Foliar Fireworks as a Fall Finale

Sorry it's taken us a while to get back to posting. Like most gardeners, there aren't enough hours in the summer to do everything, and it's been a busy, busy summer and autumn here at Baldwin's Nurseries. Things are quieting down now as we put away the stock for the winter and start thinking about next spring. We're still open in case you are looking for inspiration, gift ideas for family or friends, advice or one more plant to tuck in this autumn.

We've noticed some truly spectacular autumn colour this year, in many of the deciduous shrubs and trees. While Japanese maples are known for the dramatic colour display they put on each fall, they seem to be particularly fantastic this year, as well as late in dropping their leaves.

This red tipped gold leafed maple is one of ours grown from seed.

While this is an upright, green-leafed form that turns incredible shades of red, gold, pink and copper.

This beauty is the tricolour maple 'Butterfly', which is gorgeous from the the time its first leaf opens until the last leaf drops. 

It's not just the maples that have been putting on a show. The dawn redwoods, both the golden 'Ogon' and the regular green variety, turn wonder shades of copper, peach, gold before dropping their needles for another fall.

While the oak leaf hydrangea is marginally hardy for some parts of the province, if you can grow it, it's well worth nurturing a little just for the remarkable fall colour display. Even while pushing new, green leaves, the giant large leaves are richly tinged with burgundy, ruby, pink and bronze.

We are well known as being fond of ornamental grasses, many of which come into their own in autumn. The flower heads are wonderfully showy, but the foliage provides a great display as well--more subtle, perhaps, than the maples and sumacs and other brilliantly coloured showoffs, but lovely just the same.

Some of the magnolias are shimmering with buttery gold foliage. They don't all turn this rich shade, and sometimes the fall winds strip the leaves before they get a chance to change colour. Despite the winds we've all had this autumn, a clump of them have managed to dazzle visitors.

Visitors who have seen the foliage of the Cornus kousa in its luminescent fall finery are tempted to try a tree in their gardens next year. The flowers that come on in May and last for many weeks are showstoppers, but we think this end of season blaze of glory is pretty fantastic too, don't you?

What's Hot at the Nursery

Summer has certainly found us this July, as the temperatures were sweltering for a couple of weeks! The plants in the nursery and in our display beds have been thriving, however, and we'll show off a few of the popular choices in this post.

We keep a vase of cut echinacea flowers on hand every day, to showcase the unusual, wonderful colours that we have available, including some of the 'Big Sky' series (Sunrise, Sunset, Harvest Moon) and doubles Hot Papaya, Marmalade, and Coconut Lime.

For those who love hummingbirds--and who doesn't?--we have the irresistable beebalm in several different shades. We especially like 'Raspberry Wine', which is well named.

Hands down, our favourite echinacea other than the native is 'Hot Papaya'. Photos don't do it absolute justice, as the flowers go through so many colour changes as they mature. Truly a gem among all the new varieties that have emerged in recent years.

Want to cool things down a little in your plantings? How about Russian sage, with its blue-lavender flowers and deer-resistant foliage. This is a plant that likes good drainage over winter, and is drought resistant once established.

We have many different perennial grasses, some for the front of the border, others better suited for back of beds. Grasses are excellent choices for any garden, being easy care and offering fall and winter interest, too.

We carry a few different types of succulents, including sempervivums, also known as houseleeks and hen-and-chicks.

Our roses are grown on their own roots, and are all hardy for our tricky Nova Scotian climate. We are carrying some newer choices this year, including 'Rambling Red', and 'Emily Carr', from the Agriculture Canada Artists series.

In between tending the plants in our nursery, we are establishing more display gardens so that you can visualize what a particular new plant will look like in your garden. It's well worth walking around the nursery, as these beds are located here-and-there...

Pause by the fish pond to admire the waterlilies, and count fish and frogs--there's usually at least one frog basking on those huge leaves.

If you're looking for a dramatic plant, look no further than the Yucca, with its spiky foliage and tall stems of white flowers. Another heat and drought tolerant plant, it's sure to get noticed in your garden.

This is looking to be a fantastic year for hydrangeas, and ours are blooming in their containers at the nursery. Because of our soil mixture, even the blue-flowered ones are pink, but they'll come back around quickly in your garden. This is 'Blue Billows' in a pot...

And here it is, happy in a garden situation. The lacecaps are more reliably hardy for most Nova Scotians as compared to the mopheads, and they're gracefully beautiful.
We hope to see you soon, as high summer continues to shimmer on our gardens!

Rich Purple Foliage

This time around, we're going to look at what is pretty much the opposite of gold foliage: burgundy, wine, or red leafed plants. Where the golden gems shout "look at us!" the burgundy plants are more subdued, and need the foliage of lighter coloured plants to really show off their true colours.

One of the favourites for flowering shrubs is Sambucus or elder, 'Black Lace'. This cultivar has highly cut foliage and flat clusters of dainty pink flowers.

We love barberries, and encourage other gardeners to enjoy these deer-resistant, 4-season interest, tolerant shrubs. Baldwin's carries a number of cultivars, from the golden 'Nana Aureum' to the purple-leafed 'Rose Glow', 'Concorde', and others.

Everyone needs at least one tree that has purple foliage, whether it be this handsome birch...

Or this red maple, (a bit past Canada Day, but every day is a good one for a maple tree!)

Or perhaps you'd prefer the more delicate foliage of one of the Japanese maples, like this dainty cutleaf variety.

There are other interesting deciduous shrubs with purple or wine foliage, including several varieties of smoke bush, including 'Grace' and 'Royal Purple.' This is a shrub for the more sheltered site, and isn't hardy everywhere in Nova Scotia.

On the other hand, the elegant and four-season ninebark is a terrific shrub anywhere in our province. Tolerant of most growing conditions, it has deep wine foliage and clusters of white flowers that are beloved of pollinators.

Perhaps the showiest of purple-foliaged trees is the beautiful copper beech, which can have colour varying from bright copper to deep purple. These are European beeches and don't get the disease which affects North American varieties.

We don't carry a lot of purple-foliaged perennials, but we do have Euphorbia 'Chameleon', which boasts a variety of colours as the season unfolds, as well as great fall colour. There are no purple-leafed purple coneflowers yet, but with plant breeders, you never know...

Which reminds us--the coneflowers in our containers are blooming sporadically, so if you're looking for a particular colour, come out and see what we have. We'll tell our favourite next time around!

Baldwin's is blooming nicely despite the wet spring

Despite it being a very wet and cool month of May so far, things are blooming nicely at Baldwin's Nurseries. It's been a very busy time, first with the successful and hectic Saltscapes Expo, and now with some changes to the nursery property.  

In the nursery trade, we often remark that cool, wet weather brings out the serious gardeners, the ones who like to take their time looking through nursery stock, chat with staff about challenges and interests in their garden, without a lot of rushing around. There's certainly lots to see around our nursery right now, from the early-blooming rhododendrons like the PJMs,

To the blazing colours of the quinces, with their showy pink, red, or scarlet flowers.

This seems to be an outstanding year for magnolia bloom around the province, as we're hearing reports of fantastic bloom on most people's trees and shrubs. The Leonard Messills have been fantastic for us this spring, with a rich display of colour.

We've brought in some new Japanese maples for those with a fondness for these handsome, colourful trees. The cutleaf varieties are especially popular.

We have a selection of hostas, which are beloved by many shade gardeners but also work well in container plantings, or as border plants around trees and shrubs.

One of our favourite flower-and-foliage plants this year is Dicentra 'Burning Hearts' bleeding heart. Its lacy, blue-green foliage contrasts nicely with the rich crimson-red heartshaped flowers. This is a low-growing variety that spreads gradually, and blooms for a long time.

Last year tree peonies were especially popular, and we have brought in more this year. These are magnificent plants, taking a few years to get well established, but even with only a few blooms they are showstopping and wonderful.

These photos represent only a very tiny portion of what's in bloom, or what's in bud, at Baldwin Nurseries. We're open 7 days a week, and we look forward to helping you get inspired about your garden landscape. Don't worry about the rain--it will stop one of these days. It always does. And we're always glad to see you, rain or shine.

Springing into the Season

Although this hasn't been the most weather-pleasant of springs so far, we feel pretty safe in saying that all signs point to it being time to kick off the garden season. We are open for business daily, and the staff are busily tending to our thousands of container grown perennials, trees and shrubs. The propagation house is filled with flats of seedlings and cuttings, and there's all kinds of bloom in the yard, like this Acadian daphne (Daphne mezereum).

No, your eyes do not deceive you. These are black pussywillows, (Salix gracilistyla var melanostachys) showing off their striking catkins. The twigs are equally attractive, displaying red and black colour over winter and flushing green as spring goes on. Best kept out of the worst of our winter winds, you should keep it well pruned to keep it robust and producing large, healthy catkins.

We love seeing the rich variety of colours in the young evergreens in the nursery. Most of these plants are still displaying some of their winter colour, but are equally striking and unique in their summer foliage hues. From Chamaecyparis to Thuja, from Picea to Juniperus, from Microbiota to Pinus, we have conifers in all shapes, sizes, colours and textures.

'Burning Hearts' bleeding heart (Dicentra) was very popular last year, and we're pleased to have it again this year. It's a beautiful plant in any stage, but especially striking as the new growth appears and unfolds.

The variegated periwinkle (Vinca major 'Variegata') is a good choice for a shady spot where you want a ground cover. It's not as vigourous as the all-green form, and the periwinkle-blue flowers are larger and more numerous.

One of our favourite creeping sedums for containers or rockeries is 'Angelina'. Its winter colour is spectacular and hard to describe, but as these shades fade, the gold and green is still very eyecatching. This sedum grows quickly but is not difficult to control.

The native wintergreen, Gaultheria, makes a fine evergreen groundcover if you have acid soil. The plants produce an edible, fleshy red berry that tastes more strongly of wintergreen than do the leaves, and which often last through the winter and into spring. The foliage changes colour through the fall and winter.

We are really excited about the selection of hellebores we have this year. These handsome plants are like potato chips--you can't possibly have just one. Our biggest dilemma was deciding which ones to order, as there are so many fascinating new colours and forms. This is 'Winter Jewel Double Painted', a fantastically ruffled and speckled variety.

This delicate hued lovely is 'Winter Jewel Apricot Blush'. There is some variation in the flower colours but that's the appeal of hellebores.

For those who fancy green flowers, we have H. argutifolius 'Silver Lace'. This one is best suited for milder parts of the province, and should be protected with a good mulch around the crown in late autumn. But it's definitely worth pampering a little, we think.

These are just a few of the spring jewels you'll see at the nursery. Come and visit us, and check our our blog for more posts as spring continues. We'll have a booth at Saltscapes Expo again this year, and our free tree seedling giveaway will happen for the month of May, so keep checking back!