This has been a noteworthy year. A mild winter, an early spring, a very hot summer, but with some rain, a prolonged sunny gentle fall. We just last week saw the beginning of the fog and cloud that usually render late autumn here so gloomy, but up until three days ago the sun was shining, and temperatures are still generally good for working outdoors.

We had the best rose flowering this year I've seen since I began gardening thirty years ago. We've had a run of very mild, very wet years and they've been good for plant growth in general. Young trees that had sat for over a decade, growing an inch a year, suddenly put on half a foot to a foot in a single season; shrubs are now, at last, head high; the roses are making headway. The big garden is finally beginning to take recognizable shape as a garden. There are more and more areas that are working: the soil, with all our digging and amending, can support garden plant growth, and the planting is complete and mature enough to define the character of these zones. In these areas we're no longer pushing the mass of the garden uphill, a biological Sisyphus's stone; no, we've reached the top and shoved our boulder over and now it's rolling downhill, gathering momentum as it goes. Our task now is mainly to steer; it's the garden itself that's doing most of the work.

The worst negative event of the year was the invasion of Japanese box moth. A smaller initial infestation the year before killed five plants, so, for the first time, we sprayed, using B. thuringensis. It was a nasty job, divided between me and DH, who got stuck with a later respraying in late summer because I had shoulder problems. But we didn't lose a plant. I love box, and we have a lot of it. The exceptionally hot summer brought a few casualties, including BOTH my 'Yellow Mutabilis'--I'm still sad about that. Most plants, not all, seemed to like the heat, which was mitigated by more rain than we usually get that time of year. We continue to be quite concerned by the possibility of slides, and are planting a lot of baby trees--hazelnut, oak (Quercus pubescens), flowering ash--in consequence.

This fall we began our usual program of frantic planting. There are always shrubs, roses, subshrubs to add to existing beds, digging more thoroughly than we ever did before. It's only since about 2012 that we've gotten dead serious about soil amendment. We planted two major hedges, a large chunk of our remaining foundation planting (hurray!!!), had a lot of holes dug by a guy who came with a small excavator and are currently amending the holes, for the benefit of planting next year. We may still get thirty roses in before the end of the year; I'm not sure if there's enough time to process and ship the order before Christmas. Hedge plants I use include small-leaved privet, photinia, Symphoricarpos alba, Cornus mas, double flowered Kerria japonica, snowball bush, Viburnum burkwoodii, a tallish white-flowered spirea, mock orange, Euonymus japonica (I'm deeply suspicious of this plant, but it seems to be healthy up here), lilac, hazelnut, Berberis julianae, Hypericum 'Hidcote'. Weigelas have just crossed my radar, and people locally grow them, but I couldn't get the ones I wanted this fall and may have to special order them, though they're not rare. Most of the shrubs I've named above are widely offered and grown in this area. The rose order is mostly old roses, with a few Pemberton Hybrid Musks, 'White New Dawn', and two Warner roses as well. I couldn't get a lot of the varieties I wanted but hope for better things next year. I particularly love the once-blooming old roses, but have a certain curiosity about Hybrid Perpetuals, and of course adore Teas, Chinas, and Noisettes.

I have the bad fault of not being able to force myself to make up plant orders when the weather outside is impossible for gardening, or when I have a huge backlog of plants in pots waiting to be set out. So I tend to order late, and part of the urgency of this fall was not only planting the plants, but assembling the orders beforehand. In between making up orders, amending holes, and planting plants, I've been taking a few cuttings and collecting suckers to grow on. Suckers and divisions are from double kerria, gaura, Clematis integrifolia, Coronilla emerus (the botanists have recently changed its name), Laburnum anagyroides. I need to collect more of most of these, plus suckers of Jasminum nudiflorum. Cuttings: a handful of roses, double mock orange, three kinds of phlomis, Salvia 'Icterina', more gaura and clematis, and spring cuttings of Lonicera profumatissima, single kerria, Sarcococca ruscifolia, myrtle, Daphne odora 'Aureomarginata', and Ceanothus thyrsiflora repens. There's still more propagating to do once the planting eases off; I especially want to collect suckers from established old roses. Then will come winter, with pruning and cleanup going on until spring.

We could possibly finish the basic planting in two years, almost as busy as this one, and if we continue to be lucky in our weather, but I don't know if we'll make it. DH is eighty, and though he's still energetic I think is slowing down. I worry about mowing next year. Ideally I would still like to plant another 80 or so varieties of roses and a collection--this is an old dream--of lilacs: twenty varieties new to us would be wonderful. And of course all the less massive planting projects: hedging and bed infill, native trees and shrubs on the boundaries of the garden (ongoing elm massacre), a thousand smaller tasks. We'll do what we can.

P.S. Perhaps I should explicitly invite you all to write about your year as well. Tell us what happened. I know a lot of you have had difficulties.

I made my long post even longer by naming plants, but I thought it gave more point to what I was talking about.