Mill Pond Garden shares tips for fall favorites
Mill Pond Garden, a holistic public botanical garden located near Red Mill Pond, shares ideas and recommendations for fall. There will not be an open garden day this October due to damages from the long, cold, blustery conditions caused by Hurricane Ian. Cape Region crops, gardens and ground-water wells welcome the much-needed rain.
Recommended plants for this time of year include hardy and annual chrysanthemums, sweeps of native white frost aster, native blue mistflower and blue salvia, all loved by pollinators. Other early fall successes are the last big flush of roses if fertilized well a couple weeks back, angel trumpets and native deciduous hollies for berries ripening to color. Hummingbirds are attracted by camellia winter star in bloom now, and the fall-blooming vines of cardinal flower, mina lobata vine and hardy native southern jasmine. Also enjoyable in early fall are the last native hibiscus flowers and ornamental grasses in bloom.
Chrysanthemums, concliniums and asters are the blooming stars of the autumn garden. The old-fashioned hardy chrysanthemums, which are perennials, bloom about twice as long as the annual chrysanthemums sold in box stores. All morifolium chrysanthemums, the mound-shaped ones seen everywhere in fall, used to be winter hardy, meaning they will survive the winter cold and resume growing in spring. However, plant breeders bred hardiness out of them and made them annuals, killed by the first frost.
Now is the time to plant hardy mums and asters, and most other garden plants, shrubs, trees and perennials. Autumn is ideal for planting because it is followed by cool temperatures which roots prefer for growth and establishment.
Mill Pond Garden assures local gardeners that many non-native plants are excellent choices if they offer benefits to pollinators and wildlife. Many herbs, such as parsley, have tiny, flat flowers favored by beneficial pollinators, ones that also prey on the bad bug pests in gardens, so it’s good to let herbs go to flower and seed. Parsley is outstanding for native black swallowtail and tiger swallowtail butterflies to lay eggs on for caterpillars. Wildlife needs all the help it can get.
About lawns, less is more. Make beds bigger and reduce lawn size to be eco-friendly and wildlife friendly. Lawns cost more effort and money to maintain than beds, which provide food, shelter and habitat for wildlife. Many best-informed and discerning gardeners have given up on monoculture turf lawns as not only difficult, chemical intensive and expensive, but as biological deserts with no living soil microbiome to knit the whole of the garden together. Even crabgrass looks good when mowed. Try growing a lawn of tall fescue in sun, fine fescue in shade, with some white clover seeds mixed in the whole for a lawn that will forever be full of life, self-feeding and no fertilizer needed, since the clover will produce abundant nitrogen for the grasses. Areas like this can host more than 200 native bee species, ants, worms and a host of other small creatures.
For more color, add some seeds of short meadow flowers. Learn to love dandelions. If so-called weeds come into the lawn, consider that they are there for a reason, better suited and needed by the microbiome, like dandelions bringing minerals to surface plant roots and to adjust soil acidity or basicity. When mowed, it is all quite satisfyingly green. The eco-world could benefit from a new way of seeing beauty and value, converting monoculture lawns to naturalized meadow lawns. Fall is the ideal time to get things done.
