Saint Aubin Nurseries

Join us for a HOLIDAY OPEN HOUSE at St. Aubin’s:

December 7, 14 & 16 from 4-7 pm
& December 10th all day

From 12-2, on December 10th, Dunes 102 will broadcast live with giveaways, prizes & goodies!

Avoid the traffic at the mall, and bring your kids and grandkids down for a photo with Santa who will make a special appearance all four evenings between 4-7!

Then enjoy a Hayride (hopfully in the snow!) around our property which will be transformed into a winter wonderland complete with a beautiful Christmas light display.

Pick your tree at our nursery and then visit our gift shop to purchase new ornaments, decorations and exquisite gifts for everyone on your list! For every tree sold, Saint Aubin Nurseries will donate $2 towards the purchase of school supplies to benefit the Orleans, Eastham and Wellfleet Elementary Schools.

And don’t forget to order your holiday arrangements from our in-house florist, Stacey.

Patti & Reggie Walker

All of us at Saint Aubin Nurseries, Saint Aubin Equipment Center & Ponderosa Landscaping would like to extend our thanks and best wishes to Reggie Walker for his great service and commitment to the Equipment Center since May, 2008. Reggie was always willing to drop whatever he was doing to help someone. When it came to machinery, he had an uncanny ability to find the problem and fix it. Reggie and his wife are leaving the Cape and moving to the Fort Meyers, FL area. Reggie, thanks again & we will miss you!

We are very fortunate to have found extremely well-qualified Tony Brocco, ASE-certified mechanic and master machinist, who worked with Reggie for six weeks in order to ensure a smooth transition & ongoing great service to all Saint Aubin Equipment Center customers. Come on in and say hello to Tony!

I hope everyone had a great holiday – I love the Fourth! I’m incredibly sentimental and patriotic, and I love BBQ, so just fire up the grill, some fireworks, and ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’ and I’m happy as a clam at high tide!

The warm breezes of summer have finally arrived, and with it some beautiful bloomers (and some challenges).

Let’s start with the latter: This looks like a banner year for many insects (particularly scale-type bugs) and disease (especially rusts, leaf-spot, and mildews). The cool, moist May and June weather provided ideal conditions for these pests, many of which can be treated by organic salts and soaps, such as Bonide Copper Fungicide and K-Neem. There are a few soil drenches which are easy and effective also, such as Bayer Tree & Shrub Care, and Bayer Rose and Flower Care – Saint Aubins also carries similar Bonide products that work as well.

The rainy and cooler periods of spring also set up an incredible season for Roses and Hydrangeas, as well as other summer bloomers such as spireas and potentillas, and many perennials and annuals. Look for the Hibiscuses, both perennial and woody (also known as Rose-of-Sharon) to look fabulous later in July and August.

With our recent wave of warm sunny days many daylilies, yarrows and lavender are in full bloom; many Echinacea, Agastache, Gaura, Rudbeckia, Shastas and Phlox varieties are now opening fast. Liatris has started its signature top-down color explosion. The salvias, geraniums, coreopsis and nepetas have had their first flush and will keep blooming if the spent flowers are removed (I never liked the term “dead-heading” – sounds like someone faithfully following Jerry Garcia, not beautifying a garden!). For the shade garden, Astilbe, foxglove and heuchera are just hitting their stride. There’s nothing like a cluster of Astilbe ‘Peach Blossom’ to bring color, texture, and class to a garden.

A few things have caught my eye recently like never before: I saw 5′-6′ tall delphiniums/larkspurs at a customer’s home in Orleans last week that were absolutely stunning, so I know it can be done on Cape Cod! (albeit they were staked up, and we haven’t had any 50 mph winds recently!) They were stunning blues, possibly ‘Blue Lace’ or ‘Guinevere’. For those who don’t want to stake, try the Connecticut Yankee hybrids, which stay to about 30″ tall.

A plant I have paid little attention before is Veronicastrum, or Culver’s Root, but this year they can’t be ignored any longer. One variety that is particularly stunning is ‘Lavender Towers’, a great mid-back border plant with whorled foliage and graceful pale purple flowers spires, which grows to 4-5′ tall and 2-3′ wide. Great in full- to part-sun, and can take a moist area though it is drought tolerant.

All in all, have fun with the garden this summer. With adaquate water you can still plant freely – I love summer planting for the immediate enjoyment of growth and flowers you can get.

Ah, spring on Cape Cod. This is how I remember it – windy, rainy and cold! And yet we’re well behind our monthly average for rainfall, and we were under for last month as well.

Every year is different weather-wise, particularly on the Cape, because we are basically an island, surrounded by ocean water that stays cold long after winter is over, and that cools the atmosphere here.

For the same (or opposite) reason the fall on the Cape is awesome, because the water is still warm, and it moderates temperatures here, humidity goes away and we get those beautiful crisp, clear mornings melding into splendid afternoons… but enough about fall.

It seems we have had a particularly cool spring, though the weather data for April and early May shows we’re about on target temperature-wise. Some cool days since late-April have preserved many early-April bloomers such as daffodils, forsythia, andromeda, shadbush, PJM Rhododendrons and azaleas, still blooming now when they’re often done by about April 20th.

The magnolias were spectacular this year, but as usual a windy day brought those petals down in a shower like a ticker-tape parade last week. In spite of all the April bloomers still in show, we’re not really three weeks behind normal, because the flowering cherry trees, flowering crabs, pears, plums, and maples are all exploding into color, right on schedule (maples aren’t known for their blossoms except they’ll make a mess of your patio, your car, etc). I might say this every year, but everything that has flowered thus far seems to be heavier in bloom than normal. And the lilacs and early Rhodies, creeping phlox and deutzias, late tulips seem heavily budded and are ready to pop (many of these normally start mid-late May).

The result is a symphony of flowers on the Cape that is not equalled at any other time of year, and not in every year – only in years when conditions are just right for such compressing of flowering times. Then yesterday’s 40 mph gusty winds brought down many April flowers. Bring in the new! It’s so fresh right now, with all the new leaves opening on trees and shrubs, perennials just waking up, some with buds emerging and ready to pop. I love this time of year!

Yet I have also heard many people complaining of allergies, itchy eyes, headache and tiredness, many of whom say they have never had allergies before. The reason for this is pollen counts in the northeast are “very high” because so many trees, shrubs, and flowers are throwing their pollen skyward now, especially on days like yesterday when it’s dry and the wind was howling. It fascinates me that in the landscape every month, and on Cape Cod every week, can be like a whole new season unlike any other. In spite of all the cool weather, the pollen and the wind, isn’t it a beautiful time of year?

In case anyone is wondering what can be done in the garden at this time, here is at least a partial list of some tasks which may help you get organized, and get ahead of the weather, for the spring.

What to do?

(here’s the list)

Spring Cleanup

~ clean leaves, twigs and debris from planting bed & off lawn

~ weed

~ rake or thatch lawn to remove old grass clippings

~ edge planting beds

~ re-mulch landscape beds (do not push mulch up against the base of the trees or bushes)

Lawn Care

~ check the pH of your soil and spread lime if required

~ if you are planning on using a pre-emergent to prevent annual weeds from growing do so NOW! (Realize using this type of product means that you cannot overseed with grass seed.)

~ overseed with grass seed to fill in the bare spots.

~ fertilize your lawn (We recommend slow release fertilizers.)

Spraying for Winter Moths (Did you notice oaks with holey leaves last year?)

Pruning of woody plants: prune out dead wood from hydrangeas, dead and crossing brances from roses and other flowering shrubs, lightly prune out burned areas from evergreens. (It is usually best to wait to see what growth rejuvenates from crispy-looking branches before taking it all off.)

Fertilizing trees, shrubs and perennials:  HollyTone for acid-loving plants (all evergreens, magnolias, dogwoods). PlantTone for the rest.

Winter damaged plants should get an extra dose of TLC: a shot of Biotone or PlantTone and good deep-root watering if the soil is dry which is easy to forget wehn it is still cool.

Plant new trees, shrubs and perennials to fill in, give seasonal color, shade where needed.

Amend the soil in your vegetable bed to get it ready for planting.

It’s already almost May and in typical fashion I don’t have a backlog of articles written to cover the spring season. It’s been such a busy winter with developing a new website, attending conferences, adopting new efficiency practices, visiting customers, etc. I am finally coming to grips with the fact that for a nurseryman and landscape designer there is no off-season, but as some of my nurse-friends say, one continuous “rounds”.

It occurs to me now as many plants are springing into bloom, that even for some of these their best season is when they are NOT in bloom. For example, a little deciduous plant that lights up a landscape in the fall like Itea virginica ‘Little Henry’ (Dwarf Virginia Sweetspire), or Pieris japonica ‘Dorothy Wyckoff’ (a Japanese Andromeda variety hardy in New England), which holds incredible purple panicle-buds against dark green foliage for much of the fall and winter.

Plants that command my highest admiration are multi-season performers. I love the huge pink and gold trusses of Rhododendron ’Scintillation’, but it is the great growth habit and big, lustrous dark green leaves of this Rhodie, and it’s salt- and wind-tolerance, that wins my vote of confidence when I am drawing up a plan for a customer on Cape Cod.

Another favorite of mine is Viburnum tomentosum ‘Shasta’, which is beautiful in May with creamy white blossoms along horizontal branches, but also sports bright red fruit in the summer, intense fall color in shades of red, and interesting smooth gray bark in winter.

These plants are all capable of standing alone as a specimen in the landscape or together in groups of 3 or 5, are cold-hardy, tolerant of difficult environmental conditions (it doesn’t get much tougher than at my house, a proving ground for many of these), so for that versatility they will always be on my recommended plant lists for customers and clients.