New Bulb Book – Somewhere
My brand new book for Timber Press—The Essential Guide to Bulbs—is available for pre-order now at your local bookshop or online. It will be officially published in mid-October. I can’t wait to share it with you. It is full of helpful tips, inspirational photos and an extensive plant palette. I am scheduling book tour lectures now. Please email my assistant – Helene Fantini Cooper at jennyrosecarey@gmail.com to arrange a lecture in person or via Zoom.
Nip and Tuck Your Garden into Shape
The quote this month was written in 1958, and identified that growing a flowering plant was an antidote to the modernity of wireless radios. In this hectic world of 2025, with its new “invisible powers” like AI, and many other things that we may not know about, or even pretend to understand, I want to remind you of the simple remedy of caring for “that most perfect thing, a flowering plant.” Maybe we can learn from history?
Getting back to the earth (and things that I do understand), what are we doing here at Northview this September? I am going to summarize it as “nip and tuck.” This is the season when you are trying to keep the garden looking good for another month or two – depending on when your weather turns cold.
What do I mean by “nip and tuck”? Nipping means trimming and cutting. Tucking is keeping the plants standing up by using supports and by literally “tucking” the tops and side branches through and among other plants or stakes, so that they are not lying on the ground. By using these two techniques, the garden looks neat, and will stay attractive for the rest of the growing season.
Get your scissors out, bring along some biodegradable string (my favorites are the Nutscene twines in many yummy colors), and a few bamboo canes. The link below is the UK link, but many suppliers carry it now in other parts of the world. Here I am at the Chelsea Flower Show Stand—wearing the “right” colors—I bet you can’t guess which is my favorite?
Use the twine to tie in stems, gently, making a figure-eight loop around the cane and the stem.
If you are tucking a plant that will continue to grow, tie a bow that can be undone and readjusted later in the season. Larger plants can be corralled with a big loop. One idea is to be invisible with your tying up and not cinch too tightly. I often eschew the invisible staking with the poles and twine becoming part of the colorful decorative effect.
Walk down your paths to see if you can get along them. If not, trim overhanging plants just above a “node”. The nodes are where the leaf or leaves meets the stem. The resulting top is neat and will not poke you accidentally. The plant will grow well below the new cut, because tiny side buds, lower down the stem, break out of dormancy and create new shoots. The plant fills out nicely for the rest of the growing season.
In general, trim off brown parts or lanky new growth. Rearrange the stems of your plants, so that the flowers you like best are pointing forward. This activity is like fluffing the pillows on the sofa to make the living room neat. These small actions make the whole garden look tidy.
Ask Jenny Rose
My gardening friend Carol McConnell sent me this lovely photo of an appropriately colored Hibiscus. She calls it “the Jenny Rose”. Thank you, Carol, for letting me share this photo.
Please feel free to send me a photo and ask a question to be included in a future email newsletter. I will just use your first name and state or country. Keep those questions coming.
Speaking of questions, I have been doing a garden segment on our local NPR radio station 90.9 in the Philadelphia Area. It is also streaming on the WHYY website each Thursday at about 4:45pm with Matt Guilhem.
Munstead Wood Update
Fundraising and planning are going well for Gertrude Jekyll’s garden, Munstead Wood, Surrey, England that was purchased by the National Trust in 2023. Enough money has been raised to cover the commissioning of the Conservation Management Plan. This important document is the precursor to all future work on the site. The next goal is to raise the remaining money needed to fund the all-important Master Plan. If you are interested in learning more about this, please email me directly and I would be delighted to talk to you—at length!
Before You Garden
My blog this month is about another English Garden that I recommend visiting. Part 3 in the series is about Kelmscott Manor, near Oxford, England.
Plant of the Month: Scented Geranium
This month I am returning to an old favorite – the scented geranium (Pelargonium spp.). I love fragrant plants, and have recently leaned into the fact that my 25-year-old Herb Garden is a delightfully scented space. I am fully embracing this and going back to the early days of this garden, when I had a large collection of scented geraniums in terracotta pots. Do not confuse these plants, that are not frost hardy in many climates, with the hardy geraniums that are in the Latin genus Geranium.
If you do not know this group, there are many of them. The most commonly grown plants are the citronella-scented geraniums that have been marketed to ward off mosquitoes. I have no idea if they really work, but they do add a lovely floral-citrus scent to your deck or terrace, especially if you take a leaf and gently crush it.
Other favorites are the rose-scented geraniums that amazingly smell of musky roses, peppermint, and chocolate-mint. Some of these have soft or fuzzy leaves and may have a dark center to the leaf.
These geraniums do flower, but their blooms are small in scale compared to the regular non-hardy geraniums, that are grown primarily for their flowers. I happen to love these petite charmers that often bloom in pastel colors.
If you garden without pesticides and herbicides, you can pick the leaves and use them in floral arrangements, as plate decorations, or in cooking. My favorite use is to let a leaf soak in simmering milk before you use it in a rice pudding, crème brûlée mix, or pound cake.
Book of the Month:
The Story of Our Gardens
by Dorothea Eastwood
Gardening, like any art or science, does not stand still but moves and changes with the times. This slim book is a short but well-considered look at the history of English gardens. Dorothea’s “story” begins with Roman gardens in England. She excels in showing the progression from formal to informal gardens and back again. She also highlights the influences and causes of stability in garden design and external factors that initiate change.
There are chapters about Medieval gardens, formal gardens, Restoration to Romantic, Regency to Edwardian, and finally nature’s return. This final chapter ushers in the movement that began at the latter third of the 1800s with the rise of the wild garden, and the re-emergence of the herbaceous border as a thing of beauty. This, of course, was due to William Robinson and Gertrude Jekyll—as mentioned elsewhere in these writings.
Dorothea (1912-1961) lived through some of the tumultuous changes to English gardens that were wrought due to two world wars in the twentieth century, and the resulting loss of life and money. She addresses this but comes out on the optimistic side with this wonderful remark to bring us back to the theme of our opening quote.
“Once again our security, our money, and our leisure have either gone or are in jeopardy; but our resilience and love for gardening remains.”
Hold this thought close to your heart and remember, when you need some solace, do some gardening or walk in nature.
Want to Explore More Garden History?
If you’d like to explore more garden history, I’ll be teaching a Longwood Gardens course called “Introduction to the History of Landscape Design” this November and December. It’s an online course, so you can take it from home. I believe it’s recorded for participants, so if the dates or times don’t work, you can watch later—but double-check before registering.
One of My Favorite Fall Walks
A lovely place for an autumn walk is Bowman’s Hill Wildflower Preserve in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Full disclosure: I’m on the board there, but it’s near and dear to my heart. Not only is it a lovely place to visit, but it has a serious mission of preserving Pennsylvania’s wildflowers on this special piece of land on the slopes near the Delaware River.
The meadow just outside the gate looks fantastic in September. Check out the website below. They are having a fundraiser this month. I am not sure whether there will still be tickets available, but here is the link.
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If you would like to see photos of my garden at Northview and images of my garden travels, please follow me on Instagram @NorthviewGarden and @JennyRoseCarey
Be resilient and relish your gardening and nature time,
My new bulb book, The Essential Guide to Bulbs: Grow a Bounty of Beautiful Bulbs in Gardens and Containers, is available for pre-order now. In The Essential Guide to Bulbs, you will discover a treasure trove of bulb selections. This book covers the how-to for planting bulbs in beds and containers, along with tips on how to grow bulbs well for the best possible glorious outcomes.
PS: If you want to hear more of my thoughts and support me in what I do, check out my books. Glorious Shade celebrates the benefits of shade and shows you how to make the most of it. This information-rich, hardworking guide is packed with everything you need to successfully garden in the shadiest corners of a yard. The Ultimate Flower Gardener’s Guide gives home gardeners the confidence they need to create the flower-filled garden of their dreams. Instead of concentrating primarily on color, it brings flower shape and texture to the fore, helping homeowners make plant choices that come together in an aesthetically pleasing way.
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