Kiss the Earth

Was that a gorgeous weekend or what? The only thing missing from the last big blowout of summer was...rain! A nice downpour would've made my Labor Day, for sure. Reflecting on another season's worth of gardening, I remember spring as one of the most beautiful I've known and summer as (mostly) hot, humid and water-less. While raking leaves yesterday, I wondered what fall will bring.

My street is lined with London plane trees, which are early leaf-droppers and already had deposited an ankle-deep pile for the length of the block. I now have two huge contractor bags full of dry, brown leaves to crunch up in my new leaf-shredder, which sits unassembled in the garage. A project for another day.

If that activity signalled the end of summer, new lettuce sprouts and red- and yellow-stemmed "Bright Lights" Swiss chard seedlings are hanging on to the waning warmth and light. Succession planting is a new adventure for me, and it's very exciting to think we'll have fresh lettuce and chard, just like early spring.

Meanwhile, the bulb catalogues are rolling in. It's getting dark at 7:30 p.m. The kids are heading back to school. Sure was fun over the weekend - there were parties and dinners, get-togethers with family, neighbors, friends and lots of good food.

That, not to belabor the point on this Labor Day weekend, was a lot of laboring!

Don't know if you read New York Mayor Bloomberg's remarks at Brooke Astor's funeral a few weeks ago, but I was struck by the cleverness and on-point quality of what he said:

And within a few weeks, in parks and gardens across our city, fittingly enough the asters will be in bloom. They're the last flowers of the season, and they show us that often it's the fullness of time that brings out the best in nature-and in people as well. Their elegance-and that message-will remind us of Brooke.

Having been away for awhile, I returned over the weekend to a garden clearly on the downside of the season. It's still colorful and beautiful, especially in weather like this, but now is aster time, for sure. Blossoms on my 'Purple Dome' New England asters are coming alive, like blinking eyes, each day bringing forth more small purple blooms with golden centers.

The shrubs are truly domed, giving these plants a pleasing fat-mushroom shape that contrasts nicely with the short and tall alike that surround them. It's fun counting the open blossoms day by day, even more fun to remember the sight last summer of so many purple domes all around.

They're a great surprise, one of many this year. I shouldn't be surprised; the asters show up every year. But somehow I forget in my autumn gloom that this garden isn't finished just yet!

Not at all.

Asters aren't the very last flower to bloom in my garden. Still to come are some lovely camelias and monkshood, but Mayor Bloomberg was certainly correct when he spoke of the aster's elegance. There's something about these old-fashioned beauties that is simple, symmetrical, full-bodied and quietly colorful.

They make the downside of the summer gardening season go down a little easier.

I've always been fascinated by plant names and the stories behind them, which are usually very interesting and often downright peculiar. Take Harry Lauder's Walking Stick. What the heck is that? I never heard of this oddball tree until five years ago, when I discovered it growing in my new front yard.

Who was Harry Lauder? and what's with the walking stick? It's quite a story. And since I learned about it, the world has become divided into people who know about Harry and his walking stick and people who don't. One who knows - a man named Ed - visited with a friend from New York recently. Ed happens to be a folklorist.

We ended the evening with a walk past this curliqued tree and Ed asking what it was. When Harry Lauder's name came up, the folklorist in him must've shouted for joy. He brightened.

Before I knew it, Ed launched into a Harry Lauder ditty - might have been "Roamin' in the Gloamin' " - with a thick Scottish brogue. Wow! Was I impressed. And shocked. Wasn't expecting that! and I kind of hope the neighbors heard Ed's performance. It was almost a Harry thing to do - spontaneous and fun and silly as all get out.

Yes, Harry was quite a character, an immensely popular Scottish comedian/singer who performed while leaning on a distinctive crooked cane made of Corylus avellana 'Contorta' - the corkscrew hazelnut or contorted filbert. He cut quite a figure, and was a big star on vaudeville circuits in England, Scotland, Australia and the U.S. He came from humble beginnings but in his lifetime hobnobbed with the likes of Winston Churchill, who reportedly said Harry was the "Scotland's greatest-ever ambassador."

Harry the minstrel died in 1950. Harry the tree can get quite tall -- 10 feet or so. My Harry is a bit of a midget, sprawling more to the sides than up and down. He's a weird little thing, kind of cute in a creepy way, especially in winter.

But Harry the tree's time has come. Previous stewards have hacked it pretty hard and whether that's responsible for its feeble demeanor now or not, it's clearly not doing well. Time to come out and be replaced by something else. A native raspberry, perhaps, which will be great to look at - but in a different way.

It'll be much more pleasing to the eye. Won't be contorted. Won't be a nut. Then again, it likely won't have nearly the story that Harry Lauder did. Then again, we could make one up.

Friends have raved about this plant for years but this is the first summer I had it. Bought two, actually, and made them the centerpiece of a large dark gray planter on the patio that sits in a good bit of shade. My choices of companion plants were OK - there are some nasturtiums and climbing geranium and a few pink snapdragons - but live and learn, right? Next summer I'll definitely want more Stobilanthes dyerianus. It looked very dramatic against the gray of the planter and really brightened a shady part of the patio. Maybe I'll get smarter and luckier in finding companion plants in shades of silver, pink and blue-green.

Although you'll read that Persian shields do best in full sun, these had none of that and are quite large. I'm thinking how nice they'll look repotted and brought inside for the dining room window sill over the winter. The dining room has a lot of those colors - teal, purple, rose. Can you picture that?

I consider this one of the happier discoveries of the past summer, which was not the greatest in my garden. In fact, it was a complete disaster for tomatoes. Last year we had enough to share with the world. This year, I went begging.

I put the tomatoes in a different spot, to give the raised bed a rest, but it was the same exposure and (I thought) the same amount of sun. Perhaps it was the extreme heat and dryness, but the tomatoes never took off. I'm still getting cherries and other smaller varieties, but I've had only about a half-dozen good-sized ones.

That's been the worst thing about the summer, and while I've enjoyed good local tomatoes from farmer's markets, it's just not the same.

Wish I could take those tomato plants inside for the winter and coax them along, but there's no way they'd survive. The Persian shield, on the other hand, I'll enjoy till it's time to put it back outside in spring. Which at the moment seems a long way away ...

Tomorrow I'll be jetting off to Oklahoma for a conference of garden writers, to return the following week - I hope - with lots of new ideas. It'll be fun to visit gardens in a different part of the country. Maybe these folks will have suggestions for beautiful plants that can withstand the Dust Bowl conditions we've had on the East Coast these last few summers. Will let you know.

Meanwhile, I leave you with an update on the "blinking eyes" asters mentioned in an earlier posting. They were just beginning to open when I wrote that. Now, these big mounds of purple buds are opening by the clusters every day. Thank goodness.

They're a welcome and cheery sight, placed among the spindly sticks that used to be plants in my garden!

So off I go to Route 66 and the heart of the Sooner State. As a friend said recently: HAVE RHINESTONES, WILL TRAVEL.