The last few wild days before the first real frost. The Fall foliage of all the hardy stuff has revved up even as the tropicals are singing the last chorus of their bodacious Summer strut-and-preen. Freakishly, gloriously, defiantly, one last collision of color washes over the landscape.
This is a circular bed in Manhattan's Union Square. In the torrid days of Summer it was "just" a purple-black ode to Morticia Addams, with 'Black Magic' taro encircling a tree-like 'Carmencita' castor bean. How marvelous that the City gave the horticulturalist a free hand: This purple-black stunner is the antithesis of the usual municipal mandate of tidy, low, colorful, and floriferous.
This is the end of the park with the most shade, though, so all Summer long this planting was a bit in the dark. But by Fall the trees had switched their leaves over to chrome before a hard Frost brings down the curtain for everyone: For a week or two, Carmencita and her Black Magic minions finally have the perfect partner.
It's a mild but gusty day, the wind flouncing through Carmencita's heavy foliage to bring out the flashes of blood-red in her young foliage. You can almost hear her satisfied sighs and giggles.
Hard frost can be slow to arrive right in the "hot-in-the-city" heart of Manhattan: I've had impatiens in bloom well into December. Warm weather annuals that are tired by October can hang on for six weeks or more, getting rattier day by day. But there are only so many Fall mums and flowering kales that any of us can stand, let alone plant. So some of the "Summer" plantings need to keep it up in all through Fall too.
Thank goodness there are dog-days annuals like these two, happy to keep "coming on" even after the swelter that they crave has tailed off. No matter that it can't get too hot for them in August, they aren't such hi-temp ninnies that they collapse the first night in November that it dips into the 30's.
Where in my garden can I plan out just such a Fall foliage collision? No wait: I already have! Tomorrow's post, I promise.
This is a circular bed in Manhattan's Union Square. In the torrid days of Summer it was "just" a purple-black ode to Morticia Addams, with 'Black Magic' taro encircling a tree-like 'Carmencita' castor bean. How marvelous that the City gave the horticulturalist a free hand: This purple-black stunner is the antithesis of the usual municipal mandate of tidy, low, colorful, and floriferous.
This is the end of the park with the most shade, though, so all Summer long this planting was a bit in the dark. But by Fall the trees had switched their leaves over to chrome before a hard Frost brings down the curtain for everyone: For a week or two, Carmencita and her Black Magic minions finally have the perfect partner.
It's a mild but gusty day, the wind flouncing through Carmencita's heavy foliage to bring out the flashes of blood-red in her young foliage. You can almost hear her satisfied sighs and giggles.
Hard frost can be slow to arrive right in the "hot-in-the-city" heart of Manhattan: I've had impatiens in bloom well into December. Warm weather annuals that are tired by October can hang on for six weeks or more, getting rattier day by day. But there are only so many Fall mums and flowering kales that any of us can stand, let alone plant. So some of the "Summer" plantings need to keep it up in all through Fall too.
Thank goodness there are dog-days annuals like these two, happy to keep "coming on" even after the swelter that they crave has tailed off. No matter that it can't get too hot for them in August, they aren't such hi-temp ninnies that they collapse the first night in November that it dips into the 30's.
Where in my garden can I plan out just such a Fall foliage collision? No wait: I already have! Tomorrow's post, I promise.
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