Saugus Gardens in the Fall

Here’s what’s blooming in town this week to make your walks more enjoyable

By Laura Eisener

No frost yet! While some weather predictions warned of a possible frost Tuesday, the day dawned frost-free so there are still many flowers in bloom that we might be able to enjoy for a few more weeks. Monday afternoon I did bring in amaryllis bulbs and other very tender houseplants out of an abundance of caution, and as always it is hard to find windowsill space for everything! The amaryllis bulbs at least can go into their dormant state now and won’t need to have window space for another six weeks or so, except for the crazy one which bloomed this week.

It looks like we are enjoying the peak of fall color – plenty of trees are still green, but the red maples (Acer rubrum) and sugar maples (Acer saccharum) are showing very vivid color in many places. You certainly don’t have to go out of town to enjoy the fall foliage New England is famous for. Our native red maple is abundant on pond edges and swampy sites, such as along the Saugus River, near Birch Pond on Walnut Street, around Prankers Pond and near both Pearce Lake and Silver Lake at Breakheart Reservation. Since it is a salt tolerant species, it is also popular as a street tree and a shade tree in residential and commercial landscapes. Winter salt treatments on paved roadways are more harmful to sugar maples, so they are not used on streets as they had been in the pre-automobile era.

The full moon will be tomorrow, October 28 – known as the Hunter’s Moon. Crickets can still be heard in the grasses in the evenings, and on warm afternoons turtles still bask in the sun on Silver Lake. Many tropical flowers are still in bloom, such as marigold (Tagetes spp.) and cockscomb (Celosia spp.) Some dark purple celosia (Celosia spicata) appears to be brewing in a small cauldron on Walnut Street, tended by a ghost and one of the witches from the “Hocus Pocus” movie, which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year.

The orange and black orb weaver spider at Charlie Zapolski’s looks very appropriate in its Halloween colors. Orb weaver spiders are members of a large family, the Araneidae, which has over 3,000 species worldwide. They are known for the construction of elaborate rounded webs, which they remake every day to ensnare small insects.

Korean mums (Chrysanthemum koreana) are in full bloom in my garden right now, with pale apricot daisy-like flower heads. These lavish and very hardy mums are very easy to grow and become covered in flowers in late October with no pinching or special maintenance required. All they need is sunlight. ‘Sheffield pink’ may be the best known variety, but there are others with pale lavender, pink and apricot petal tints. Several of these have been grown in New England since the 1930s, but they are less well known than the florists’ chrysanthemum with its many intense colors. The scientific name has changed several times, with some scientists having assigned it to the genus Dendranthema while most have returned it to the genus Chrysanthemum.

The hummingbird moth I saw this week on the Korean mums looks like a snowberry hummingbird moth (Hemaris diffinis), which is closely related to the eastern clearwing moth (Hemaris thysbe), which we often see but with black rather than light-colored legs. The snowberry moth is more often found in the western part of the country but does show up here from time to time. It is occasionally called a lobster moth because of the shape of its body, though these moths are not related to either hummingbirds or lobsters! The larvae can only feed on special plants, such as snowberry (Symphoricarpos spp.), honeysuckle (Lonicera spp.) and viburnum (Viburnum spp.), but adults enjoy nectar from a wider range of plants.

  Editor’s Note: Laura Eisener is a landscape design consultant who helps homeowners with landscape design, plant selection and placement of trees and shrubs, as well as perennials. She is a member of the Saugus Garden Club and offered to write a series of articles about “what’s blooming in town” shortly after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. She was inspired after seeing so many people taking up walking.

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