hot-pink.



Others hold back with a milky plum-pink.


And so each bush's berries form an aesthetic community, not a uniform-by-decree brigade.  A bottom-up, all-colors-are-local populace.



The leaves drop off to leave the berries the stage for a few weeks, but for me the foliage is just the tissue-paper-in-the-box gesture that the berries need. Without them, the berry display slides from a joyful slap in the face (slap in the eyes?) to just plain odd.

Lest I seem to be damning callicarpa with faint praise, remember that I have about sixteen bushes of it right at the streetside bed.  This isn't a bush I'm at all embarrassed to throw in the face of every passerby.  Party because:

...all callicarpas cry out to be cut to the ground in Spring, which keeps the growth more compact and so concentrates the weird berry display even more—and also gives room for the daffodils and grape hyacinths that are planted between the bushes.

...in back of the twenty-feet swathe of callicarpas (which, thanks to plain-green Summer foliage and invisible Summer flowers, is just a blah stretch of green) are three huge clumps of silphiums, which are in bloom all August with ten-foot stems of yellow daisies.

...there's a June-blooming rose, Goldfinch, threaded through the teeth of the picket fence right behind.

So this is a bed that, in truth, needs to be a bit boring in Summer.  But by Fall, silphiums and roses, let alone Spring bulbs, are long forgotten.  It's time to shake things up, violate the norms, arouse the neighbors.  With—of all things—some mighty beautiful berries.

It's a berry festival right out by the street: Lavander callicarpa in front, orange holly berries in the middle, and flanking standards of green-and-white leaved euonymus just starting to show orange berries.  Fall is fabulous!

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Since a variegated holly was cast in a hyper-choreographed duet in the previous post, why don't we revel today in a holly that wants and needs nothing more than to grow solo, on its own, free-range?  No choreography, no contortions, no fancy moves with hand tools, no deux ex machina.  Just slow and steady growth: big, bigger, bodacious.  More size, more leaves, and more berries.

This is Ilex 'Nellie Stevens', and anywhere Southward from sheltered spots in Boston, it's one of the best hollies to get that deep-green and glossy-leaved "English" holly look.  (Those fussy beauties generally recoil at both our Summer heat and the Winter cold up:  If you go far enough South that the Winters are mild enough for them, the Summers are too hot.  If you go far enough North that the Summers are mild enough, the Winters are too cold.  So visit English hollies on the West Coast and (duh) in England.  Or grow a few in pots like I do.)

But back to berries.  You've gotta look mighty close to see any at all in the overall shot of my Nellie.



Any at the top of the bush?


Nope.  They are all farther down, and all in the interior.


This is because in their first year holly twigs aren't old enough to bloom.  They take the entire Spring and Summer to work on their stems and the leaves, only thinking about some flower buds in the Fall.   By then it's too late for those buds to bloom let alone set berries.  But if they tough it out through the Winter they'll be right there at the gate for an early bloom the following Spring.  Which in turn leaves the whole Summer and Fall to Get Those Berries Done Right.

And this is, indeed, just what happens.  Hollies set buds in the Fall, which bloom the following Spring, and mature into berries over the Summer and Fall.  So the new stems and leaves that also come out that same Spring are often bushy enough to hide many of the berries.

Pruning only makes the berry display skimpier.  That's because any given stretch of holly branch doesn't keep blooming and berrying year after year after year.  It's productive for only a couple of years, after which its leaves drop and blooming and berrying stop.  From then on, it's "just" a branch, supporting all the newer leafy, blooming, and berrying growth at its tip.  If you prune off the outer growth of a holly, then, you remove the only growth that, eventually, will carry on with flowering and berrying.

So the very tops of holly trees are always berry-free: They are, by definition, the very newest growth of all.  And this is why berries will never be a big part of my Stewart's Silver Crown's display:  I'm going to prune off much of its top each Spring, which will only inspire the it to grow more and more fresh new growth, which, because I'll prune all of them off the next Spring, will never get old enough to berry.

But my Nellie Stevens is going to grow free-range, and as she grows up (in all senses) she'll make a big berry show.  This is partly because she's just an enthusiastic gal, but also because she's one of the rare hollies that is as happy to self-pollinate as to rely on a neighborhood male holly.  So one way or another, Nellie always sets a heavy berry crop.

My Nellie is still young and small enough—five feet tops—that she's just warming up for a long and happy berrying career.  In five, ten, and twenty years, she'll will be ten, fifteen, and twenty feet tall.  And her berries will be showy enough to cheer not just the pedestrians, but even the folks in cars speeding by.  She'll be a real drive-by moment.

While the amsonia excitement of the past week was largely luck, I think I've completely choreographed the performance-to-be of this extraordinary variegated holly.



Colorful evergreen leaves?  Check!  Contrasting red berries?  Check!  But those are just the obvious opening steps in our little show here...

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...the mere baseline of competence for this performance:  It's a variegated holly, Samantha.  If this plant isn't going to lead off with showy foliage and berries, what the heck is it doing on stage in the first place?

Rest assured, Ladies and Gentlemen, this luscious American holly and I have cooked up quite a pas de deux for your viewing pleasure.  And foliage and berries are, indeed, just our opening steps, our casually exciting warm-ups for the death-defying moves to come.  (Which display of staggering talent and inspiration we will nonetheless make look easy, shocking, and inevitable.)  And while our finish is years away, we promise it will be worth the wait: A sensation, a true coup de theatre.

[After that beginning, I think I need a gin fizz and a fan.  Back in a minute.]

As I say, this is a duo performance of a variegated holly and a dancer-choreographer, yours truly.  Let me introduce my partner, this female variegated holly.  She's a rare bird indeed because she's a variegated American holly—the only one in an otherwise dull-green family.  (That's why her Latin name is, with rueful honesty, Ilex opaca.  "Opaca" means dull; yes indeed, it's a cousin of "opaque.")

She's clearly still a youngster, all knees and elbows, not yet even hinting at her voluptuous as well as statuesque maturity.



Even so, many of her gifts are already before us:

— Leaves heavily margined in cream and white (and displayed so nicely against the backdrop of green boxwood and frost-killed hardy hibiscus foliage).


And, of course, just like the rest of the American holly family, these leaves are evergreen as well as spiny enough to be completely deer-proof.

— Hardiness through Zone 5, so you gardeners in low-land Vermont, plant away.

— Red berries through Fall and (well, let me track this for you this year) mid-Winter.

Hollies with berries are always females, and they (almost) always need the stud service of a lowly male holly to berry their best.  This holly's still a bit sparse in the berry, so to speak.  Is that the nature of the girl?  Or perhaps she needs a man nearby, not just a dancer-choreographer.

Checking out the neighborhood for male American hollies...and there's a massive one not fifty feet away in the adjacent property.  It doesn't have any berries at all, even while this one does.  If even this young variegated female has berries, the far larger and older tree would also have them...if it were also a female.  And so it's a male—and so either this variegated tree is just getting into a berrying mood or isn't all that interested in the first place.  (More on holly berries in today's post.)

— A preference for full sun that doesn't rule out a long and happy life with some shade.

— A remarkable flexibility about (Spring) pruning:  Do it a lot, a little, or never, and she's still enthusiastic.  And while heaven forfend that you would ever need or want to get out the chainsaw and stump the old girl, she'll sprout forth promptly if you do.

Not to worry: I'm never going to recommend more than a nip and tuck for my baby girl, because she's soooo special already.  Yes, she may well be a child of the shininess-challenged Ilex opaca family, but that's the reason why her given name, Stewart's Silver Crown, is all the more tantalizing.  Even more astounding, the reality of the "silver crown" only exceeds whatever you're imagining:  As she matures, the foliage at top of the tree (and only the top) will be entirely cream-white.  The bark on the young twigs too.  All of it, pure ivory white.

By the second year, that creamy foliage acquires some chlorophyll (and the bark of the young twigs matures to boring tan), but the new foliage growing up from it is the new generation of all-white growth.  Year after year, the tree is never without a "silver crown."

[Back to my David Merrick impersonation.]  But even this silver crown—unique not just in the world of hollies but in the world of plants overall and everywhere—still isn't the finale of the act.

Ladies and Gentlemen, kindly recall that this is a pas de deux, a partnership.  Having a silver crown, then, is only the beginning of climax.  That part of our performance comes right from the casting.  So what could possibly top it?

Three clues:   1. Holly is amazingly amenable about being pruned.   2. The way to encourage any holly to grow the maximum amount of new growth is to prune it in early Spring.   3. Stewart's new growth is pure white—but only at the top of the tree.

And so, the envelope, please:  Year by year I'll prune away my Stewart's lower branches, whose foliage is "only" the usual variegation.  And year by year (starting this very Spring), I'll lightly prune the very top of the Stewart, so it branches into two, four, eight, sixteen, a zillion tops, all crowding together.  Each of which will produce its own "silver" crown.

In who-knows-how-many years, then, the tree will be a broad mound of pure-white foliage atop a thick trunk.  This Silver Crown will have grown into its essence: It will be all crown, or rather, all crowns.  A full set of crowns, a collection, a congeries:  A crowning glory indeed. 

Or at least that's the plan.  Admittedly, it's more of a high-wire act than a Fred-and-Ginger sashay.  There's suspense involved, not just sparkle, not just skill.  How much of the "normal" variegated foliage is needed to sustain the growth of all of that pure-white (and therefore chlorophyll-free) new growth each Spring?  Will the look therefore be more like a giant and thickly sour-cream-frosted green cupcake on a stick?  Or will the outer crowns be nodded outward by density of the more central crowns, so that the cupcake will become frosted on the sides too?

In truth, who can say?  To my knowledge, my lifelong dance—pruners at the ready—with this Stewart's Silver Crown is a "Star Trek" moment.  Stewart and me, holly and gardener, we're both Going Where No Man Has Gone Before.

At the left of the amsonia is a young plane tree.

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This is the variegated version, Platanus x acerifolia 'Suttneri', with gently speckled foliage that, yes indeedy, seems prune to scorching.



I'm hoping Suttner is worth the trouble of regular watering to prevent the scorch.  No, I won't be watering it in this location.  If you were thinking right from the get-go "What the heck is that plane tree doing sprouting right up through that beech?", rest assured that we are on the same page.

In Spring I’ll transplant it a couple of hundred feet further West—but even its more spacious spot I still won’t let the tree grow free-range.  On the one hand, I just don't have the space: Given a century, this plane tree would grow to a mighty monster larger than the biggest beech, and I've only got an acre and a half for my entire garden.  And on the other, why grow a plant that can, well, just grow, when I can grow a plant that gives me yet another opportunity to intervene along the way, pruners eagerly in hand.

And with plane tree, I've picked my quarry—I mean my subject—well: Plane trees seem to have infinite tolerance for severe pruning.  Each Fall I'll cut all the branches (and the trunk itself) back to nubs, and in a few years the tree will look like this one in the staggeringly well-trained production fields at the Van den Berk nursery in Holland.


This Tree-Imitating-an-Umbrella look is known (who knows why) as a "pollard."  And plane trees just love to be pollarded.

What a paradox of Nature that both of these giant plants—beeches and planes—are content with generations of life being held to a fraction their unpruned dimensions by geeky humans wielding pruners.

And those pruners suggest yet a third reason to pollard my Suttner's plane:  The new foliage that pollarding inspires is often larger and more colorful.  If ever there were a tree whose variegation could use a little help from a tall guy with pruners, Suttner's  it is.

And in back of the plane tree, another pleasurable tree that's not long for this spot in the garden: a young spruce with gold-tipped needles.

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Despite my enthusiastic attention to the plant database for my entire garden, I don’t have a clue which spruce this is.  Memory nags me that it's an offspring of the legendary gold Sitka spruce of the Pacific Northwest, a single mutant tree that was given its own Latin name, Picea sitchensis 'Aurea'.  It grew for centuries in a coastal forest until felled by a deranged logger.

Still-living branches were retrieved, and the tree has been successfully propagated.  One of the progeny has been planted by the stump of the parent.  And wouldn’t you think I'd have bought one of the others myself?  With such a sensational back-story, it's very likely I did just that, even though the tree eventually (at least in its home ground near the Pacific) grows larger than many a redwood.

Whichever spruce this is, look at the good foot of this year's growth.



This tree is definitely too fast-growing (and therefore ultimately too large) for this spot.  Once I've identified it, I'll know it's mature size and if I've honestly got the room for it.  But if I don't, given the notable tragedy of the parent it would bad karma to just cut it down.  A bad deed, indeed, for this human to cut down this offspring of the original golden spruce that another human had cut to death (so to speak).  Aboricide, one generation and the next.  Abor-assassination, it's not beyond exaggeration to call it.  (What is it with we humans?  Give us a brain and opposable thumbs, and often as not the results are despicable.)

I’ve entreated one of my tree-geek buddies to identify this tree.  Sitka, or not sitka?  Stay tuned.

Yes, I'm quite avoiding the issue of What If It's NOT A Gold Sitka?  Would I still just cut it down?  After all, it's only here in my garden because I bought it.  I must have thought it was necessary.  If I change my mind can I just, well, kill it?

Whatever it is, this spruce is a "good" tree, harmless as well as attractive.  It deserves a respectful destiny.



I'll transplant it by early Spring.  Meanwhile, what a Fall pairing, spruce and amsonia.  The tips of the spruce needles match the butter yellow of the amsonia, while the deeper green of the rest of the needles is the vivid contrast that makes it all sing.

Unlikely, accidental—but gorgeous:  Sounds like a good thing to me.  Who among us would have the hubris to boast that our garden's riveting plant combinations and surprising color juxtapositions were all planned, intentional, man-made?  Some of them of course, maybe even most: That's why we stare at books, catalogs, and magazines all Winter, darn it, to think all that excitement up.  We deserve all of those moments of well-planned glory, which confirm that we do, in fact, know a thing or two, and are sometimes just as capable of doing good in the world as bad.  They give us the courage and the reward to keep laboring onward in our garden, and I guess in life itself.

But how pat and limited our garden would be—and yes, how shallow our dreams and short our vision too—if all of our garden's glories were only and exactly as we'd planned them to be.  A garden of only intentional beauty would be a painful indictment of—the literal evidence for—the modest gifts of the gardener.

So it's not "Who among us could boast..."  It's "Who among us would want to boast..."  What we should wish for instead is that our garden's excitement will be bigger than we are, far beyond what our reference books and on-line databases and plotting and plans and experience and our work and our money could have foretold.  That all the effects we successfully thought up, as fine or even fabulous as far as they go, however far indeed that may be, are only the beginning.

Beyond them are the effects we hadn't seen coming at all.  Please, let our gardens bring those to our eyes too.  Please.  The effects that take us by surprise and even shock, and that humble us to our knees.  How did that staggering patch of beauty happen here, when we were working so hard over there (or even more embarrassing, right here) but on other goals and charms, worthy as they may be, and so were looking in quite the other direction?  Or more likely, not really looking at all?

Like this week's spruce/amsonia/beech/box/plane-tree mash-up.  Yeah, yeah, yeah, the Black Swan swimming atop the variegated box:  I thought up that entire trick, and someday it will, in truth and with all modestly, be sensational.  But if I hadn't planted variegated box too small to reliably survive, I'd never have had the wonder of the amsonia spilling through the gap.  If I hadn't bought the who-knows-what spruce and stuck it in this nursery bed (there are, so help me, twenty others nearby) for a few years until it was large enough that I'd have to figure out where to move it, I'd never have seen how exciting it looks each Fall with the amsonia nearby.

And how is it that some amsonias got planted in this bed at all?  Looking back to the database, I see that these were volunteers from where all of my amsonia started out (and is still happy): the Pink Borders.  Where the amsonia's pale-blue Spring flowers are, to my eye, far more at home than with the yellow or red of the gardens elsewhere.

This intensely interesting corner of the garden's Fall excitement, then, was created mostly by death, self-seeding, hasty transplanting, and forgetful on-line shopping.  Calm planning, careful execution, the calloused and dirty-kneed wisdom of decades of mucking about in the dirt, growing hundreds of plants and designing scores of gardens?  They was the least of it.

Back to that spruce:  If it is a golden Sitka, it's here in Rhode Island only because of the tragedy that, literally, be-fell the original out on the Pacific coast not far South of Alaska.  But how is it that there was that single golden Sitka at all?  That mutated, who knows why, and was gorgeous, and also survived.  That's plant excitement that's not just rare, it's unique.  And spontaneous to boot.

Ah, then: a spontaneously sui generis Sitka spruce.  Humans, let alone gardeners, had nothing at all to do with its creation (although, alas, one of us had all too much to do with its destruction).  But we have everything to do with its preservation through propagation.

So I await the identification of this young spruce with a mixture of excitement, worry, pride.  If it is that Sitka, I'm helping preserve it.  Pat me on the back.  But I don't have room for it here on my acre and a half, so where will it go?