The Green Thumb

By Cheryl Doyle Kearns

Fall chore time is here again! Bagging fallen leaves, perhaps enjoying a bonfire, going leaf-peeping, visiting
the State Fair, grabbing bargains from the perennials sections of your favorite garden center, and adding bulbs and new trees or shrubs are all a part of the master plan for fall. 

If they haven’t already, the cardinals will soon have eaten the bright red berries of the dogwoods. To attract these bright red birds, now is the best time of year to add a dogwood to your garden. Dogwoods transplant best during the cool, moist season of fall. Apart from the pink, red (really a deeper pink), and white natives, there are cultivars of the native dogwood (Cornus florida) with showy fall leaves, such as “Cherokee Chief” and “Cherokee Sunset.” 

A non-native and equally beautiful dogwood is the Kousa Dogwood, which is more drought and sun tolerant than our native species. It too has shades of deep maroon red to brighter red fall leaves. The bloom time is closer to June than April, extending the length of season of bloom on these stately trees. If you look for cultivars (plants named because of specific attributes, such as profuse bloom, growth form, or fall color, for example), the choice is amazing. 

One of the most prolific bloomers is called “Milky Way.” The tree is so consumed by large flowers that you can hardly see the leaves. Apparently several trees carry this name, but all have parentage which ensures the prodigious amount of flowering.

A favorite tree in my garden is a Kousa Dogwood with white and green variegated leaves. Cornus kousa “Wolf Eyes” grows between 6’ and 10’ tall, very slowly, and the bracts (blossoms) are as delicious looking as the foliage. The leaves sometimes have a slight pink edge on them in the fall just before they fall off.

Another variation of the Kousa Dogwood, which I saw last year in a South Carolina garden in mid-June and immediately lusted after, is Cornus angustata Empress of China™. It is evergreen and the leaves are longer and narrower than the Kousa Dogwood, with a slightly glossy tone. In winter here it will likely turn a purplish blotched color, but it is an evergreen. A small tree, it will only reach about 12’ – 15’ in height, and the bloom time is six – eight weeks. (Look for it on the market in Spring 2006 through the mail order catalog from Klehm’s Song Sparrow Farm and Nursery. Their website is www.songsparrow.com and you can write for a catalog at 13101 E. Rye Road, Avalon, WI 53505). 

The Pagoda Dogwood, a native, (Cornus alternifolia) is on my personal wish list, too, for the shape of the branching. Like other dogwoods, it forms layers of branches, but the tips of this one rise slightly, reminiscent of the tips of the Japanese pagoda from which it gets its common name.
If you have room, an interesting dogwood known as the Bigleaf Dogwood (Cornus macrophylla), is well worth having just for the size of the leaves. It won’t overtake your garden, though, as it only reaches 25’ to 35’ high, but the leaves are up to 7” long – quite spectacular. The fruits are reddish purple to reddish black. While not easy to find, it is another dogwood worthy of the search, for the bark in winter is a lovely smooth gray, becoming slightly furrowed with age. Another advantage is that this tree doesn’t bloom until July or August, adding a yellowish color to the shade garden when little else is in bloom.

If it’s berries you want for winter interest, look for a variety of shrubs called beautyberries. They are multi-stemmed shrubs that are deciduous, so when they lose their leaves in fall, what you see are stems of purple or white berries. They bloom in late July. Some have bluish tinged leaves, and one has a white and green variegated leaf. 

The American beautyberry (Callicarpa Americana) has groups of bright purple or white berries clustered around the joint where the leaf stem meets the branch. It looks like rings of Christmas decorations all up and down the branching. Best of all, this native shrub performs well under pine trees in the southeast. Left unpruned, this shrub will reach 10’ or more.

A smaller, daintier beautyberry, Callicarpa dichotoma, stands at about 4’ tall and is covered in numerous, small, deep purple berries. Two cultivars are worth searching for: “Issai,” which fruits heavily even as a young plant, and “Early Amethyst,” which bears a lighter purple berry early in fall. There is a white form, but it turns brown much more quickly than the white of the American Beautyberry.

So now you may have decided to plant a tree and a shrub this fall. What about a new perennial? There is a whole range of new colors in the world of coneflowers – from soft, bright yellows to oranges to double purples. Coneflowers are an easy plant to start with if perennials are new to you or the soil seems to be too difficult to work with. Once established, they are happy in relatively dry soil if you have worked in a little compost and/or soil conditioner. They bloom profusely from June until a hard frost kills them. Try leaving a few seedheads; to see a goldfinch swaying on a stalk in December is truly a thing of beauty!

Still got those containers left over from this summer? Time to plant some new types of pansies in them. Put some small tulips and early daffodils under the pansies, and in spring wait for the surprise! 

Lastly, add a good book to your wish list for Christmas. One of the best I’ve come across in a long time is The Perennial Gardener’s Design Primer by Stephanie Cohen and Nancy J. Ondra. There is a plant listed for just about every difficult site as well as an excellent encyclopedic list of plants with good photos. The best part, however, was the “dirt-under-the-fingernails” description of what worked in each of their gardens, told with honesty and considerable humor.

Cheryl Doyle Kearns is a member of the Garden Writers of America. She frequently lectures on gardening topics and teaches horticulture through Wake Technical College’s evening program. She is the perennials buyer and does landscape design work through Martin House and Garden in Youngsville. In her spare time, she tends a garden of unusual and rare plants at her home in Franklin County.