In
between summer’s long bright days and the gray, quiet of winter is the golden
glow of autumn.
This
season needs no power chord to rev up its fall color show; it needs nothing but
cooler nights and shorter days. Gardeners know this is the best season for
planting.
For most
of them, it is also their favorite time — gardening under the golden glow
of the season, cheeks cooled by tinges of autumn air, their handiwork helped
along with the loving hand of nature with its gentle rain storms. Cyclamen,
gaillardia, snapdragons, primrose, Iceland poppies, English daisies, pansies,
violas and stock are all dependable winter favorites. Even vegetables such as
cabbage will bring fall color and can be eaten in a pinch. “To be successful,
local gardeners just need to remember that this is not Santa Barbara,” said Tom
White, nurseryman Rolling Hills Garden Center in Buellton. “Bouganvilla is not
a good choice, and there’s a reason you don’t see citrus and avocado trees
here, only grapes and apples,” he said.
Buellton’s
Windmill Nursery is owned by Bob Blokdyk. He and his sidekick, his yellow lab
Bart, love fall flowers. “If you want to have a good show for January, February
and March, plant now; Iceland poppies need to get established to do well,” said
Blokdyk. He also recommends planting stock, a variety of flower, “because of
its sweet smell that the other fall flowers don’t have.”
Gardening
does not need to cost a lot.
“No one
really needs plants, and in this slow economy, this can hit nurseries hard,”
said Perry Baker, nurseryman at Valley Hardware and Garden Center in Solvang. “But
plants and flowers are the only things that can make you feel good and make
your world a little prettier.”
Fall
flower planting is not an unwise investment. Most of the fall plants are
perennial, said Baker, meaning that the plants will bloom for more than one
season if not over-watered during the summer.
The
nursery shelves at Harrison Hardware in Santa Ynez are covered in colorful
petals of pink and red cyclamen, purple cabbages and trees, which do best when
planted in the fall, said Jim Whitesell, a nurseryman at Harrison Hardware.
In answer
to the perennial question, “What plant is deer proof?” the nurserymen all shook
their heads sadly and said nothing is completely deer proof, especially in a
drought, but that poisonous, pungent and spiny plants such as lavender,
rosemary and oleander seem to be good choices.
Rolling
Hills’ White offered a poetic tip, similar to writer Robert Frost’s line that “Good
fences make good neighbors.”
To deal
with the deer, he advises: “A good fence — and better yet, a good dog —
might do the trick. Or, you could do like my grandpa, and plant them their own
hedgerow of crabapples, and then warn them it would be in their best interest
not to cross it.”