Crazy Fall Months Ahead?
Article and photos by Monika Smith
We work hard to extend the flowering season in our gardens. We wait anxiously for those early spring blossoms and hope we have flowers late into October.
Fall is beautiful, and people hit their yards to do one more thing before saying enough, “good night, dear garden, hoping to see you in the spring!” But then we have Snowtembers or heat or downpours, a white wallop in October. Early snows can freeze-dry leaves that can hold snow to the point of breaking branches. While these two months can be very exciting for the wrong reasons, we end up with winter yards that are sometimes white, usually brown.
Let’s love our winter yards; we need a good think about what winter aesthetic means. It is more than covering a yard with outdoor Christmas lights or plastic glow in the dark statues.
As usual, I’ve looked at what’s standing in our naturalized parks for inspiration. Of course, evergreens are central to showing winter prettiness. Some shrubs can look very good in winter as well. Two examples of native shrubs include red osier dogwood (Cornus cericea), with red stems and white berries, and the underrated snowberry (Symphoricarpos alba), with bright white berries in winter.
If cutting everything back to look tidy is in your DNA, maybe change a spot. Leave a few flowers standing. If they have sturdy stalks, their fall and winter forms might be a treat to see and the insects, birds, and other critters will thank you for the refuge, shelter, and food.
Big public gardens such as The Highline in New York, and others, no longer cut back in the fall. Instead, they wait for the teensiest bit of green to show in spring before giving the forbs and grasses a haircut in a frenzy of cutting back, replanting, and evaluating in a very short two-week period.
My wild and lush yard this year did a lot of new and different things. Some plants grew to be astonishingly large: those rains fell at the right time! The blanket flower (Gaillardia aristata) reseeded itself and grew in interesting spots. My fireweed (Chamaenerion angustifolium), which usually tops out at a meter, was over two meters tall. I actually had to pull a few to give some light and space to other plants. Many of my native plants survived wind, hard rain, hail, hot sun, dry days, and cold nights. All those plants will be left as is for shelter, food, and adding winter appeal.
Take a walk throughout the fall and winter in a nearby naturalized park and look at what’s happening to the shrubs, grasses, and flowers. Enjoy how they evolved from a live, green plant to an architectural form.
Join us in developing our community association yard into a beautiful, colourful, restful, and healing area. Contact me if you have any wish list ideas. We are working hard with experts to give us the best advise us to go forward.
Until next time,
from Monika’s Grove
Editor’s Note: Just a reminder that as Calgary moves out of Stage Four water restrictions, stay tuned to City information regarding the ability to return to outdoor watering. Consider the information in this CBC article about helping your trees through drought and into winter. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/calgary-drought-tree-health-arborists-1.7295912. Tips include watering trees and surrounding soil as deeply as possible to encourage deeper root growth, and to mulch over the root zone.
Blanket flower in summer.
Blanket flower in winter.
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