Once a year this column features one of our neighbor’s gardens, usually in the summer months, when we’re in the midst of flowers, surrounded with their colors, immersed in their scents, witnessing the benefits the birds, the bees and the butterflies have reaped from our efforts. This is the first garden I’ve featured so late into the fall; it’s rare to have such a spectacular garden so late into the fall.

Dot Blocker’s gardens are filled with flowers throughout the growing season, beginning in earliest spring when daffodils paint the landscape in cheerful clumps and ruffled rows. Viburnum and japonica perfume the air, while the flowers crowning the fruit trees share their lofty space with purple lilacs at the entrance to the arbor sheltering the blueberry bushes. Later in spring, rhododendrons dot the landscape in shades of pink, from palest pastel to brightest fuchsia. While few have missed this spectacular array, the gardens in back of the house aren’t visible from the street. Here a circle of bachelor buttons, indigo petals surrounding crimson centers, bursts in one garden, while an apricot bearded iris is stunningly coupled with a rusty-red iris in another. In a third garden, the bright orange cups of California poppies swirl around stalks of dark purple lupine, and in another, old-fashioned pink columbines dance with purple irises – these line the fence of the vegetable garden and fill pockets along the stone wall that separates the lawn from the field, complimenting the pink azaleas planted there and the welcomed wild violets.

Particular attention is paid to entrances. Structurally strong yuccas demarcate the entry to the property; later in the season their ivory colored bells will rise like sentries above the foliar swords. The clematis “Nelly Moser” winds its profusion of powder pink petals, striped with a deeper pink and punctuated with purple anthers, around the wrought iron filigree at the front door. The path to the rear of the property is lined with clumps of pulmonaria, splotched foliage and bright pink buds opening to bright blue blossoms, interspersed with annuals and tender perennials, marbled and silvery foliage from which apricot and wine-colored flowers rise.

Shrubs and trees also play an important structural role in the backyard. A large, old honey locust tree acts as an anchor, its leafy canopy providing shade for the Adirondack chairs resting beneath it and hosting a splendid view of the fields, forests, and pond beyond. Variegated willow spills its foliage in the southeast corner, emerging lemon-lime, turning cream and green in summer, and a shimmery yellow in fall. Other focal points include “beauty bush”, sprinkled with pink blossoms in spring, a mountain laurel cultivar with cups a deeper pink than the native, and a coppery Japanese maple. In early summer, a crimson shrub rose contrasts in color, texture and form with the dark purple foliage of barberry and the silvery needles of blue spruce. Elsewhere, heirloom Siberian irises smolder with the mahogany leaves of ninebark, which will later brighten with the white umbels of goutweed, and a sprawling burning bush shelters a little red wagon filled with a pot of perennials.

In early summer, perennial shrublets line the vegetable garden fence, an assortment of powder-puff pink peonies, an unusual and stunning baptisia with bright yellow and dark purple racemes.  Later, the white, pink and red fronds of astilbes form a ribbon across the front of the house, anchored with a mauve colored hydrangea and another with lace-cap blue blossoms. The pale yellow “Moonbeam” coreopsis, cream-colored feverfew, and golden black-eyed Susans cavort in a garden in the front lawn. Summer also brings an assortment of lilies, all striking against the brick house — a bright orange with ruffled petals, soft tangerine and warm marmalade, lemon and banana yellows. There are also exotic cultivars – plum purple with a yellow throat, another with a plum purple throat edged with cream petals.  In the large garden in the back yard,   six foot wands of cimicifuga with black foliage and white racemes, and the equally tall fennel, with mustard colored seed heads and feathery fronds smelling of licorice, rise over the scarlet and purple beebalm the hummingbirds adore, all skirted with variegated hosta and an assortment of coleus with foliage of chartreuse and maroon, brick red and lemon yellow.

Later in the season, the walk between the front and back door is lined with bright pink phlox skirted with the tendrils of blue perennial geranium, sprays of pale pink mallow, and spurts of purple echinecea to liven the scene. In one garden, the shrublet perskovia with its lavender blossoms and silvery foliage joins the pale yellow coreopsis and a pearly pink yarrow for a gentle, pastel pairing. In another garden, the dark golden rays of rudbeckia partner with orange and yellow throated lilies. Many gardens host a beautiful assortment of phlox – a bright, bubble gum pink, a lavender coupled with hyssop’s purple spears, pale pinks with dark throats, magenta, and a third hydrangea is draped with lace-caps of pink, white and blue. In the large garden in back, other herbs flower along with the bee balm and the fennel, tiny white petals of thyme, lavender spurs of mint, purple pom-poms of flowering onion.

In the fall, chrysanthemums cushion the front steps. A circle of raspberry sedum “Autumn Joy”, the “Moonbeam” coreopsis and the silvery lavender perskovia, and a pale yellow and pink lantana create an unusual seasonal display of pastels. Dahlias in sunrise and sunset hues pair with rubdeckia in one garden, orange impatiens in another. “Montauk” daisy spreads cheery rays in its own garden underneath the mountain laurel, repeated at the far reaches of the property. A traditional hydrangea, with racemes maturing from cream to mauve, borders the deck, small mounds of purple asters line the ramp with variegated euonymus climbing its rails. A potted red hibiscus reigns at the top of the deck, and a potted palm, over 40 years old, relaxes in the corner. Between the ramp and the house, a shrub rose blooms for the third time this year, with tropical looking coral and pink blossoms. A holly, with glossy foliage and clusters of ruby red-berries, will provide interest in winter. Marigolds and pumpkins cheer various places in the lawn, the burning and blueberry bushes are afire, and in the garden, purple New England asters mingle with the pale blue wild varieties, chrysanthemums burst with blossoms of gold, purplish pink, and copper, and the coleus shines in its finest hour — rusty red with a lime edge, lime leaves splashed with maroon – inviting visitors to rest in the Adirondack chairs underneath the locust tree, which affords a panoramic view of the surrounding fields, burnished in the autumn light, and a glimpse of the distant pond, eclipsed with blaze of yellow, scarlet and orange foliage. It’s a glorious view of a glorious season from a glorious garden.

Dayna McDermott