6 on Saturday – 23NOV2024

Chris Mousseau

Snow has fallen on points south, north and west but the ground is still bare here. I can still wear shorts on mid-day runs even while my neck enjoys being coddled in a buff, and there is still some lovely fall colour in the garden even if it’s mostly provided by foliage rather than flowers. The leaves of Geranium sanguineum ‘Max Frei’ in particular puts on a lengthy autumn show.

The ornamental switch grass I keep dividing and planting all over the yard is on its way to a wintery brown but for now is holding on to a lovely golden shade. And with its leaves fallen, the paper thin, cinnamon-hued bark of my small paperbark maple – Acer griseum, is easily spotted peeling away from trunk and limb.

There are still a few happy surprises in the garden – Rosa ‘Friesia’ keeps blooming away, no longer bothered by beetles or earwigs:

And, for some reason, this Spiraea thunbergii ‘Ogon’ has sent up the odd tiny white flower amidst its really beautiful orange-yellow-reddish leaves:

A sixth notable thing in my garden today – and you can see six things in gardens around the world by checking out Jim’s site, here – is rather sad. Emerald ash borer, an invasive beetle that feasts on and eventually kills ash trees, has been making its way up and across this part of the continent in recent years. The dozen or so lovely, large trees on my property are all dead or close to it, and over the past few weeks a neighbour has been helping chop and cut up a few of them for firewood. Ash burns beautifully in the fireplace, and there’s a small fire going as I write this now, so it’s not entirely doom and gloom. But still…

19 Comments

  1. What beautiful autumn color! I was especially interested to see your geranium leaves. Our tiny native Carolina geranium also has leaves that turn reddish in cool weather. I spotted the leaves long before I knew what the plant was, or had seen a flower.

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  2. I love the red flash of geranium this time of year. It is sad about invasive insects damaging our native trees. We just talked to a tree landscaper about removing our hemlock hedge 😭 having lost the battle with woolly adelgids. Ugh!

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  3. Emerald ash borer is supposedly not here yet. I thought I encountered it years ago, and now that I think of it, I can not remember what the problem was. Ash is not such a common tree here, and the native species do not dominate their forests. They tend to grow mixed with other more dominant species.

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    1. We have a lot of ash, and many municipalities used them as street trees as well. Now, driving around the countryside in summer, you see large swaths of dead trees and realize how important they were in the ecosystem…

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      1. Did the same happen to elms years ago? I would say that nothing like that happens here, since both ash and elm are not so prominent, but Sudden Oak Death killed countless native coast live oak and tanoak in the late 1990s.

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  4. So many colors to admire! Hue of Paperbark maple is gorgeous…cute little spirea flowers. It’s amazing that roses keep blooming. Too bad that the Ashes haven’t developed a chemical to deter the borers.

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  8. Wonderful autumn colour Chris. I have heard about the ashes dying off over the Atlantic and can only hope the cycle will soon be broken and new trees will be able to grow again one day.

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  9. Sorry about your ash trees. I had two removed when I bought my house. Never even bothered to see them leaf out. The wood, or some of it is under my vegetable garden. Every ash in my city that was alive when I moved here in 2017 is not dead, unless the owners opted to treat them. Most did not. Most were 50+ years old too, but luckily we have a lot of diversity in neighborhood trees, so we will not have the problem that Dutch Elm disease caused in the neighborhood where my husband grew up, Every tree in his neighborhood was an elm, and they all died. Great that you still have roses! I have Calendula and that is about it,but lots of seeds for the birds,

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