It’s official. It’s fall. The signs are everywhere.

I can’t wait to add some fall pix to my time-lapse stack.

Love the way this hybrid hazelnut colors up next to the driveway.

The ornamental grasses are coming into their own.

More colchicum. Looks like I have four decent patches, three different varieties.

Aconitum (monkshood) finally flowering, a sure sign of fall.

Elephant ears starting to lose their chlorophyll, with a little backlighting.

Apologies for the sparse posting lately. Life has been hectic. Here are some images from a quick walkaround on Saturday morning.

Heuchera flowers.

Clematis

Pulling back, lots more purple with the clematis: Hosta, Astilbe

South bed: Echiinacea, Daucus, geraniums, amorphophallus, coleus.

Same bed, opposite angle.

Aloe flowering. First time that’s happened to me. Guess it will die and the pups will take over in that pot?

Closer …

Paeonia tenuifolia blooms twice.

Rescued Pepperomia.

I’m often amazed by what springs forth from the compost pile. But this year I have an amazing potato, mustard and tomato crop coming.

Container cluster is coming along despite the cool weather.

From Sunday’s walkaround. I find Nigella to be a most improbable flower.

Closer …

From Sunday’s walkaround …

Come visit the flower research and demonstration area at the Department of Horticulture’s Bluegrass Lane Research facility, featuring more than 1,000 varieties of perennial and annual flowers — many new or just coming onto the market.

Everyone is welcome from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on July 25 and 26. Bluegrass Lane is located off Warren Rd. near the Robert Trent Jones golf course northeast of campus. (See map.)

For more information, contact Melissa Kitchen: mjb239@cornell.edu

For a preview, visit the Bluegrass Lane Annual Flower Trials website.

Like Nectaroscordum, this annual packs a lot of colors in a small space. I’ve grown it a couple times in the past. I think I’ll have to move it up into the ‘grow every year’ category.

When I saw these shots from scattered spots around the garden on the thumbnails page, I wished that I’d put them all together in one place in the garden, too. The whites and purples work well together.

Verbascum. (Don’t know the species, but it’s seeding around nicely.)

Closer view

Cerinthe major

Purple-flowered tradescantia

White-flowered tradescantia

Purple-spotted foxglove

Another view.

A shrub whose name escapes me.

The verbascum I opened with, along with some Verbena hastata coming on. If the Verbena speeds up and/or the verbascum slows down, could be a nice pairing.

Coleus

Astilboides tabularis, tradescantia, Oenothera tetragona.

Whiskey barrel water garden.

If memory serves, this is a Paeonia tenuifolia I grew from seed. Ants on the bud already.

Lamium

Mertensia

Violas amongst bulb foliage.

You might want to start with Part 1.

July

July started with a rare vacation away from home, to my brother’s lake house to celebrate my Dad’s 80th. On the boat with my sister Cheryl and wife Elly …

With Cheryl and Alex after a good morning of striper fishing.

Back home, it’s midsummer and there are lots of great serendipitous plant combos to enjoy, in the wet garden …

… and front garden.

Enough plant material to do bloom day scans in four different color schemes.

Out in the garden, lilies …

The rusty favorite, Digitalis ferruginea

Exploring backlighting.

Lots of gaudy flowers to shoot. Hibsicus at Cornell Plantations …

Filipendula.

Lily

Plus my 15 minutes of fame in USA Weekend.

August

Jade rolling under a double rainbow ’bout sums up my feelings about August.

Larger image.

They say things start slowing down in the garden in August. Can’t say I’ve noticed that. There’s lots growing around the patio, but still not much time to sit.

Still plenty of flowers to shoot, including Daylilies, purple …

… and yellow …

… Rosa ‘Princess Di’ …

… buttonbush …

…globe thistle …

… water lily …

One of the bloom day scans for the month.

I also defended heucheras.

August has nice sunsets, too.

September

OK. The pace does start to slow in September. But it’s still one of the best times of year in these parts, if not the most floriferous.

The colors are more subtle, like this anemone.

My favorite bloom day scan featured grasses, not blooms.

I featured my four (that’s a stretch) water gardens in the month’s Garden Bloggers Design Workshop.

And on a rainy day, I discovered blingee.

October

October is the month of frost and fall color. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t still some flowers around, like my fall favorites, anemones.

Abutilon pictum ‘Thompsonii’

Grasses carry the weight in October.

Fall colors start coming with Polygonatum odoratum ‘Variegatum’

Ivy outside campus store.

First frosts provide great photo opps …
Asian pear in the veggie garden.

Pitcher plant

Backlit grasses usher in brown season.

November

Fall color is where you find it, like this pitcher plant …

… and this bittersweet and borrowed scenery.

When there’s less to see looking down, you appreciate more the view looking up.

January came in November [impressions | the real thing]

I visited the Winter Garden at Cornell Plantations as the light was waning.

December

Check out the student projects from Cornell’s Art of Horticulture class.

Glowing greenhouses make leaving work after dark a little less depressing during these SAD-inducing months.

And I’ve now got a passable scan for December for my planned 2010 garden scan calendar.

Thanks for visiting and commenting. Best wishes for the New Year.

The obligatory (and hopefully entertaining) look back …

January

Not much happening in the garden, so it was a good time to think about ordering seeds and plants (unfortunately, they’re more than 5 cents a pack these days, unlike these old packs) and sharing stories about the great bowling ball accident of 2003.

While there were no blooms (or scans), there was surprisingly much to photograph on a very warm January garden bloogers bloom day.

February

February is for forcing.

And time to fiddle around with PhotoShopping that month’s bloom day scans and chase away the merry blues with Manu Chao.

Had a sunset picture grace a CD cover.

Read and reviewed Tulipomania. Added my two cents (and a ton of pictures) to the Garden Bloggers’ Design Workshop – Color in the Garden edition.

March

I love March, if only for its excitement. There are the forced bulbs in flower …

The first of the spring ephemerals …

Then back to winter, hell and high water.

By Easter, plenty of signs that spring is on it’s way …

Then more snow. There’s a reason they’re called snowdrops, you know.

April

Speaking of snowdrops, April brought the open house at snowdrop collector Hitch Lyman’s garden.

And the spring ephemeral peak at my place. Crocus …

Puschkinia.

Hyper-spring also brings scilla …

… and erythronium.

And by the end of the month, a bazillion daffodils, these at Nina Bassuk and Peter Trowbridge’s annual open house.

May

Spring continues full bore. Purple primrose …

Thalia daffs …

Sakuraso primrose …

…an iris from Marcia’s garden …

… and many more in this bloom day scan.

In the world of art, Quilter Lisa Ellis used one of my canna images for this work of art …

… Cornell students built this Turfwork! project …

… and Durand Van Doran built this fabulous floral gate — roots and all — in Minns Garden outside the building where I work.

And we are reminded that there’s nothing new under the sun.

June

Some theme posts in June, because there’s so much to cover you’ve got to do some lumping. One on openings …

,,, another on chartreusey stuff …

… too many blooms on bloom day to fit onto one scan …

… actual bloom day pictures to go with the scans …

… East Digitalistan …

… and decent images of aruncus (finally!) …

… summer songs …

Mussolini was a-shavin’ whistlin’ tarantella,
Stalin was keeping eye on barbeque.
When their fish line bell started to jingle,
Mussolini caught a-nothin’, Stalin caught two.

On the art front, Cornell graduation turf art …

I tried to push back on the bland reporting on leaf casts in the garden media, and reported on the infamous Memorial Day jello contest.

As we head into the second half of the year, these alliums in Minns Garden outside the building where I work are all ready for 4th of July fireworks.

Part 2 starts here …

This year’s crop, from Hortus Forum, Cornell’s undergrad plant club.

[backdated from 12/21]

David Waugh, leaf-caster extraordinaire at the improbably named Morningwood Farm Nursery and Garden Center, left a comment on my post last June, The secret to great leaf casts.

David’s leaf casts, like the petasites leaf above, are inspirational. One of my new year’s resolutions is to make some more next summer.

From the KPL greenhouses this week …

More from the weekend image dump …

Abutilon pictum ‘Thompsonii’ (I think. Finally looked it up tonight by googling variegated abutilon and mostly got images from my own blog.  And discovered I’d been misspelling it all these years.)

Slightly different view.

Up close.

Bittersweet

Sanguisorba tenuifolia (Burnet)

Cornell University’s Department of Horticulture (where I work) held it’s annual floriculture field day last week. Part of the program was the 5th annual Kathy Pufahl Container Competition.

There were more than 40 entries this year, hauled in from all across New York by field day attendees. The contest honors the late Kathy Pufahl, who founded Beds and Borders, Inc., Laurel, N.Y. She was a staple on the horticultural educational seminar circuit, spreading her container ideas far and wide, helping to change the way the horticulture industry looks at the spring container business.

View winners and other entries.

Some images from the weekend, which included a very short tour of Cornell Plantations with some old family friends in town for a visit. Plantations is worth a visit if only to see the container collections right off the parking lot.

Some hot hibiscus blooms at Plantations.

And some nice lilies.

Every year this border right outside the education building is a little different. And every time I marvel at the skill that goes into its design and execution.

A favorite vignette from the border, including ricinus and beets.

Another view of the containers.

Some scenes from around the home garden. Red astilbe.

The back sunny border.

Allium, artemisia and jewelweed.

Some blooms. Ligularia.

A hybrid hazelnut I got from Phil Rutter close to 20 years ago.

A bunch of filipendula closeups. Cotton candy.

I know, bloom day isn’t until Tuesday. But I had some time on my hands last night to work on these and time tonight to post them. Sorry to jump the gun. Holler if you want IDs. There are some weird things in there.

Click on images for larger view.

Whitish:

Pinkish:

Purplish:

Warmish:

Carol over at May Dreams Gardens found some seed packets dating back to 1886 when she was going through her seeds the other day. I didn’t see any ‘packed for’ dates on these, but I suspect they’re older.

(I always thought ‘Australian Brown’ was a table wine.)

And this is what I’ll be using to fertilize the veggies this year:

As you may have guessed, these are actually vintage seed packets from my friend Marcia’s collection. I’ve still got a few packets left from my Y2K purchases, but Carol’s 1986 packs beat me by more than a decade.

I broke down and did a quick scan this morning during the lull between the storms. Lunaria and bittersweet. Lots of my favorite grasses and perennials still standing in their tan and brown glory. But little in the way of bright colors we associate with ‘blooms’.

… that Julie over at the Human Flower Project chose one of my images to add to her tribute to the late poet Jon Anderson.

If you like flowers, you’ll love her website.

Oh yeah. Heavy frost last night. The banana tree is mush. It will be a dahlia-packing weekend this weekend.

In the 30s here last night.  It looks and feels like fall outside, and everything looks (as jug band musicians say) ragged but right on the scanner.

Whites, including Sorbaria (reblooming again this year), Eryngium yuccafolium, Eupatorium purpureum ‘Joe White’, Artemisia, Miscanthus.

Dahlia, Solidago.

Aconitum, Ligularia, Physostegia, Achillea, Lantana, Chelone, Verbena bonariensis.

Ditto above with some wild Eupatorium thrown in.

Hastily prepared August scans. But this time of the year, it’s not hard to pull together four scanner-beds worth.

Albutilon, Veronicastrum, Hibiscus, bloodleaf:

Eupatoriums, coneflowers, goldenrod. I have no clue what the yellow flowers are. The grow on 6-foot plants that a neighbor gave me.

Liatris, hosta, butterfly bush, dahlia, lantana, viola, Persicaria (’Firetail’ I think), Telekia?

Phlox, perlargoniums, spirea, fuscia, dahlias:

Surfeit might be a little strong. Let’s just say there’s purple everywhere I look this time of year. Click images for larger view.

Coneflowers, of course.

In the front gardens, purple clematis amongst the goatsbeard and wild grape, and hosta flowers. (They’re not just for foliage, you know.)

Hibiscus moscheutos in the wet garden, dahlia in patio pot.

And the wetland is just loaded with Joe-Pyeweed. (I’m sure I’ll get around to my tribute to Eupatorium in the next week or so.)

I’m actually early to the party this time. With rain headed our way, I thought it good to go ahead and do this month’s scans. Click images for larger view. Apologies for lazy nomenclature and mis-IDs.

Update [7/15/2007]: As Layanee and Carol both pointed out, there’s a big article on scanning in the latest Horticulture (which has been sitting in my huge stack of unread gardening magazines). It’s by Ken Druse, so you know it’s gotta be good. (Print’s not dead. Sign up for a free issue of Horticulture.)

Monarda, Asian lily, sedum, spiraea, lychnis, Rosa ‘Cuisse de Nymphe’, allium, daucus, stachys (the other one), Scotch thistle.

Astrantia, viola, sorbaria (about to pop), verbascum, sedum, that weed that looks like fried eggs, digitalis, Verbena bonariensis, Verbena hastata, coneflower, teasel, rock garden campanula?, wild composite (aster?).

Digitalis, Asian lily, allium, astilbe, monarda, sorbaria (popped), astrantia.

I’m late to the party again. Sorry. Seems like it wasn’t long ago that I had to scour the garden to come up with a single scan. Now I just pick a couple themes and fill three scans without covering half of what’s flowering.

Mostly pinks and purples: Peonies, bearded iris, bearberry, violas, dame’s rocket, pinks, willow.

Larger image | Original scan

Mostly whites: goatsbeard, nectoscordum, persicaria, daisies, violas, bishops weed, arrowwood, anemone, columbine.

Larger image | Original scan

Mostly grays: artemisia, Scotch thistle, verbascum, plume poppy, hosta, lambs ears, begonia.

Larger image | Original scan

Too many things blooming to fit them all on one scanner bed, so here are the blooms from the cool side of the color wheel, more or less. (The warm blooms are here.)

I did them with a dark and light background. Take the poll below to let me know which you like best. Click on images for a larger view.

Too many things blooming to fit them all on one scanner bed, so here are the blooms from the warm side of the color wheel, more or less. Larger image.

Actually, we’re home again. The laundry is done. The lawn is mowed. And the rescued tulips are still in flower. (Pix and post coming soon.)

On to Florida landscaping …

What is this green shit you call grass? I recall now the admonition from my grandmother the first time I visited Florida as a teenager: “This is no place to go barefoot.” It’s green. You mow it. But it’s really not very inviting.

Haven’t I been reading about Agapanthus as a hot new plant the past couple of years? Judging by the landscaping around the condos, it’s a freakin’ groundcover on the order of Sedum ‘Autumn Joy’ here in the Northeast. Doesn’t mean it’s not a great plant. But I could have plucked a dozen plants and no one would have been any the wiser.

I love palms. I don’t care that they’re everywhere in the landscape and stacked on flatbeds headed for the next new development. If I could grow palms here, I’d do it. Growing Amaryllis outside is pretty cool, too.

The PGA tournament at Sawgrass (spitting distance from Nate and Trista’s place)  gave the whole trip an even more festive atmosphere. Even I knew about the incredible 17th hole with the island green in pond and I don’t follow golf at all.

Update: Pix from the trip are at Elly’s picassa gallery.

From a couple of weeks ago, some fuzzy close-up that I couldn’t resist fiddling with. Sometimes PhotoShop captures what you can’t get with the camera.

Diego Rivera 1925. Just because I like it.

And when Diego had to pay the bills, he also used calla lilies. (Retrato de la Señora Natasha Gelman, 1943)

In winter, I’m a sucker for sites with pretty pictures. If you are too — and you want a sneak preview of some new annuals — check out this site: Annual Flower Research at Bluegrass Lane, Ithaca, New York

Full disclosure: I helped develop this site at work, though one of our research technicians, Melissa Kitchen, has taken over the reins at the site.

Every year, Bill Miller (our bulb and flower expert in Cornell’s Department of Horticulture) gets seed of annuals that are just coming onto the market. He and his staff grow them out and make observations through the summer, and industry folks come look at them during our floriculture field day.

But you don’t have to travel to Ithaca. You can see what these flowers look like through the season right in your browser.

I’m not big on annuals.  But I liked the Phlox Intensia series ‘Lavender Glow’.

Go explore.

I rediscovered a bunch of images I’d taken and prepared for blogging last September, but never had time to put them online. The scenes came as quite a shock, now that I’ve gotten used to the snowy landscape. Will try to get the rest of the images — mostly vignettes of favorite plants and combos — over the next few weeks as we countdown to spring.

Click on pix for larger images.

View from the bathroom window, now under that curvy drift in the winter images.

Border and containers.

The container cluster, which is now the container stack in the winter images. Brugmansia, cannas, elephant ears, dahlias.

Expanded water garden, which finally froze over about 3 weeks ago. Hope the fishies are doing OK.

An older PhotoShopped image I did a couple years ago. I lost the Nigella, but I still have the image.

Larger image

I tried a new morning glory cultivar this year, ‘Mt. Fuji’. At first I thought the foliage was diseased, but it’s just got an interesting mottling to it. I put them in a container and they’re climbing a trellis Marc made on the east side of the house next to the driveway.

I generally grow cannas for their foliage, but the flowers on these are pretty nice too. They’re in containers this year (including a big, heavy concrete/hypertufa one I made last year to resist blowing over), but plan to put most of them in a bed next to the water garden next year where they should stay nice and wet without watering them every day or so.

Ricinus communis (Castor bean)

A friend once asked me why I bothered growing castor beans. Well if not for the foliage, the architectural form, or those cute fuzzy seed pods, maybe it was just to make sure I got on a terrorist watchlist somewhere for being a regular purchaser of seed.

The plant is highly poisonous (hence deer-resistant) and the beans can be processed to make a very potent poison. (A local seed company reported a big sale of seed to some guy who turned out just to be disturbed, not dangerous.) From the Cornell poisonous plants website:

In 1978, ricin was used to assassinate Georgi Markov in 1978, a Bulgarian journalist who spoke out against the Bulgarian government. He was stabbed with the point of an umbrella while waiting at a bus stop near Waterloo Station in London. They found a perforated metallic pellet embedded in his leg that had presumably contained the ricin toxin.