By the time you’ve read this post, my garden will be all tucked up for the winter. Putting away pots (or tipping them over–more on that later), stowing away my weird and wonderful assortment of garden decorations and emptying the bird bath are all chores that I like to do at the last minute. But the clock is ticking and in just a few days my guy and I will head off to our winter home on the other side of Canada.

Our wood settee (shown partially in the foreground) stays in the garden year round as does the vintage fishing boat which is now a garden bed.

Besides, the weather forecast is calling for night-time temperatures of 2C or 3C which in Fahrenheit is Pretty-Darn-Close-To-Freezing. You’d never know it, though, if you only had our little moss garden and all the plant containers on our deck to gauge the season. Everything is surprisingly green and still growing including some very un-hardy tropical houseplants and annuals that by all rights should have expired weeks ago.

Instead of a lawn in my little woodland garden I have a lush carpet of moss which flourishes over the naturally flat limestone surface of our woodland garden.

For instance, I’ve got a towering white flowering begonia that has pride of place in the centre of the fishing boat garden bed (see above and below). I think it’s a Dragon Wing. At close to 3 feet high, the stems spray out in elegant arches, each spangled with white blooms.

A leggy begonia has turned into the star of the fishing boat bed this autumn.

The fuchsias have not stopped, either. I got these bright white and purple beauties (shown below) at an end of season sale and they’ve shown their gratitude ever since with a non-stop show.

Behind the fuchsias is a container with two kinds of hostas. Right after I took this photo, I tipped the container over still filled with the hostas. In this way I have a very good chance of seeing those hostas come back again in the spring. It’s a trick I learned from one of the plantspeople at a garden nursery quite a bit north of us on the Bruce Peninsula. They have a lovely nursery but no solid buildings to over-winter any potted inventory. So to ensure that their plants survive a really harsh winter, they tip over every single pot and leave them all on their sides. The theory is that, even if you have drainage holes in your pot, the wet potting soil at the bottom of the pot can freeze into a block of ice, encasing the roots. A pot on its side drains faster and what ice does develop will only be up a bit of the side of the pot. This technique, by the way, doesn’t work for a plant with pot bound roots. I’ve been tipping over that hosta-filled pot for years now and the hostas come back every spring albeit a little bent out of shape, literally. But they sort themselves out and straighten up pretty fast.

These fuchsias have not received the memo that fall has arrived.

On our deck we’ve got a collection of pots and plant containers filled with flowers, ivies, houseplants, ferns–basically all the usual suspects that don’t have a problem with a full shade situation. We’re surrounded by tall trees both deciduous and evergreen.

Left: A Variegated Croton which has thrived all summer long. Right: My glistening Persian Shield.

Two annuals that I love to use as fillers in a container planting are also classic houseplants (read: not hardy at all). I love Variegated Croton (Codiaeum variegatum), seen above left, for its long deep green/brown leaves streaked with vibrant red. Not only does this plant add a dash of unexpected colour, the strappy leather-like leaves often grow into interesting twists and curls that add an extra element of texture as well. The Persian Shield (Strobilanthes auriculata) adds colour, texture and shine, thanks to the silvery sheen that frosts its leaves. I often plant Persian Shield with velvet leaved Streptocarpus.

My delicate Bird’s Foot Fern has out-lasted a lot of the other seemingly hardier annuals.

You’d think that Bird’s Foot Fern (Pteris cretica), a native of the tropics, would have given up the ghost about the same time that all the kids went back to school. Instead, it has out-shone much of the other plants in its container.

I wish I could dig it up and take it with me. But I swore after our last series of adventures taking a plant on our long road trips across Canada that I would never do that again.

But, I’ve also learned never to say never. Happy (Canadian) Thanksgiving, everyone!