Though summer seems to drag on interminably, gardeners know that August marks a transitional period.
The garden is hinting at the signs of change — one we will all welcome. The thermometer may be near 100, but plants are the garden's barometer. There is a seasonal clock that triggers the beginning of autumn flowering, and it is a better indicator of the season than any calendar.
One plant that tells me that the high tide of summer has peaked is the cardinal flower (Lobelia cardinalis). This brilliant red spike is a beacon in wet meadows and on the sides of mountain streams. It is a favorite food of the ruby-throated hummingbird, which will guard a population jealously once they are discovered.
Wet spots are becoming particularly floriferous this time of year, especially in mountain areas where Joe-Pye weed is supporting towering heads of dusky pink flowers and ironweed adds the perfect complement of deep purple buttons.
If you can accommodate their size, many of these plants would make an attractive addition to your home garden. A few of our natives may already be there. The perennial asters found in our borders started out as native varieties. Most took a trip to England where breeders taught them to be more colorful and better behaved. Like a lot of these native plants, asters can scarf up as much space as your typical shrub. But there are smaller versions such as Purple Dome, Woods Purple and Woods Pink that are a more manageable size.
The shade garden is also starting to show some signs of life after a long dormant period following the leafing out of the trees in spring. Two notable perennials that are showing signs of life are toad lilies and Japanese anemones. They couldn't be more different in flower design. The Japanese anemone is a simple composite flower full of grace and charm, and the toad lily is a complex, convoluted thing with spots and color variations that are more what you would expect of an orchid.
The Japanese or fall flowering anemones tend toward the pink, rose and white scale. They are upright, spreading and have five petals, sometimes doubled, to form open-bowl-shaped flowers with a distinct central button of stamens. Some folks find that these plants can be aggressive, marching over their gardens and engulfing wide swaths of ground. Many varieties of these have been derived from a complex and confusing group of hybrids.
In my garden, some have been blooming for a week or so, and others are just beginning to get the idea. They should last until the fall begins in earnest.
You can appreciate a mass of anemones from afar, but to fully appreciate a toad lily, you have to get a little pollen on your nose. The complicated, knobby flowers appear on arching, ladderlike plants that appreciate shade. They are most often spotted, dark purple on lavender, rosy pink on pale pink or liver colored on white.
They hold an odd fascination about them that is somewhere between beauty and oddity. Tojen is perhaps the most common and is blooming in my garden now. It is not spotted but rather suffused lavender over pale cream.
Toad lilies seem like the perfect plant to collect. They are easy and cooperative and put on their show when much of the shade garden is sleeping. Neither brash nor showy, they are the sort of thing whose intimacies a gardener could invite a guest to discover while winding through a late-summer garden.
Even if the weather denies it, the daylight hours that trigger these flowers to bloom have reached their zenith and tell their own story. Autumn is on its way.
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