November

I have three camellias in the garden. All are sasanquas, because I feel like a camellia without fragrance is rather disappointing. One is 'Yuma', a single pink and white, 'Mine-No-Yuki', a double white, and the third is a single pink that I grew from seed. I purchased the cultivars from Camellia Forest Nursery a couple of years ago and they are still pretty small. I grew this camellia from seed is 10 years ago. Now it's over 8 feet tall.

I planted it too close to the stalls and now it has a rather two
dimensional look. It has kind of espaliered itself against the wall.

I like that it's in tree form. I didn't limb it up. I want to grow out and cutting and see what form it takes with more room. Years ago I saw camellias in the White Garden at the JC Raulston Arboretum growing as small trees and they were lovely. They were either tea-oil (Camellia oleifera) or tea (C. sinensis) camellias that produced single fragrant white flowers in the fall.

The flowers of this camellias smell sweet, particularly after a warmup, and remain strongly fragrantly for a while even after the flowers have frozen and dried. It's prudent to check the flowers before sticking your nose in it because it's a great favorite of yellow jackets, although the more peaceable honeybees and hoverflies like them too.

Naturally I have seen camellias I covet while driving around running errands. Especially one that has small double dark pink flowers in such profusion that it looks like one of my swamp roses in bloom in the spring. I've got to find one like that.

November is the time for aster 'Miss Bessie to shine. Hundreds of insects
throng to its flowers when its in bloom, like these honeybees

and bumblebees.

Many different species of insects visit the asters: butterflies, moths, wasps, and even flies.



There's usually some roses until December.

'Caldwell Pink' with 'Miss Bessie'

Fall has been slow to arrive here. We didn't get a hard frost until the second or third week in November. Early color was a bust, although that may have only been true for our locality. I don't know about south and east of here, but the second we drove north into Wake County on Thanksgiving Day the color was spectacular. Bright crimson dogwoods, red maples in shimmering shades ranging from golden yellow through orange to blood red, and pumpkin and scarlet oaks.

The late fall color here has been pretty good. I've noticed in other years when we didn't get much fall color early on, we still got late fall color in the latter half of November through to December. Several of the roses are good for late color. Until I started growing species roses and rugosa hybrids here I didn't know that roses could even have fall color. I have a lot of rugosas, all grown from seed except for 'Hansa', 'Foxi Pavement', and 'Sir Thomas Lipton'. They provide beautiful spots of color in the November landscape. The effect is like the golden late afternoon condensed in leaf form, with splashes of orange, red, and pink.

The leaves of prairie rose (R. setigera) are golden briefly before bright pumpkin orange.

Virginia rose doesn't have fragrance like Carolina rose (that one has a
delicious damask rose and lemon scent), but it has better fall color.

A late turning red maple

For the first time I can remember a time when the apricot maple didn't turn, and it could very well be because it's splitting down the middle. Inconvenient to say the least. One half is leaning over the driveway below the house, and the other is leaning over the neighbor's fence. A hazard of big trees with multiple leaders.

It's been a good year for oaks here. Even the willow oaks turned
a golden russet orange. A beautiful oak at the local McDonald's.

A Shumard oak?

Our wild blueberries, the most of which are Southern black
blueberries, never seem to fail, and finish coloring very late.

Like the blueberries the swamp cyrillas never fail. They turn gold
before changing to vivid shades of scarlet and orange in December.

Blueberries and swamp cyrillas are the last colorful woody plants to
lose their leaves. When they are bare I feel that winter has truly begun.