September, golden September: warm sun and lengthening shadows under the Corn Moon, eclipsed on Sept. 7. Find garden snakes (great vole control) basking on infrared-heated stone. Beach plums ripen.
Meadowsong, the mating chorus of countless Orthoptera (crickets, grasshoppers, and katydids) swells, as September days shorten and autumn looms. Their mating calls reveal a sense of haste to complete the work of reproduction. Read “Wild Side,” Matt Pelikan’s observations on Island Orthoptera, and much more.
Too much vehicular traffic
Am I alone in heaving a sigh of relief that the summer is past and over, Labor Day has come and gone, and, just possibly, traffic jams are abating? How can we ask the Steamship Authority to reduce casual automobile traffic to the Island, while continuing to allow Island people to travel economically to and from the mainland? Please, encourage casual visitors to ride the VTA.
‘Our Charlottes’
Late summer is time to start looking for dew-decorated orb-weaver webs and the spectacular argiope garden spiders. Every year, for a long time — many years — an orb-weaver spider stakes out a spot on the corner of our house, using a gutter, a downspout, and a tall potted hibiscus as her anchoring points. There she stays for the duration of fall weather, until she has consumed enough prey to produce and secure her egg sac. Then, she disappears.
The programming and constancy of this chickpea-sized creature and her descendants are the source material that inspired E.B. White to write his captivating tale of the spider, the pig, the rat, and the other denizens of the barn in “Charlotte’s Web.”
Inevitably, as whitefly finds the potted hibiscus, it must be a lucrative source of protein for “our” Charlotte. What is interesting about this year’s orb-weaver, in the usual spot, is that there is not one but two; they sit in the centers of their webs a foot and half apart.
Read more about orb-weavers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orb-weaver_spider. This link describes the thousands of orb-weavers harvesting in a huge web above a sewage treatment plant’s wastewater system in Baltimore!
Yew
Some call yews gloomy. On the other hand, yew (Taxus spp.) and its cultivars and species are magnificent plants for garden accents, hedges, topiaries, graveyards, or sites where immortality is invoked. (Yew has also become the source for a successful cancer treatment.) What makes this so is yew’s ability to sprout new growth from old wood, making apt its symbolism in graveyards.
Unless it is in deer country. In deer country, the stately yew often becomes a scrawny, scraggly scarecrow of a plant due to deer browsing, and must live in protected spaces or behind fencing. Nonetheless, early September is time for shearing or trimming those yews, and other evergreens, that have prospered over summer. The summer’s soft growth trims easily. Woodier sections require loppers or secateurs.
Garden refocus
Shrinking? Or expanding? After a summer’s enjoyment and attention, many will be contemplating changes, improvements, otherwise making alterations to gardens, or hoping to take advantage of seasonal sales in garden centers and nurseries. Autumn is on the way, a great season for establishment of perennials, shrubs, and trees.
Have you seen a must-have plant somewhere? Correctly identifying an intriguing potential addition can be challenging. Finding a match with a pot tag (which may not mention invasive tendencies, or need for constant watering) in a garden center is one way. Going online is another, although I deplore the junk info the unwary often find there.
I recently loaned C. Colston Burrell’s updated “Perennial Combinations” (Rodale Press) to gardeners interested in expanding their garden palette. This is a comprehensive, illustrated companion to plant selection, even bed layouts, which is an excellent reference. Or, rely on similar quality resources.
Informed choices
When deciding what to plant, sometimes the only choice is the original decision: Dealing with choices’ aftermath can go on for years, as several presenters at the spring Sakonnet Garden symposium observed. Porcelain berry seedlings are now problematic, Island-wide, as an example of plant lust gone awry.
Eco-gardeners, those with more ecological approaches, absorb what plants tell them about the genius loci, or spirit of the place where they garden. Tim, a neighborly gardener, the other day quoted his mother: “If you want to garden, plant what grows there.”
Avoid design and “wrong plant” problems in your garden spaces. Becoming knowledgeable about what you want and how it grows, its qualities and features, is a way to practice “right plant, right place.” We are all learning.
Lilac foliar diseases, redux
Across the Island, a disease is disfiguring lilacs’ foliage. This is a recurrence of summer 2024 lilac problems. Syringa spp. leaves are subject to several different problems, caused by differing agents, bacterial and fungal.
Older cultivars are less resistant to many of these than more recent introductions. Plant pathology labs are the best source of advice for what is afflicting submitted samples.
On the bright side, the afflicted lilacs generally bounce back, such as the ones pictured, which were seriously afflicted in 2024, and appear relatively fine in 2025.
M.V. Agricultural Society
Two Agricultural Society events: Garden tour with Laura Silber, Sunday, Sept. 14, from 10 to 11:15 am, and Garden Tour with Susie Middleton, Wednesday, Sept. 17, from 5 to 6:15 pm, both free for MVAS members, $10 for nonmembers. For signup information, go to
marthasvineyardagriculturalsociety.org/upcoming-events.
In the garden
Sedums (now Hylotelephium) are coloring and are covered with insect life. Cardoon, a favorite of French and Italian gardeners and cooks, a vegetable as well as statuesque ornamental, is flowering. Fluff from its passé flowers figures in birds’ nesting materials.
Proceed with cutdowns. Garden beds survive fine with chop ’n’ drop: leaving cutdowns where they fall, as soil protection, winter cover, and pollinator support. Or, collect and compost cuttings. Sow cold-hardy greens.
Tick-check every night.
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