Why am I inside?

It was 70 degrees and sunny today, the first week of November, in Chicago. And I spent it inside.
Yesterday I got a ride in the country, and today I had to pay for it with a day in front of the computer. I have more than 500 bulbs to plant, but tomorrow I'm going to a business meeting in a hotel conference center. The only gardening I've done this week is watering the houseplants. How did it all go so wrong?

Just not ready to plant bulbs

Once again, I was out in the garden today and couldn't bring myself to plant any bulbs. I have them -- have a list of them (more than 600) by species, cultivar and bloom time -- have a plan in writing for where each blessed one is to go in the garden -- all in writing. Have every bulb-planting tool known to man, of which all I ever use are a trowel and a shovel. But I just couldn't do it.

It didn't feel like time yet. The air was not crisp and bracing. Most of the leaves haven't begun to turn, apart from the stray 'Autumn Blaze' maple or gingko here and there. Despite day after day of drizzly rain and night after night deep into the 40s, there are brave little pink flower buds on the pot of impatiens on the patio table. The coleus has shriveled up and died, but the elephant ears, the geraniums on the stoop and many of the other annuals I've been waiting for frost to kill are hanging tough. The turtlehead and toad lilies are still blooming their hearts out, along with the goldenrod, Russian sage and lobelia out back in the sun. In my beds, everything gets packed tightly, and I cannot bring myself to cut down and clear away blooming perennials to make room to dig holes for bulbs.

I needed something to do to keep me out in the sun and fresh air today, so I got out the pole pruner and whacked back as much suckering growth as I could reach from the gnarly old mulberry over the patio and and the weedy Norway maple that keeps trying to make my part-shade bed into full shade. There was not a sign of leaf color on any of the branches that I brought tumbling down.

To plant bulbs, I need some physical cues, the way a poinsettia responds to day length and a crocus sprout responds to soil temperature. I need a frost to kill the impatiens and make them yucky melted green stems instead of brave little flower buds. I need colorful leaves cascading from the maples and the hackberry and the elms and the oak. I need to need to do some raking before I can tuck scilla bulbs into the lawn. I need a chill in the air that requires a turtleneck and a layer or two. I need to be able to ruthlessly yank out annuals that have died and hack away perennials that have gone dormant. It helps if there's a whiff of smoke in the air late in the afternoon from the neighbors' first wood fire.

I was pruning in a T-shirt this afternoon. T-shirt weather is not bulb-planting weather. It just won't do.

Now, I realize I am taking a risk. Warm as it may be (some days), the later it gets in October, the greater the risk of a sudden Arctic cold front that freezes the soil and leaves me with a lot of bulbs on my hands. Like that year (was it last year? the year before last?) when we got nearly a foot of snow the first week in December and me with hardly a bulb planted. I seized on one of those January warm spells (Chicago weather is nothing if not various) to scrape away mulch and shove bulbs into the chilly muck. A few of them bloomed.

Even if we don't get slammed, unless I get the bulbs in the ground soon they won't have many weeks to work on their root systems before the ground freezes up sometime during Advent. Every day they are out of the ground they risk drying out or getting moldy. And if I don't get them planted at all, they won't get the 14 weeks of winter chill they need to know to bloom next spring.

But I feel like I am caught in a gardener purgatory. All of the summer tasks are finished; all of the preparation-for-fall tasks are finished. I'm ready. I want it to be time for fall tasks -- collecting and shredding leaves and stashing them away, tucking up the dormant elephant ear tubers, planting the Narcissus 'Bridal Crown' and 'Tete a Tete' and 'Mount Hood' and the Allium ostrowskianum and Chionodoxa and the 'Elegant Lady' lily-flowered tulips. Can't I have a freeze please?


Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe .

All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.

Toad lilies, a small pleasure of fall

Isn't that a lovely little thing? It's a toad lily. It blooms for me every October, just as the petals of the Japanese anemones have fluttered away. There are dozens of these little purple-spotted orchidlike flowers--about an inch across--growing up stalks with handsome shiny dark-green leaves. The plant thrives in shade, with no attention except top-dressings of compost. Planted by the front walk where I can pause to enjoy it, the toad lily gives me something to look forward to every fall.

I don't know what species of Tricyrtis this is -- my mother gave me the clump years ago, and she didn't know. Probably Tricyrtis formosana or Tricyrtis hirta. But if you're interested, Richard Hawke of the Chicago Botanic Garden did an evaluation of Tricyrtis species a couple of years ago; find his report here.

Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe .

All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.

The march of the houseplants

The autumn redeployment is underway. The houseplants are on the move.

About this time every October, I feel like armies could be moved with less effort. And yet I've been doing it for more than 15 years.

There are about 18 plants, more or less, that make the descent every spring from the third and fourth floors of my apartment building to the garden. They live in plastic pots, some of which slip into terra-cotta containers of various shapes around the patio or spotted under trees or in the beds. Others are disguised by coir liners in hanging baskets around the patio.

In spring, it's a lovely feeling. The plants are pretty sad after a long winter in north-facing windows. They are dusty and thin for lack of sunlight. They've been gasping in low humidity and heated air. Some may have spider mites or other afflictions. I feel like I'm liberating them, moving them out into the sun (well, shade) and the cleansing rain, out where predatory bugs can clear up the mites and aphids. Some I repot if they need it. I know they'll grow green and happy through the summer and be lush and full by fall.

I've usually taken a bunch of cuttings and rooted them over the winter to use for annual containers and underplanting: purple heart vine as a groundcover where the jack-in-the-pulpit dies away, variegated spider plants to take over a shady spot after the Virginia bluebells yellow and droop. These plants do fine beneath trees and between buildings because most of them are understory plants in their native tropical forests. That's why they can stand the shade of a Chicago interior.

It's the autumn retreat that is such a struggle. As the nights hit the high 40s, I know I'd better get it done. I dither for a week or so. But these are tropical and subtropical plants, and even when it doesn't downright freeze, such low temperatures are tough on them. So I try to get all this done at least a couple of weeks before the likely first frost.

First I have to make some hard choices. There are only so many windows, even north-facing windows, in my apartment, so only a few of the once-hopeful cuttings will make the cut. And always there's a plant or two from last year that fails the acid test: It's just not worth carrying back up three flights of stairs.

I've pretty much saturated my neighbors, family and friends with houseplants, but I'll try one more time to give some away. The scorned will be left to their doom in the first frost.

Next I have to scrounge through the collection in the basement to find the right size of basket for each of the chosen ones, and make sure each of these cachepots has a functional plastic liner to catch surplus water. A pinhole leak can be a major headache.

This year, as most years, I couldn't do it all in one day. I got the plants as far as the back porch stairs and gave out. They sat there, stationed step by step, for almost a week. I kept telling myself that they were at least too high to be killed by a ground frost.

None of these plants is anything special. I have no rare orchids or remarkable bromeliads. I don't know any of the cultivar names and have never bothered to try and figure them out. You could pretty much match the collection at any Home Depot. These are plants that are, obviously, not fussy.

But they are friends of mine. We've been through a lot together. We have a history. I know who gave me the foxtail fern and the cuttings for the spider plants and the prayer plant and the cactus and the begonia, although I could never remember all the many folks I've given cuttings to. I remember who I was with when I bought the staghorn fern. I remember every house and apartment the ficus and the arrowhead have ever lived in, and the people who spent time with me there. Some of these plants are decades old.

So when I get the plants upstairs (as I finally did last night) and arranged on their various tables and windowsills (which I have not; they're all on the dining-room floor) they won't just be air cleaners or sources of oxygen. They won't just soften my decor. They won't be just a taste of nature or a glimpse of summer in the depth of a Chicago winter. They are companions, protectors, memory-keepers. Like memories, they may dwindle and grow thin. Some will be lost. But most will live with me until it's spring again.

Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe .

All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.

Rain at last

We've finally had rain -- and the right kind: long, slow and soaking. I counted less than an inch in my yard, but that's an inch more than we've gotten in the last month or so. I take full credit: I finally broke down and set up a sprinkler on the lawn yesterday, first time I had watered the lawn all season. So of course it rained. You're very welcome.

I don't think anything, even the grass, has really suffered much from a few rainless weeks. We had so much rain earlier in the summer that there was a deep reservoir of water in the soil. I just succumbed to a primitive, atavistic urge to water the lawn. I feel like an ex-smoker who's backslid. But hey, the president is having trouble quitting too.

Here's hoping that there is plenty of good rain the next couple of weeks, and then a couple of nice dry weeks in early October so I can plant the couple of hundred bulbs I have already accumulated. I have planted bulbs in the rain; I have planted bulbs through melting snow in a warm spell in January. But that is not my choice of bulb-planting conditions. Dry and sunny, between 50 and 55, with migrating geese honking overhead, please.

Plants do need watering in the fall. A lot of people sort of give it up on it as the season dwindles and the plants lose their blooms and leaves. But even though the top growth has died back the roots are still growing. Evergreens resist winter kill much better if they have lots of water stored in their needles and root systems. Any tree or shrub planted in the last two years, and any perennial planted this year, needs diligent watering going into its first winter, because it probably hasn't had time to grow a big enough system of feeder roots to glean enough water from rainfall.

Bulbs need watering too. They go into the ground dormant, but then they need to immediately start growing roots, I was recently told by Scott Kunst, who owns Old House Gardens in Ann Arbor, which sells heirloom bulbs. They need those roots to store enough water to get going in spring. And if they don't get water in fall they can't grow the roots. So it's important to plant bulbs in well-drained soil, but it's also important to water when you plant them and keep watering regularly until the ground freezes.


Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe .

All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.