Fall Stars

I’m going to start this post with a picture of asters, because if you’re talking about fall in the garden and spend a lot of time with native plants, you just have to get the asters out of the way.

Yup, those are asters all right.

Asters are one of those plants I resent for most of the year, for taking up all that valuable real-estate all spring and summer that could be used for something exciting, and then they explode into glorious masses of blue and lavender and I love them somewhat grudgingly until frost.

There are, however, more asters in heaven and earth than New England and New York (Symphyotrichum novae-angliae and S. novi-belgi, respectively.) I have lately become enamored of the Blue Wood Aster, Symphyotrichum cordifolium, which forms tall wands covered in tiny blueish-pinkish-whitish flowers.

"Blue" may have been an overly optimistic name.

I did not expect to love this plant as much as I did. It grows in wet and dry, sun and shade, and makes a nice transitional plant between the sunny parts of the garden and the shady bits. (Okay, that was the nursery’s suggestion. I do not think in terms like that. I stuck it under a piece of yard art that resembles a heron made out of a trombone. It does actually sit in an area that’s sort of transitional between sun and shade, but there is not nearly enough planted there for it to transition between anything but mulch and more mulch. Still, it’s been an unexpected delight.) But enough of asters! Moving on!

Small! Cute! Yellow!

Willow-leaf sunflower was another surprisingly delightful little plant. This is the dwarf form, which runs about a foot tall. As the non-dwarf form can top eight feet, I feel the vague guilt of someone who has just seen a Chihuahua bred out of a timber wolf, but it’s still a marvelous plant at the front of the sunny border. (More nursery talk. I am not sure what my “border” is bordering. It’s a kidney-shaped bed in the middle of the front yard. I wedged the sunflower between a hyssop “Heatwave” and some zinnias. Then I had to keep cutting down the zinnias because they weren’t giving it any sun.)  The only down-side was that, from a design point of view, it throws bright yellow composite flowers at the time when everything else in the garden is also throwing bright yellow composite flowers, and when they faded, after three or four weeks, the flowers were dead and vanished more or less overnight. Nice while they lasted, though.

American holly, "Yukon Gold."

Fall continues apace in my garden. Being that this is North Carolina, fall lasts until sometime in February. I have seen white Christmases here, but I have also seen Christmases where it was ninety+ degrees for a week and we wassailed in Bermuda shorts. (Well, somebody probably wassailed in Bermuda shorts. Although that might be illegal in this state, unless you’re married. I’m pretty sure you’re not allowed to wassail within 100 feet of a school or daycare, anyhow.)

Given that fall frequently lasts forever here, the leaves may or may not turn. Sometimes they stay green right up until a hard freeze and then they all turn brown and vaguely embarrassed and fall off.  Up in the mountains you get good fall color, but down here, it’s a crapshoot. One hysterical red maple in my yard has gone completely, violently scarlet, but the other maples are still green and are looking at the red one with the deep loathing reserved for neighbors who put their Christmas decorations out in mid-August.

Leaves and flowers aren’t the only striking things in the fall garden, of course. Other than the asters and the eternal zinnias, I am actually somewhat short on flowers at the moment—the goldenrods have mostly finished up, owing to a couple of days of flower-stripping rain, and the coreopsis, while still blooming, are definitely past their prime. The salvias are still going strong, of course—Salvia greggi is a glory and delight well into November around here—and there are still a few roses, but compared to the riot of spring and summer, the garden is much more subdued. The big pollinator draw at the moment is the non-native calamint, which is usually covered in honeybees. Occasional monarchs flit through and inspect the tropical milkweed that I grow as an annual, (which are loaded with bright orange aphids) but they seem to be making a fuel stop rather than raising another generation.

Fortunately the berries have risen up to finish out the season. American beautyberry has its completely unreal clusters of purple around the stem, false indigo puts up large black seed pods, and the American holly is going strong. Well, “Yukon Gold” which has orange berries is going strong. The winterberry or sparkleberry or whatever-the-heck berry that I planted three years ago got completely denuded of berries early this year. I assume that somebody was hungry. The orange one, however, is covered in berries. The cardinals will eat them eventually, but they usually leave them on the bush until after frost, when I think they get sweeter or softer or something.

The grasses are also in their glory—river oats has turned golden and the seedheads whisper in the slightest breeze, and the pink muhly grass sends up frothy plumes that could probably be called pink in the right lights. (They do better backlit. In their current position, the seedheads look colorless. I have seem marvelous displays of muhly grass, and then I come home and sigh a lot. I can’t blame the plant. It didn’t stick itself in the ground there.)

American Beautyberry. This looks like something you'd buy at the craft shop.

So that’s fall in my garden. We might get a hard freeze soon, or we might not. I could be harvesting beets in December. All part of the adventure of living in the South…

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