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From the garden Story and photos By Belinda Gallagher change Late fall and early winter are a very interesting time in a garden, at least in my opinion. There are those ardent gardeners who have finished for the season; the leaves are raked and bagged, the spring-flowering bulbs are duly planted, annuals have been plucked unceremoniously from the borders and marched to the compost bin. But I am not such a neat freak. Frankly, I would love to do a little bit of that late fall clean-up to take the load off spring but I just cannot. And the reason is the subtle beauty of plants as they die back or hold stalwart for the cold season ahead. Gardens, as you know very well, are cyclical in nature. That is, they are ever-changing. In the simplest sense, they change because they are full of living things and living things are not static. Layered on top of the simple growing are the effects of climate change, weather, catastrophic events and most importantly the seasons. There has been a lot of debate in recent years about the muddling of the seasons. `We don't really have a spring anymore', I heard a fellow gardener say. `Spring bulbs melt in a day if the squirrels and rabbits didn't already eat them.' In some years, we bemoan the loss of the fall, jumping instead from the heat right to the cold rain and dreariness of November. What a bonus it is when a season like autumn arrives on time, puts on its best Sunday-gone-tochurch outfit and remains until the real snow flies. It is in just such a season that we can get up close and personal with change. Come along with me on a walk in the garden and reflect on the uncommon beauty of some common plants as they fade. There is no question that the hosta, once known only as that durable, shade-loving plant has undergone a transformation. Since the creation of the American Hosta Society in 1968, the number of available cultivars has gone from a few hundred to well over 7,000. The native habitat is restricted to Japan, China and Korea in moist woodlands but we know they do fine in Southern Ontario, gracing our gardens for at least three seasons of the gardening year. (And the fourth season for some as they peruse the new plant catalogues in the winter months.) Most hostas are green of one shade or another, and they are one of the few perennials that even the most brown-thumbed person can easily recognize. Great in spring, great in summer but superb in the late fall and early winter. As long as we have a long, long fall without a real heavy snowfall, you get the colour followed by the demise into shades of beige. But best of all, are the seedheads dripping with, black tar-like shapes. A little further along in the garden we can stop and see another plant from China doing its end of season act. The porcelain vine, Ampelopsis glandulosa v. brevipedunculata for short (only kidding) is literally covered with berries and they are really undefinable colours. They are at once robin's egg blue, teal, violet, purple and mauve or maybe even olive and mint! The berries persist for some time into the winter and I wonder if it is because there is no bird in our neck of the woods that actually likes the berries. The variegated version of this vine is slightly less aggressive than its green-leaved cousin, but both produce the brilliant berries. Wouldn't it be wonderful if the berries were out at Easter time so that we could add them to that holiday's decorations? Before we wander along to the front, let's stop and admire the PG Hydrangea (Hydrangea paniculata `Pink Diamond'). It has already passed through its many stages of summer beautiful-- pink buds opening to white, fading back to pale pink then bright pink by mid-autumn. But how uncommonly The uncommon beauty of Three different views of hosta: from colourful to hosta and raven's wing to the seedheads dripping with black tar-like shapes. WINTER · 2010 36 S I D E R O A D S O F H A LT O N H I L L S W Expiry date: March 31, 2011