Through The Garden Gate: The Year in Review

Published 4:55 pm Thursday, December 18, 2025

We’re approaching the shortest day of the year, Dec. 21, and the nights are chilly. It’s time to review the year in the garden and take a much-needed break from weeding, planting, pruning and digging. Dreaming, however, is fine.

Unlike last year when my long-time gardening helper and buddy discarded all of my daylily labels when he divided the clumps, this year has been relatively uneventful. There haven’t been any major disasters. I didn’t have to remove more beloved ancient oaks, and the neighbors continued to adjust to changes in the front garden. For months, no one has knocked on the front door to complain about the change in location of the elephant ears or okra planted along the edge of the front porch. Even the Halloween skeletons sitting on a second floor windowsill discussing the state of the world escaped censure this year.

Yes, 2025 was a remarkably quiet year punctuated by many pleasant surprises. It was the kind of year I would wish for all of my gardening friends. The elephant ears grew taller and larger than ever. The massive leaves eventually reached the porch ceiling. The Lilium formosanum, a surprise gift from that gardener extraordinaire, David Fowlkes, also put on quite a show. It was more than seven feet tall and topped with a massive cluster of white blooms. I had to put a wire cage around it to prevent it from breaking.

Not to be outdone, the macho ferns also set new records for size and lushness; they definitely lived up to their name. A visitor commented that I must have over fertilized my plants this year. Not true. The trick to growing giant elephant ears and macho ferns is to repot them into extra-large containers and to use the best potting soil available. Whispering sweet nothings to them at twilight probably doesn’t hurt either.

Not all the surprises this year were as bold as the elephant ears. There were also some quiet ones that brought smiles. I had tucked some Tulipa silvestris in odd spots throughout the garden and forgotten about them, but they popped up in March and provided some much-needed color and evidence of new life. The yellow blooms are small and tend to change shape every day.

My much-loved twin leaf provided another surprise. After seeing masses of twinleaf growing along slopes at Powhatan State Park, I was desperate to source some for my home garden. I finally found some at Monticello. It emerged every spring, but never bloomed. This year three of my four plants bloomed and then produced their characteristic helmet shaped seed pods.

Old favorite plants performed better than ever this year and provided additional pleasure. Both reblooming irises and daylilies flowered in mid spring and then again in early summer, and, surprise, again this fall. I still had daylilies blooming at the end of October. Even the Limelight hydrangeas finally settled into a new mixed perennial border and produced large panicles of lacy flowers.

The water lily pond surprised with lots of unexpected blooms. These poor plants had been neglected for several years and then, finally, divided and reset at the wrong time of the year. I was surprised that they survived much less that they flowered. Sometimes a gardener just gets lucky.

As might be expected, not everything in my garden went according to plan. The unwanted tree that shot up by the pergola behind my house several years ago is back. I remove it; it returns. I dig it out again and, yes, it returns again. I may have to resort to herbicides.

In other areas of the garden, there’s an infestation of mulberry weed. It’s an extremely persistent and resilient pest that flowers and starts producing seeds when it’s only three inches tall. Hand pulling and disposal in a trash bag are essential. I’ll be waging war with this tough plant until the day I die, and it will probably win.

All in all, 2025 has been an excellent year in the garden. I’ve had bountiful blooms, some lovely surprises, and congenial visitors. What more could I want? Here’s to another year of gardening in 2026. Cheers!

DR. CYNTHIA WOOD is a local master garden