November is a Great Month for Planting

If you are like me, you are always daydreaming about Spring. Specifically, all the wonderful bulbs and flowers that return each year like old friends. On these cool autumn days, I'm plotting and planning for the next year, and purchasing some perennial bulbs to enhance my yard.

Now let me preface this by saying, "do as I say, not as I do"... For all the gardening books advise careful planning based on the desired bed you want to create. Essentially everyone says, start with a plan! While I do admire and appreciate a carefully designed bed with rivers of color and symmetry, that style of gardening just isn't me. I prefer the hodgepodge aesthetic, or more euphemistically speaking, the "natural" look. However, nature is rarely randomness and chaos, for, with years of observation, one begins to see the patterns and repetition. Some might regard my aesthetic as "messy", but I see it as pragmatic. I discover what works, and carefully edit the space. And going forward, I'm always selecting for my desired "look" removing weeds and reining in aggressive plants.

But I must concede that it is important to have at least some kind of plan. Examples include knowing the timing of flowering, especially if you want to create color combinations, estimating the size of your planting area, how many bulbs do I purchase? and importantly, the care and maintenance of these plants moving forward. All bulbs have an "off-season", a period of time after flowering when they don't look so great. Yet by layering with other plants that bloom at different times, you can mitigate the relative unattractiveness of the fading bulbs.

Even more importantly, you can also reframe the way you see them by learning to love the "ugly". What I mean is, not seeing it as ugly, but understanding that it is just an essential phase of nature. A time for a different purpose. Flowers evolved to attract insects and other pollinators, when a plant exits this phase, it enters seed and fruit production. Learning to love the whole lifecycle of a plant can awaken us to tremendous, previously unexperienced natural beauty. Wholeheartedly embracing this tenet has helped me cope with so many aspects of life, not just gardening.

But I digress... After you've determined the area you want to plant, it is now time for the fun part! Picking the bulbs and plants. For in my boring life, few things are as exciting as shopping for plants! But I would advise having a budget in mind because as I know first hand that buying plants can become an addiction! So with that in mind, here are some of my favorite nurseries I'd recommend for spring bulbs. Here in the south, it is so important to know what bulbs work, and those that don't. I can't possibly cover all of this here, and this is a lifelong lesson. But suffice it to say that many plants just don't like our climate, so it is advisable to do some research and determine the best cultivars/ species for our humid zone 7-8. These are some online nurseries I'd recommend: Old House Gardens, Plant Delights Nursery, Terra Ceia Farms, Southern Bulb Company, & Bulbmeister. I'm sure I'm leaving someone out, but this is a good place to start.

So enough with today's ramble... Over the next few weeks, especially on those dreary days when you feel down, think about all those wonderous flowers that grace us with their presence if only for a few weeks in spring. Now is a great time to prepare for those days, but we shouldn't also forget to embrace the beauty of this time. Fall is amazingly beautiful. Go out and savor it!