On the morning of January 1, 2013, I will brew a cup of coffee, open my garden journal and record the temperature, the color of the morning sky, and what plants (if any) are blooming in my winter garden.  This year Hana Jiman Sasanqua camellias, coneflowers (Echinacea), feverfew and hardy salvia are still blooming in our relatively balmy temperatures. I have been keeping a garden journal for the past ten years.  I began my first journal in January, when my garden was reduced to its “bones”, and I could view it without the distractions of flowers and shrubs in bloom.  This clear view allowed …

In these last days of the year, as darkness falls earlier and earlier, we try to lighten our spirits by festooning our homes with sparkling lights and evergreen boughs. We gardeners scour our gardens for natural decorations, and trade with our gardening friends for those special beauties not found in our own yards. I am lucky to live on a wooded lot replete with rhododendron, mahonia, juniper, eastern white pines and a magnificent magnolia. I have a number of large rosemary bushes and two lavender bushes that can easily yield up some fragrant boughs. I trade cut branches of these evergreens …

Although the cold weather has not yet arrived in our area, it soon will. When the bleak mid-winter weather begins to get us down, there are blooms to lift our spirits. The amaryllis is one of these blooms. Cultivate an amaryllis now and you will be uplifted by its extravagantly large flowers in the dark days of February. The most commonly encountered bloom is fiery red in color, but amaryllis (spelled the same whether singular or plural) also come in white, candy stripes and even lavender. Amaryllis bulbs have just arrived in all the garden centers and big box stores such as Home Depot, Lowes…

Garden leaves have been raked (mostly) and incorporated into the compost bins. Spring blooming bulbs have been planted. It is time for the gardener to transform outdoor containers into winter gardens.  If you live in the Northern Virginia area, your garden is most likely dominated by the shade of lovely oaks, tulip poplars and other large deciduous trees. Gardeners in our area can maximize available sunshine by incorporating large containers planted with annuals and perennial bloomers into garden beds or hardscaped areas like patios and driveways. But what does the gardener do with these …

When we gardeners refer to the good “bones” of our gardens, we are not talking about this month’s All Hallows Eve decorations, a new composting element, or the occasional remains of a vole or field mouse we might find. The “bones” of a garden are the elements that are permanent and that provide its structure: trees, shrubs, arbors, walls, trellises, walkways, and statuary or other sculptural elements. They represent the garden as it appears when the growing season ends, when the color and texture provided by blooming plant material is muted by snow and bare earth. The garden’s bones are the …

My mailbox has been blooming[1] with bulb catalogues for the past few weeks. Lovely color photos of daffodils, tulips, scilla and grape hyacinths are spread out like a bouquet across every horizontal surface of my kitchen.   Like many of my other gardening friends, I have been busy cutting back perennials and otherwise getting the garden ready for its winter rest, but I have seized a few minutes each day to peruse the bulb catalogues for spring bloom ideas. It seems counterintuitive as we diligently work to put our gardens to bed, but autumn is the time to choose and plant spring blooming …

It is the perfect time of year to talk about composting. Leaves have begun to fall, and gardeners are cleaning up and cutting back spent flowers and other plant material in the garden. Composting this material is the ultimate step in sustainable gardening — returning nature’s bounty to our garden soil. I have been an enthusiastic composter for the past 10 years and have watched as my gardens thrive and my carbon footprint shrinks. Compost is produced when organic matter such as garden, lawn and other organic waste is broken down by bacteria and fungi. Compost incorporated into your garden …

Summer’s end finds this gardener hard at work preparing the garden for fall …taking inventory of what worked and what fizzled; cutting back any plant that has finished blooming or is diseased; and preparing the beds to receive new perennials. I am taking advantage of the cooler September weather to divide overgrown spring and summer blooming perennials such as black-eyed susans, daylilies, peonies, Asiatic lilies, moss pinks and yarrow. Dividing these overgrown perennials will result in healthier plants and provide me with free plant material to fill in bare areas in my garden beds. Dividing …

In my last column, I wrote about August as the perfect time to assess your garden, eliminate plants that did not perform well this season and determine what new plants you might choose to fill in the “holes” in your garden beds. After assessing my own garden, I have decided to completely eliminate the last small bit of lawn and to plant more hardy salvias, hardy hibiscus and a new crepe myrtle to fill in my garden “holes". My front lawn will now become a fieldstone-and-pea-gravel courtyard with enlarged side garden beds and a central circular garden bed. I have fallen in love with a large …

Gardening in the hot, muggy days of August can seem like a marathon. We gardeners can only dream of sitting in our lounge chairs, sipping lemonade and enjoying the fruits (and vegetables) of our summer labor.  Enjoy that cold drink in the afternoon after a day of assessing your garden this month — which plants did well and which plants did not. My garden beds are currently decked out in a riot of yellow blooms (rudbeckia), orange blooms (Echinacea) and blue flowers (salvia 'black and blue'). These plants did well despite the heat, humidity and lack of rainfall. I will keep these standouts and…

The summer of 2012 has become the summer of the begonia. These hardy plants have supplanted impatiens as the go-to bedding plant for sunny as well as shady areas.  Drought, hot temperatures and a horrific case of downy mildew have left impatiens stunted and diseased ridden, but wax begonias (begonia semperflorens) have remained fresh and profusely blooming. Begonias are a popular choice for both indoor and outdoor gardening. They can bring a stunning variety of leaf forms to container gardening, and depending on the type of begonia, the blossom can bring a pop of form and color. The website …

Throughout this hot, oppressive summer, I have come to rely on a cheery morning greeting from the daylilies in my garden. My bank of daylilies has been steadily sending up blossoms since late May with seemingly no regard to the high temperatures and sporadic watering. Daylilies are very hardy perennials that belong to the genus Hemerocallis and are not true lilies. The term hemerocallis comes from the Greek words hemera (day) and kallos (inherent beauty), and the term is apt — each flower opens to reveal its beauty for only one day.  Luckily, each plant produces a succession of flower buds …

It’s been a hot time in the garden this past month with more heat to come. We are more than seven inches below normal rainfall. This trend may continue for the next few years. Consequently, I am looking for a dependable flower that will tolerate heat and scanty rainfall and still bloom most of the summer.  Black-eyed susans (rudbeckia) fit this bill—they begin to bloom in June and continue right through September if I remember to do an early June pruning. As dependable as rudbeckia are, however, the only color they contribute is yellow, and I would like to add more color to my flower beds. My…

As we clean up the fallen limbs and windswept debris from our yards left by the ‘derecho’ that stormed through here Friday night, we must be careful to drink plenty of water and try to avoid the hot sun. Better yet, do as little as possible until the heat wave passes. This advice is good for the garden as well. Plants suffer from intense heat; that ‘wilted’ appearance gardeners are seeing today is a result of the effects of transpiration (a process similar to evaporation). Plants try to cope with intense heat by drawing up more water through the root system. This water is then released …

My latest passion is growing herbs in ornamental pots. I began, like many gardeners do, by purchasing ceramic pocket pots, the kind of containers with pockets for parsley, thyme, oregano, etc. After a time, I realized that I needed a larger scope for my herbs and began to see the design possibilities of evergreen rosemary bushes and lavender. The unexpected demise of the boxwood I had featured in two large urns flanking my front porch led to my planting rosemary in their place. I combined the rosemary bushes with cascading thyme and sage plants for color and textural variety. I have found …

This is the last of a series of columns dedicated to the pleasures and surprises found in gardening in the cool of a shady garden. In previous articles, I discussed the types of plants that grow best in filtered shade and dappled shade. This article is devoted to plants that work where the sun almost never shines — dense, deep shade. Residents of the Potomac River corridor can escape the heat of summer in the shade of the woodland areas that run along the river and its tributaries. The large leafed tree canopy and evergreens in these areas can result in conditions where the understory growth …

In the past two weeks, I’ve been exploring the kinds of shade that might be found in a garden: filtered or partial shade, dappled shade and deep shade. Last week I wrote about the satisfaction that a gardener can have in choosing versatile plants for an area that gets primarily filtered or partial shade.  This column will focus on areas that get dappled shade — the kind of shade that occurs under the canopy of large-leafed trees or evergreens. It is also the kind of shade that is a welcome respite from summer sun and heat and where a constantly moving shade pattern protects under-story plants…

The past week of temperatures higher than 80 and sweltering humidity have reminded me just why I love the breezy shade of my back gardens. My shade gardens grow down the slope of a hill and under the canopy of several 75 to 80-foot red and white oaks, numerous maple and beech trees and a couple of redbud trees. At this time of year, most of these back gardens are in full shade, although the sun does trace a line of filtered light through the trees as it crosses the sky during the day. I spend a lot of the summer out of the sun on this breezy slope and, consequently, have figured out which …

Nancy Burns has decided to retire from the Gardener’s Garden column so that she can spend more time in her garden, and with her husband and new cat. She has left a standard of garden advice which will be hard to follow, but as an equally passionate gardener, I look forward to being its caretaker, and will continue to share information on horticulture with you, including local gardening opportunities and sources. I am a master gardener, vice president of the Belle Haven Garden Club, chairwoman of the landscape committee at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, and author of …