Category Archives: My Garden

Garden Arbours & Pergolas

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It’s the dead of winter in my part of Canada, the garden buried today under more than a foot of snow (which always makes me laugh, to see photos from milder climates of ‘the winter garden’ and how to design for that season). But winter is always a good time to think about plans for the garden – especially those involving ways to make it more inviting to those who want to spend time relaxing, dining or napping in it. Enter those structures — sometimes architectural, sometimes rustic, sometimes just plain whimsical — that transform the garden from a ‘place for plants’ to a sanctuary for people. I’m thinking mostly about arbours and pergolas, two words that have come to mean almost the same thing, but in fact have different roots. Pergola comes from the Latin “pergula” for “projecting roof”, meaning an open-work-roof structure attached to (or immediately adjacent to) the house. Arbor/arbour derives from the French and Old English “herbere“, originally meaning a herb garden, but later a structure for supporting heavy vines such as grapes. Below is an illustration of a 16th-century German celebration in an outdoor arbour or pavilion, taken from a 1992 book on my shelf called Decorating Eden by Elizabeth Wikinson and Marjorie Henderson.

In time, “arbour” evolved to mean a simple structure with an open-work roof within the garden, sometimes containing a seat. Today, those words are almost interchangeable and encompass myriad styles, from barebones rustic to architecturally ornate. Let’s start with one of my favourites, because it reflects the talent and style of my dear, late friend Penny Arthurs, aka The Chelsea Gardener, who designed and built this arbour in her Toronto garden. Teal stain transforms the enclosing walls and cross-beams through which Boston ivy creeps. The front posts at left support climbing roses, while the ‘floor’ is the same brickwork Penny used in the rest of her garden. The rustic bench completes the scene. I so miss Penny and wrote a blog about her in memory.

In Shirley William’s garden in North Grafton, Mass., a rustic arbour featuring rough-hewn uprights and cross pieces supported climbing vines that were just coming into leaf when I was there in May a few years ago. It was furnished with comfy chairs for taking a weeding break. I wrote a blog called “Spring at Brigham Hill Farm” after my visit to this delightful garden.

Derek Bennett’s food-forward Toronto garden included this trellised arbour for al fresco dining – featuring an overhead lamp and a rustic, dry-laid brick floor. Morning glories grew through the trellis and basil and tomatoes grew in pots nearby.

This formal poolside Toronto structure seen on a garden tour seems best described as a pergola, despite being away from the house. Architect-designed to be integrated into the raised terrace, its supports are strong enough for the massive overhead wisteria about to burst into bloom.

A well-known pergola at Wave Hill garden in the Bronx features an open wall for guests to view the Hudson River and New Jersey’s Palisades on the far shore. It is surrounded by and hung with containers of plants, many rare. Have a look at my blog on Wonderful Wave Hill.

In Wave Hill’s famous Flower Garden, rustic arbours with built-in seats face each other across the colour-themed garden. One is wreathed in climbing roses……

…. while the other hosts roses and dainty Clematis ‘Betty Corning’.

I loved the bright blue beams of this “ramada” (Spanish for open air structure covered in branches) in the herb garden of the Tucson Botanical Garden. Why don’t more people use colour like this in the garden?

A massive white wisteria rests on sturdy overhead beams in the Pond Arbor at Chanticleer Garden in Wayne, PA. The beams are supported at the back in brackets attached to the stone wall of the Gravel Garden, above and behind it, and in front by sturdy, stone-faced, concrete posts. Guests can rest in Chanticleer’s iconic chairs, listening to the breeze ruffle the ‘Everillo’ sedge and fullmoon maple nearby. Chanticleer is my favourite small public garden in the world! Here’s my latest 2-part blog from Sept. 2023.

At the Idaho Botanical Garden in Boise, a series of arbors in the English Garden fitted with steel mesh on the overhead timbers support clematis, climbing roses and other vines . They contain benches so visitors can stop and enjoy the sound of the central fountain. Here’s my 2017 blog on the Idaho Botanical Garden, which highlights native plants on the Lewis & Clark Trail.

I walked through the aquamarine pergola/colonnade in the Walled Garden at Old Westbury Gardens on Long Island – home of the wealthy Phipps family – a few decades ago, so this photo could be out of date. But I was delighted to see the garden used as a location for the society opening of “the botanic garden” in HBO’s ‘The Gilded Age’ a few months ago. It features a border of ferns and wisteria overhead.

At Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., landscape architect Beatrix Farrand originally designed the Arbor Terrace in the 1920s as one of seven garden rooms on the property. In 1944, it was re-imagined by owner Mildred Bliss with designer Ruth Harvey, its lawn replaced by Tennessee stone and the oak arbor rebuilt out of cypress. You can read my blog on Dumbarton Oaks – including the grape arbor – here.

A large arbour decorated with hanging ornaments encloses an outdoor seating area in Colleen Jamison’s Austin, Texas garden: a perfect spot to relax on warm evenings. Here’s my blog “Birds, Bling and Beguiling Brown” on Colleen’s garden.

This beautiful dining arbour designed by Maureen Sedran of Mark Hartley Landscape Architects was on a Toronto garden tour ages ago. I loved that the urn fountain was near enough to create a soothing soundtrack for the lucky people enjoying dining under the suspended hurricane lamp.

Maureen Sedran of Mark Hartley Associates also designed this airy arbour and the surounding garden featuring an elegant white redbud (Cercis canadensis f. alba).

For several years when we attended the Shaw Festival in Ontario’s Niagara-on-the-Lake, we stayed with friends at Lakewinds Bed & Breakfast. It had a beautiful garden, a covered veranda with comfy seating and this pergola dripping with wisteria. Sadly the owners moved on – but of course I wrote a blog!

When we were on our South Africa garden tour years ago, the garden of Henk Scholtz was a delight. I wrote a blog about his “wonderful, whimsical garden” that included the photo below, of Henk’s grape pergola.

Architect Minky Lidchi’s ornate Johannesburg garden did not feature a traditional pergola, but used metal beams between sturdy concrete pillars blanked with vines to create an airy overhead effect. Here’s my blog on Minky’s garden.

I liked this metal chandelier hung amidst the wisteria in the dining pergola of Stellenberg Garden, in Cape Town, South Africa. Of course I wrote a blog about this Cape Dutch Class house and garden.

On a 2022 wine tour of Sicily, we had an outdoor tasting under an interesting shade pergola/awning at Principi di Butera winery. It would be easy to attach a canvas above the overhead pole array to provide more shade.

Sometimes, privacy is as important in an outdoor structure as overhead shade or vines. In artist Bev Stableforth’s garden in Creemore, Ontario, outdoor draperies can be drawn to create a sense of intimate sanctuary.

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MY GARDEN

When we did some landscaping in 1988, having a two-level deck off the back of our 1915 house helped ease the transition from the back door to the garden in a way that regular stairs would not. An architect neighbour more accustomed to designing museums did the original rough design – placing the structure on 16 cement sono-tubes – a foundation our contractor swore could support a small house. It had an inner bench, a milled-lattice privacy screen and a solid cedar wall that made the deck feel like the prow of a ship. I loved it, but wanted something a little more romantic right outside the door. So a few years later, I hired a carpenter to build a pergola and planted a wisteria in the garden to the right of the deck, the idea being it would reward me with purple flowers each spring. That did not happen, the deck being a little too shady, but the foliage was pretty. (Some of you might have read my poem ‘Wisterical’ about my flower-shy vine.)

However, late afternoon was often too sunny so I hemmed up three sections of pink candy-striped fabric and suspended them via eyelet rings between the cross-pieces. It looked very festive! And I had the chunky table built to fit the space.

In the 1990s, my husband still had his company and we hosted a few garden parties, inviting friends and clients. The bar in the pergola was a popular first stop.

The post featured my artist son’s clay mask and at the base, an assortment of containers filled with annuals and perfumed star jasmine (Trachelospermum jasminoides), which I brought indoors in autumn to overwinter.

I strung lights in the wisteria for evening dinners.

A 1998 garden party saw us take precautions against rain with a marquee that went right up and over the deck and pergola.

It was very romantic – though the rain stopped in late afternoon.

The deck from the garden.

I sewed up some cushions for the built-in-bench and the sling chairs. But eventually the non-flowering wisteria irritated me enough to get rid of it. Though it was too big to dig up, I cut it back and put a garbage bag over the bottom of the trunk until it gave its last gasp. Then I planted a hybrid Asian clematis called C. x fargesoides that features small white summer flowers and rampant growth to more than 20 feet.

This was the view of the pergola and privacy screen from beside the deck.

But the Asian clematis was a nuisance to try to train on the sparse overhead boards, as you see here.

And by 2009, the wood on the deck – including the pergola – had sustained more than 20 years of rot (especially sitting under a 70-foot black walnut that rained nuts and leaves down each autumn) so a rebuild was in order. Those 16 cement sonotubes were still in good shape, howver!

And admitting defeat on the deck pergola idea, I opted instead for a simpler design – no benches, a traditional railing wall that would dry out better than the solid cedar wall and iron outdoor furniture. Not as romantic, but less maintenance.

And that’s the end of my winter contemplation of pergolas and arbours. If you’re interested in garden construction, you might want to read my blog on our garden path and gate, “The Gate, the Grate, the Path”, featuring the 35-year-old magazine cover below of my gate on the first issue of Canadian Gardening Magazine in Feb/March 1990.

The Gate, the Grate, the Path

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We’ve now lived in our 1916 Toronto house for more than 40 years, making us one of the old-timers on the block. When we moved in back in 1983, there was a long driveway leading to a ramshackle garage which was too small for modern cars but just right for a family of raccoons who did not take kindly to being evicted. In fact, most of the driveway was too narrow for a car so we decided to create a side garden halfway down it in place of the last 40 feet of asphalt, bisected by a winding path behind a pretty arched gate. That was 1988. At the time, the publisher of Canadian Gardening magazine lived in the house behind me and thought my gate would make a good cover for the very first issue of the magazine, launched in 1990 and published for 25 years, finally closing down in 2015. Apart from writing stories for three of its editors in that quarter-century, they also became very good friends. And as you see, back in 1988 I was growing impatiens in the shade, as were most gardeners.

A few years later, I wrote a story on the gate and garden for Fine Gardening magazine, title page below. In the article, I tallied up the costs: $960 US for the gate and fence panels (the gate incorporated a “see-through” made from an old brass heating grate we found while renovating the house); $500 for the path, including breaking up and removing the asphalt as far as the driveway’s original limestone grit and laying down concrete pavers; and a load of topsoil and plants to bring the total to about $2,000. I cannot imagine doing this today for less than $10,000, likely more. Only 9-1/2 feet separated our house from the neighbour’s fence, so the path took up 3-1/2 feet with 3 feet of garden on either side. To complicate matters, a black walnut tree (Juglans nigra) that had likely been small when our house was built during the First World War was now a hulking 70-footer, its big trunk straddling the property line, the allelopathic juglone secreted by its leaves and roots toxic to certain plants growing underneath it.

As the years passed, the walnut tree needed periodic pruning and cabling. On one occasion, an arborist working in the branches above dropped a heavy branch onto the gate and broke the arch.  But even without it, the gate added a certain flair to the house – I even gave it a big Christmas wreath for several years. I had planted the two half-whiskey-barrels flanking the gate with ‘Green Velvet’ boxwood shrubs (a Canadian introduction) around 1990, though I was warned they wouldn’t survive the first winter. Not only did they survive that winter, they lived in the barrels with no care except an occasional summer watering and shearing for more than 30 years! And in the photo below you can see the first tendrils of a bird-seeded Boston ivy (Parthenocissus tricuspidata) beginning to climb the fence panel at right.

In 2010, I designed and had built a screen to hide the recycling and trash containers, staining it to match the gate and house.  (You can see the long crack forming in our old driveway here.)

I had designed a driveway utilities screen for a gardening client in the 1990s, so while I had contractors at the house rebuilding our sundeck, I thought it was a good chance to utilize the design myself. Because as much as I approve of recycling, I can’t stand the look of plastic bins.

Meanwhile, the little sideyard garden grew and I learned which plants can tolerate living under a black walnut. Dry shade was a more important consideration, since the area is rarely watered except by rain and the tree sucks up much ground moisture. The shiny groundcover leaves are European ginger (Asarum europaeum); uber-invasive lily-of-the-valley, front right, makes its home there; and native Solomon’s seal (Polygonatum biflorum), front left, does very well, too.  The tall shrub at left is alternate-leaf dogwood (Cornus alternifolia), my favourite native shrub and a seedling of one I planted in the back garden in the 1990s.  The boughs of white cedar (Thuja arborvitae) come from my neighbour’s tree over the fence.

Here is the alternate-leaf dogwood in flower on May 22, 2012.

Move a little further along the path in this 2013 photo and you can see the double iron arch I installed atop 4×4 posts, over which I grew what I purchased as a native bittersweet vine but turned out to be the invasive Asian counterpart. The paver path circles around our lower deck to become a patio adjoining a lily pond in the back garden.

I planted a few bulbs of Corydalis solida in 2011 and they now carpet the sunniest part of the path garden in spring, but die away quickly as the Solomon’s seals send their green spears up.

There are native spring ephemerals in the path too, like mayapple and Hepatica acutiloba, below.

Lily-of-the-valley grows here, often in carpets – as it does in the rest of my garden. It’s always strange for me to see garden centres selling a few pips in a pot for $. I could be a millionaire, I think! Then I remember I’d have to dig them out, which is much easier said than done. But they are lovely in a little vase and they do make a very fun and fragrant garden party hat, as I’ve blogged before.

Here, looking towards the gate from the deck are the Solomon seals in a photo from May 24, 2016. Note the thick trunks of the bittersweet vine coiling up the posts.

Just a little bit on Boston ivy, shown climbing onto the gate in July 2015. Because it adheres via adhesive sticker aerial roots, I’m never keen to let this invasive climb our house and attach to the old mortar. But I thought it might add some interest to the gate, so I’ve let it grow while keeping it trimmed.

Inserting the see-through grate into the gate wasn’t an original idea; I’d seen various versions on garden tours. But knowing it had come from this house made it special – and I liked the fact that it lost its shininess and took on a rusty patina.  It framed the garden beyond like a peek into a colourful jewel box.

As the Boston ivy continued its journey across the gate on Oct. 16, 2019, I let its tendrils feel their way. In autumn it turned crimson, trailing across the view through the grate of orange sumac and azure blue monkshood and sumac at the back of the garden.

Here is the long view on that day, showing the path littered with yellow autumn leaves from the black walnut and the garden beyond.

Notice how the juvenile probing leaves of Boston ivy are shaped very differently from the leaves on the older wood in the next photos. They’re almost heart-shaped….

…. compared with the three-lobed (tricuspid) foliage emerging from the older wood in 2020.

Boston ivy is one of the best species to show the effect of summer sunshine on the pigments of the autumn leaves. Where one leaf shades another, the shaded section does not turn red in fall, but reveals the accessory yellow photosynthetic pigments.

As the alien bittersweet vine grew across the iron arches, it framed the view to the garden in an intriguing way, but it also latched on to everything nearby, including the dogwood shrub and the house’s downpipes.  I had to use a stepladder to try to thin it out and prune it away from both.

But I did love walking down the shady path in June to see my neighbour’s beauty bush (Linnea amabilis, formerly Kolkwitzia) in full flower over the fence.

Alas, all that weight on the arches and the four old posts holding them up finally took its toll. The vine collapsed onto the path in summer 2021 and everything had to be chopped up, dug up and removed.  (And this man was not too thrilled to be doing it.) But bittersweet doesn’t give up easily; every year it sends up shoots (some through the deck boards) from bits of root left behind, reminding us that it would like to return.

And that crack in the driveway? Eventually it opened, cracked more and formed more openings that turned into ankle-turning crevices. So the driveway had to be replaced in 2022.   And with the old asphalt went the 1990 half-whiskey-barrels and the 30-year-old boxwoods, since it was impossible to work around them and the barrels had started to fall apart.            

Surface roots from the black walnut had been lifting the path’s concrete pavers for years until they became unsafe and I had to warn visitors to watch their step coming into the back garden. I knew the time had come to fix the path.

Black walnut is a tap-rooted tree, so the surface roots can take some cutting back before much damage is done to the canopy…

…. but the Toronto company I hired called “Leveled Ground” said they would not cut surface roots bigger than a “toonie”, about 1-1/2 inches in diameter. This offending root got cut.

In July 2023, a team of guys arrived to lift up all the pavers….

…. stacking them carefully in the new driveway.

With all the pavers removed, they laid down a new layer of limestone grit, atop the layer put down under the old path in 1988, atop the layer from the original First World War driveway.

Now the right side of the garden under the black walnut is a few inches higher than the newly leveled path.  After all the grit was laid down, they used a mechanical compactor to compress it, then put the old pavers back, adding sand between the cracks and using the compactor to compress the entire path again before sweeping it clean.

This is what the path looked like 2 weeks after Leveled Ground departed. Sturdy, flat and safe.

I’m not sure how long the old black walnut will last. For that matter, I’m not sure how long we’ll last in the house – many of our friends have opted to move into condominiums as they’ve aged. But I cannot imagine life without a garden, watching birds drinking in the pond, bees nectaring on flowers, leaves changing colour in autumn – and that old gate leading down the curving path to the joys beyond.   

A Love Letter to Smooth Solomon’s Seal

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Each spring, I look with admiration on my drifts of an Ontario native plant that asks so little of me, but gives so much in return: Polygonatum biflorum, smooth Solomon’s seal.  Its tapered shoots emerge in April in my north-facing back garden, where the clumps under the black walnut tree that looms over my sideyard pathway are surrounded by the tiny flowers of the bulbous spring ephemeral Corydalis solida.

By mid-late May, looking back towards my garden gate, the corydalis has disappeared but the Solomon’s seals stand three feet tall.

It’s still early in the garden when they flower, the grasses in my deck pots still just inches high.

The colony in the back corner of the garden grows near a Tiger Eyes sumac and has as its neighbour fall monkshood (Aconitum carmichaelii ‘Arendsii’), not yet visible. Both enjoy the same shade-dappled, slightly moist, humus-rich soil.

It’s a testament to the travelling power of Solomon’s seals that they do sometimes subsume other plants. This ‘Ballade’ lily tulip – one of my favourites – is resisting.

But nothing keeps Allium hollandicum ‘Purple Sensation’ from rearing its pretty head.

My garden features a number of invasive plants – some native, like ostrich fern (Matteucia struthiopteris), others enthusiastic exotics, like my lily-of-the-valley, aka ‘guerilla of the valley’ (Convallaria majalis).  (I’ve written about that pest before in my blog about making a perfumed garden party hat!)  But Solomon’s seal is up to the challenge and can stand its ground.

One that didn’t fare so well in competition with the Solomon’s seals was wild geranium (G. maculatum), shown below in a photo from a previous spring.  

At the Toronto Botanical Garden, blue Amsonia tabernaemontana, shown in the background below, makes a pretty companion for Solomon’s seal.

I love the way the pearl-drop flower buds of smooth Solomon’s seal open, curling up their green tips like dainty skirts.

In November, the leaves turn yellow-gold.

Solomon’s seal and other woodland lovers were featured in ‘Shady Lady’, one of #Janetsfairycrowns from 2021, which I blogged about last year.

My next-door neighbour grows smooth Solomon’s seal as well; it met with the approval of the resident male cardinal.

Finally, speaking of cardinals, here’s a tiny video made in my garden featuring smooth Solomon’s seal with my regular choristers, cardinals and robins.

Fairy Crown #27-Winter in the City

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In this festive season, my 27th fairy crown celebrates a few stalwart plants that give some structure and life to my garden for the four-to-six months when the soil is completely frozen.  I see red hawthorn fruit, aka “haws”, from my beloved Washington thorn tree (Crataegus phaenopyrum).  Hanging down over my right shoulder is a bough from one of my gangly hemlock trees (Tsuga canadensis), complete with four sweet little cones. The dark-green prickly needles come from my yew blobs, i.e. the balls of Taxus x media ‘Hicksii’ in my pond garden. Over my left shoulder are bits of lacy arborvitae (Thuja occidentalis), aka “white cedar”, from the very long hedge separating my garden from my neighbour’s.  The broadleaf evergreen is wintercreeper (Euonymus fortunei). Finally, the seedheads are purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea) and snakeroot (Actaea racemosa) sticking out on my right side.

When you garden in Toronto, you learn not to expect too much – aesthetically – from “the winter garden”.  Unlike those exquisite December scenes from England, France and the Netherlands of silvery hoar frost delicately coating each leaf and seedhead, December in the northeast is often more like a thick blanket of snow that not only buries all the plants in the garden, but the car in the driveway too!  Yes, this was our car on January 17, 2022.

It broke a daily record with a total of slightly more than 21 inches (55 cm).

And it was a very hard slog with the snow shovel for my husband Doug!  But I added a little muscle and together we cleared a path to the door.

As I write this, there’s a big red weather warning on The Weather Network. “Rain, transitioning to freezing rain, transitioning to snow with expected accumulations of 10-15 centimetres.”  That’s 4-6 inches for Americans, not a lot, but in the course of a normal Toronto winter, we can see deep snowfalls, then complete thaws, then sub-freezing temperatures that hit certain plants very hard.  Those vagaries are more challenging than a nice, cozy, insulating snow blanket that stays in place until March, like the one in the photo below taken in my garden a few winters back after a less dramatic snowfall than this year’s. Nevertheless, it’s what we have – and why books were invented, i.e. to while away these months before the earliest spring bulbs come into bloom.

If I stand on my verandah after a normal snowfall, this is my view of the pollinator island.  Most of the seedheads of the perennials – echinacea, sedum, perovskia – stand up well through winter, until I cut them all down in March in anticipation of the crocuses.

This is dense blazing star (Liatris spicata) that fed so many bumble bees in summer.

Purple coneflower seedheads were foraged by loads of goldfinches in the autumn and now clearly show off the “cone” of the capitulum.

I love the brown “shaving brush” seedheads of New York ironweed (Vernonia noveboracensis).

Every year I fill a big pot near my front steps with pine boughs, Magnolia grandiflora boughs with their rich copper-brown leaf reverses and bright-red winterberry boughs (Ilex verticillata).  Usually it’s covered by snow within a few weeks, but with melt-and-thaw cycles in winter it does add a little festive touch to the garden.

And when we get the Christmas lights up on the Japanese maple and around our front door, the plant silhouettes in the pollinator garden add a natural touch.

My old garden gate lost its sentry boxwood shrubs this June as we resurfaced the driveway. There was no way to move the whiskey barrels I’d planted them in way back around 1990, since the barrel staves had finally started to break and the 30-year-old boxwoods had begun to suffer.

From the back yard deck, my garden always looks lovely in winter…..

…..even somewhat nicely maintained, which is the miracle disguise of snow!  That’s my frozen lily pond in front of the lantern. The shrubs are the Hicks’ yews and that golden grass is Molinia caerulea subsp. arundinacea ‘Skyracer’.   Sadly, the crabapple tree was also removed this year, the victim of one of the many blights that hit certain Malus cultivars. I am giving some thought to what its replacement could be, but I do want it to be bird-friendly!

Speaking of birds, they do love the hemlock trees (Tsuga canadensis). I often see “my cardinals” against the green boughs, but it’s black-capped chickadees that make most use of the cones.

However, the most popular plant in my garden for birds is not actually in my garden, though I pay each year to have a lovely young man come by to shear it, below, once the border perennials have finished for the year and been cut down. It’s my neighbour Claudette’s long arborvitae hedge (Thuja occidentalis), aka “white cedar”.  As I’ve written before in my blog about designing a garden for birds, a tall, thick evergreen hedge affords wonderful habitat for birds – and it’s where “my” cardinal family resides, as well as unknown numbers of house sparrows in their own nests.

The other tree that shines in winter – and provides those red fruit for my fairy crown – is my Washington thorn (Crataegus phaenopyrum).  Birds of all kinds love the berries – and occasionally leave some on the branches so I can photograph the clusters with snowy little caps.

But winter arrives on the calendar in 6 days – even though it always looks like winter long before that here.  And like good old Saint Nick, I plan to do a little napping, plus a little reading, and a lot of photo-editing through the long months of winter that stretch ahead!  After all, that view from inside the house through the witches’ balls is very inviting!

Merry Christmas to you all, and I’ll return before New Year with my final fairy crown celebrating winter in my meadows on Lake Muskoka!

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Did you miss a fairy crown blog in 2022?  Here they are:

#1 – Spring Awakening
#2 – Little Blossoms for Easter
#3 – The Perfume of Hyacinths 
#4 – Spring Bulb Extravaganza
#5 – A Crabapple Requiem
#6 – Shady Lady
#7 – Columbines & Wild Strawberries on Lake Muskoka
#8 – Lilac, Dogwood & Alliums
#9 – Borrowed Scenery & an Azalea for Mom
#10 – June Blues on Lake Muskoka
#11 – Sage & Catmint for the Bees
#12 – Penstemons & Coreopsis in Muskoka
#13 – Ditch Lilies & Serviceberries
#14 – Golden Yarrow & Orange Milkweed
#15 – Echinacea & Clematis
#16 – A Czech-German-All American Blackeyed Susan
#17- Beebalm & Yellow Daisies at the Lake
#18- Russian Sage & Blazing Stars
#19-My Fruitful Life
#20-Cup Plant, Joe Pye & Ironweed
#21-Helianthus & Hummingbirds
#22-Grasses, Asters & Goldenrod
#23-Sedums, Pass-Along Plants & Fruit for the Birds
#24-Fall Asters & Showy Goldenrod for Thanksgiving
#25-Autumn Monkshood & Snakeroot
#26-Fall Finery

Fairy Crown #26-Fall Finery

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For me, autumn is a time of richness as the gardening season nears its end in an explosion of pigments and seedheads.  Those pigments, in particular, have always fascinated me and I made a concerted effort to use brilliant fall foliage colours in my own garden design.  So today’s fairy crown, the 26th, features the fall leaves and fruit of shrubs and trees in my Toronto garden in early November, including Japanese maple (Acer palmatum), Washington thorn (Crataegus phaenopyrum), burning bush (Euonymus alatus ‘Compactus’), barberry (Berberis thunbergii ‘Rose Glow’) and, draped down my front, a compound leaf of my black walnut (Juglans nigra).

Every year is a little different in terms of the parade of colour. Here you see my Japanese maple showing off its regular autumn leaf change as the burning bush hedge turns colour. In the pollinator garden, the ‘Autumn Joy’ sedum seedheads are ruby-red, but the fothergilla haven’t begun to change yet. The columnar red maple (upper left) that the city chose for my boulevard (I asked for one that turns red) has taken on its disappointing dishwater-yellow. Red maples, of course, don’t always turn red in fall.

In this photo taken a different year, the fothergilla in the pollinator garden is a rosy-apricot.  That’s catmint in the front giving a nice glaucous contrast with Russian sage and echinacea seedheads adding structure.

From across the street, my neighbours see my garden through the fan-shaped yellow leaves of my second boulevard tree, a ginkgo (G. biloba).  

If you’ve followed my blog for a while, you likely know that I’ve had fun turning those yellow leaves….

….. into ballet tutus of tiny dancers.

The Japanese maple (Acer palmatum) I planted in front of my living room window decades ago is a great joy to me. It’s the straight species with green leaves – in Japan it would be a common forest tree.  But in my garden, since there are no drapes on my front window, it forms a lacy curtain from spring (when bees buzz around the tiny May flowers) to fall. In very late October or the first week of November, the foliage turns a range of rich hues from yellow to apricot, scarlet and crimson.

The leaves are delicate, their branching exquisite. It’s no wonder they were the subject of the renowned Japanese woodblock artists like Hiroshige and Kuniyoshi.

As I’ve written before, my Japanese maple’s brilliant autumn colour lights up my living room in early November….

….. enhancing the glass witches’ balls I’ve suspended from the window frame.

And, of course, the leaves also provided me with an appropriate costume and landscape for my little geisha.  

If there’s a saying that “good fences, good neighbours make”, it can also apply to hedges – which was how I ended up making this hedge in my front garden more than 30 years ago. (My current neighbours are lovely!) Today, environmentalists tend to shun burning bush, given its invasive tendency in milder regions, but my hedge produces very few seedlings, unlike the Norway maples in my neighbourhood which are a scourge. And this neon display in autumn is truly amazing.

My belly dancer’s costume was made from the leaves of my burning bush hedge.

Though there’s no fothergilla in my crown, it is definitely a big part of the fall colour in my front garden.  In this photo made just before Halloween, you can see one of my shrubs has turned a rich burgundy-red beneath the Japanese maple.

The richer, more moisture-retentive soil in my pollinator island tends to produce orange and gold colours in the three fothergilla shrubs there.

Look at those colours! Who needs the spring flowers….

…. though they are lovely, if short-lived, in late May.

And, yes, I did harvest my flamenco dancer’s multi-colored skirt from my fothergillas.

Turning colour a little later in the front garden is my paperbark maple (Acer griseum) with its red trifoliate leaves.

Moving into the back garden, you see Boston ivy (Parthenocissus tricuspidata) cloaking the driveway gate.  I didn’t plant this vine, nor did I plant all the Virginia creeper vines that pop up throughout the garden. That’s Mother Nature’s role and she’s very enthusiastic about it (!)

I confess that I wanted the Washington thorn tree (Crataegus phaenopyrum) in my garden long ago purely for its multi-hued fall leaves.

But it turned out to be a wonderful tree for bird life – IF the birds can out-compete the squirrels for the fruit. The robin, below, managed to do that, but so have cedar waxwings and cardinals.

Here you can see the range of autumn colour in the foliage of Washington thorn.

When we bought our house in 1983, the native black walnut tree (Juglans nigra) on the property line between us and our next-door neighbour was already mature. In the 39 years since then, it has hosted raccoon families in the crook of its trunk, carpenter ants in its bark and countless cardinals practising their song in its branches.

Our bedroom sits right under the tree, but we seemed to have missed the obvious ramifications of putting a skylight in our ceiling – particularly when windy nights in September roll around and the roof is pummelled with billiard-ball-sized nuts. Though the skylight has proven strong, we’ve replaced two car windshields since the tree’s branches — and nuts — extend far over the driveway.

The walnuts are enjoyed by the neighbourhood squirrels….

….. but the natural dye in the husks creates an unbelievable mess.

The arborist has told us the tree has rot in the trunk, but my neighbour and I have had it cabled and pruned away some of the branches over our houses to reduce the nut fusillade. It is our tree, after all, it gives us shade and we feel a duty to keep it – thus its inclusion in my 26th crown. 

I don’t really notice the ‘Rose Glow’ barberry (Berberis thunbergii) in my back garden until it turns rich crimson-red in autumn – then it’s a show-stopper. It’s another one of those shrubs that environmentalists shun – especially in milder U.S. regions where it seeds around freely. I haven’t seen one seedling in my Toronto garden.

I have a fairly new addition to my back garden:  a little sassafras tree (S. albidum). which I wanted especially for its fall colour.  This autumn – admittedly one of the best for colour in many years – it has begun to display the reds, corals and yellows for which it is known.

Those colours, by the way, are on leaves that exhibit three distinct shapes:  elliptical; mitten-like and three-lobed.  This is what they look like on my light table.

Designing with and celebrating fall-colored plants and shrubs is my way of expressing my appreciation for nature’s yearly preparation for winter, as it cycles through the yellow/orange “accessory” carotene pigments in the leaves of certain species to harvest and synthesize as much sunshine as possible, once the ‘green’ pigment chlorophyll breaks down in cooler temperatures. Red colour is from anthocynanis. According to the USDA, “Anthocyanins absorb blue, blue-green, and green light. Therefore, the light reflected by leaves containing anthocyanins appears red. Unlike chlorophyll and carotene, anthocyanins are not attached to cell membranes, but are dissolved in the cell sap. The color produced by these pigments is sensitive to the pH of the cell sap. If the sap is quite acidic, the pigments impart a bright red color; if the sap is less acidic, its color is more purple. Anthocyanin pigments are responsible for the red skin of ripe apples and the purple of ripe grapes. A reaction between sugars and certain proteins in cell sap forms anthocyanins. This reaction does not occur until the sugar concentration in the sap is quite high.”   Because the reaction requires light, you often see leaves (or apples) fully exposed to sun that are red while those parts that are shaded stay green or yellow, like these Boston ivy leaves on my fence.

I love making the leaf montages that celebrate these pigment changes, like the one below from leaves in my garden.

A few years ago I even held a photography show called “Autumn Harvest” featuring a number of my leaf montages.

Finally, this week as I walked out onto my front porch and gazed into my garden, this is what I saw– a multi-hued tapestry that shows that nature is the best designer of all. It’s my reward for a gardening season that began seven months ago with the first snowdrops and will soon come to an end with the first hard frost.

******

My year of fairy crowns is soon drawing to its wintry finale. If you missed a few, here they are:

#1 – Spring Awakening
#2 – Little Blossoms for Easter
#3 – The Perfume of Hyacinths 
#4 – Spring Bulb Extravaganza
#5 – A Crabapple Requiem
#6 – Shady Lady
#7 – Columbines & Wild Strawberries on Lake Muskoka
#8 – Lilac, Dogwood & Alliums
#9 – Borrowed Scenery & an Azalea for Mom
#10 – June Blues on Lake Muskoka
#11 – Sage & Catmint for the Bees
#12 – Penstemons & Coreopsis in Muskoka
#13 – Ditch Lilies & Serviceberries
#14 – Golden Yarrow & Orange Milkweed
#15 – Echinacea & Clematis
#16 – A Czech-German-All American Blackeyed Susan
#17- Beebalm & Yellow Daisies at the Lake
#18- Russian Sage & Blazing Stars
#19-My Fruitful Life
#20-Cup Plant, Joe Pye & Ironweed
#21-Helianthus & Hummingbirds
#22-Grasses, Asters & Goldenrod
#23-Sedums, Pass-Along Plants & Fruit for the Birds
#24-Fall Asters & Showy Goldenrod for Thanksgiving
#25-Autumn Monkshood & Snakeroot