Charlie’s Early December Newsletter
We’ve recently returned from visiting our daughter in Melbourne, Australia. She’s in Veterinary School there and it’s the first time seeing her in 2 years. It was a 2 week whirlwind tour of Melbourne and Southeastern Australia. She was very excited about showing us the city and the beautiful national parks around the area, and especially the exotic Australian wildlife. Of course, we spent time in some of the public gardens there and I highlight some of the plants we saw in this newsletter.
We saw lots of holidays lights in Australia, but of course, no holiday trees… at least not live ones. In our New England region, there are plenty of live holiday trees to cut for decorating indoors and some you can save and plant outdoors after the holidays. I talk about live holiday trees and decorating them for the season in this newsletter.
We returned to cold temperatures in our zone 5 garden so it’s time to protect some of those tender perennial herbs and roses in our garden. We have lavender and some hybrid roses that would appreciate winter help and I highlight how to protect these plants here.
It’s also the time for my annual End of the Year Gardening Webinar Sale. Webinars are a great way to spend the dark days of winter learning and dreaming about gardens in spring. I have 20 webinars available for sale. To make it easier to choose, I created packages of themed webinars from my library and you can purchase them, at a greatly reduced price, from now until the end of the year. Check out more about the webinar packages below.
Until next time, I’ll be seeing you in the garden.
Charlie
One of the fun activities in our household this time of year is purchasing a live, cut holiday tree. We’re fortunate in Vermont to have many holiday tree growers, so we can cut our own or select a pre-cut tree to decorate. There also is the option to purchase a live holiday tree in a container to plant outdoors after the holidays are finished. The first step, though, is to decide what type of live tree you want to cut or purchase. There are many on the market and each have certain advantages.
Balsam has a great fragrance. Blue spruce has stiff needles, but can drop needles in a warm room. Scotch pine has stiff branches and needles that stay on the tree even when dry. White pine has soft, long needles and weak branches that can support only small ornaments. And there are small evergreens that can double as houseplants. Try growing a lemon cypress, rosemary or even a Norfolk Island pine as your holiday decoration this year.
When purchasing a pre-cut tree make sure it still is fresh and won’t drop needles excessively in your home. The best tip is to lift the tree and tap the bottom of the trunk a few times on the ground and see if any needles drop. If so, move onto another tree. When you get the tree home, re-cut the bottom of the trunk and immediately put it in fresh, cool water. Keep the water tray filled. The cooler the room, the longer the tree will stay fresh.
Another option is to purchase a landscape tree that will double as a holiday tree for a week or so indoors, before planting it in your yard. Check local nurseries for tree options. Once you bring it home, place the tree in a protected spot outdoors where it won’t freeze, such as as shed or unheated garage. Dig the hole where it will grow while the ground isn’t frozen and store the soil in a protected spot where it won’t freeze. Leave the tree there until a few days before your holiday. Then bring it indoors into the living room, place it in a large container to hold water and the root ball and decorate the tree. My brother used to place his live holiday tree in his 3 season porch with a sliding glass door to the living room. The tree enjoyed the cool temperatures on the porch and his family still could decorate and see the tree indoors. After about one week, move the tree outdoors to plant. Don’t keep it indoors any longer or it will break dormancy and may get winter injured. Plant the tree and water it well. If it is an exposed site, consider wrapping the tree with burlap to reduce desiccation.
Go here to learn more about Holiday Trees
How to Growing: Protecting Perennial Herbs and Roses
We came home to cold temperatures, so it’s time to finish protecting some of our more tender perennials from this winter’s weather. With our changing climate, it’s often not the absolute cold that kills our plants, be the fluctuating temperatures and conditions. Warm weather followed by sudden drops in temperature and increase in winds can often cause damage to evergreen foliage and deciduous branches. So I’ve learned to continue to protect our tender plants even if a mild winter is forecast.
One of the more beloved of our perennial herbs to protect is lavender. We grow the ‘Munstead’ and ‘Hidcote’ English lavenders because of their hardiness. We’ve also had success with newer hybrids such as ‘Phenomenal®‘ and ‘Sensational™‘ lavenders. These hybrids are more heat and cold tolerant, have better tolerance to high humidity, have higher levels of essential oils and are beautiful in the landscape. They produce beautiful blue flowers that bees love and the foliage is resistant to rabbit and deer damage. We’ve even purchased plants of lavender this time of year to use indoors as holiday decorations. Place them in pots with other holiday plants in a sunny room and once the holidays are over, plant them outside, if your ground hasn’t frozen. Otherwise, heal them into a mulch pile.
Protect lavender plants by piling wood chips on the plants this time of year. Wood chips are better than shredded bark mulch because the size of the wood chips is larger, allowing more air flow to the plants. This reduces the likelihood lavender plants will rot in winter. We cover ours with about a 1-foot deep layer of wood chips. It’s okay if not all the branches are covered. We mostly want to protect the crown of the plant. We’ll end up cutting our lavenders back hard in spring to stimulate new, more attract growth. In climates where rosemary overwinters, but needs help, use this same technique to protect this perennial herb.
Another plant to protect now is roses. If you’re growing specialty hybrid tea or floribunda roses, it’s important to shield them from cold winds. We drive wooden stakes around the shrub roses and wrap burlap around the stakes. This creates a wind barrier that helps keep the canes alive in winter. We also will bury the bottom of the rose bushes with wood chips as we do with lavender.
Go here to learn more about Protecting Perennial Herbs
Go here to learn more about Protecting Roses
Gardening Webinar Sale!
Happy Holidays! One of the fun activities this time of year is buying some special gifts for friends and family. It’s always nice to surprise someone you love with a the perfect gift for them. If you have any gardener friends or family members, consider giving “me” to them as their holiday gift. Actually, it would be my gardening webinars! Over the years I’ve created 20 gardening webinars on a variety of gardening topics. For flower lovers I have webinars on Cottage Gardening, Pollinator Gardening, Gardening for the Birds, and more. For vegetable gardeners, I have webinars on No-Dig Gardening and Raised Beds, Soils and Mulches, Berry Growing, Foodscaping and more. For gardeners looking for specific information on plants I have specialty webinars on Lilac and Hydrangea Growing, Spring Bulbs, Summer Bulbs, Flowering Vines and others. How about some technique webinars on Pruning, Natives, Invasives and Weeds, Organic Pest Controls and Container Gardening? And for some one who just needs help with their houseplants, I have a webinar called All About Houseplants.
Webinars make great gifts and I’m here to help by offering an End of Year Webinar Sale! I’ve created 3 packages of my webinars based on themes and offer them at a greatly reduced price. The Organic Food Gardening Webinar Package features 6 webinars about vegetable, herb and fruit gardening for only $29.99. The All About Flower Gardening Package features 8 webinars all about flower and shrub growing for only $39.99. And if you can’t decide, why not buy all 20 webinars in the Whole Gardening Webinar Package for only $109.99. These prices are about 40% off the regular prices.
In each 1 hour long webinar I cover the topic in depth with up to a 30 minute Q/A afterward. Once you purchase the webinar, you own if for life and can watch it as many times as you like, whenever you like. I just ask you don’t share it with others on social media or the internet. Of course, if you’re purchasing the webinars as a gift, share it with them.
So, surprise a loved one with an unusual gift this year. The gift of garden knowledge! Of course, you can also just purchase the webinar packages for yourself too, because you also might find them helpful! This End of the Year Webinar Sale only runs until January 1, 2025.
In Our Garden: Australian Gardens
I have to admit Australia has not been on my bucket list of places to visit. It always sounded unique and amazing, but I’ve never been drawn there before now. With our daughter going to school there, it was a perfect chance to go check it out and see her! I’m glad we did. It’s an amazing landscape with tons of plants and flowers I recognize and many more I don’t. While I could talk about Melbourne city and the animal life in Southeastern Australia, I’ll keep my focus on plants for this newsletter.
Southeastern Australia is a land of contrasts. We saw rolling greens hills and fields similar to England, flat open farmland similar to the Midwest, temperature climate rain forests like the Pacific Northwest and a shoreline that rivals California’s Big Sur coast for its beauty all in the same region. A few things that stood out to me was the variety of temperate climate plants and tropical plants growing in this area. It is early summer in Australia and we saw perennial borders with daylilies, salvia and coreopsis and rose gardens as we would at home. But then we saw gardens with Australian and other Mediterranean area plants blooming such as pincushion protea, blue flowered jackaranda trees and red flowered drunken parrot (Scotia bachypetala) trees. (It’s called a drunken parrot tree because when dew forms on the blossoms, it ferments. 
The parrots drink the dew and get tipsy). I saw a wide variety of cactus and succulents growing as landscape plants where I’d grow them as houseplants in our zone 5 area. There were amazing plants, such as black rose (Aeonium) and Gazania, flowering in large swaths in the landscape. In the wild, there are huge eucalyptus forests in the Great Otway National Park with under stories of 8 foot tall tree ferns. It is other worldly.
With all these plants, it was amazing to see the bird life associated with them. Parrots, Lorikeets, King parrots, Cockatoos, Laughing Kookaburras, Magpies and many other exotic birds feed on and live in the forests and gardens with these plants.
So, enjoy a few photos of the gardens and forests of this area of Australia. Our daughter graduates in 2 years, so we’ll be going back again!
