The West Chicago Garden Club

The Kruse House Garden is ever changing. Today the fading plants still provide a diversity of color and texture.

The Kruse Crew will be changing too. Billie Childress is retiring from working in the Kruse Garden and she will be greatly missed! For many years now Billie has headed up the crew, providing expert leadership, knowledge, generosity, and fun. Billie has led us down the right paths, resulting in a garden with “bones” and artistic structure.

Billie has donated numerous trees and perennials from her own gorgeous garden. The viburnum she donated twenty years ago has grown to fifty feet – it’s magnificent. The variety of perennials are like a kaleidoscope –vivid, beautiful and always changing. Billie has devoted an incredible amount of time and love to the garden.

Thank you Billie!

The Kruse House Gardeners have completed the last work day, officially closing out the 2023 gardening season at Kruse. It was a year of significant accomplishments with the refining of the bed front east side, the reworking of the bed at the end of the driveway, and the addition of many new plantings.

We leave you with these parting images of the garden in rapid transition: the fall asters and sedum in full bloom, the begonias and other spring potting plants reinvigorated by the cool fall days before the coming of a hard frost, and the cone flowers’ and other summer perennials’ withered blooms pointing ominously to the end of the season–all against a backdrop of colorful falling leaves. Enjoy!

(For more photos, see our October newsletter)

by Barbara Darrah

“Try to remember a kind of September when grass was green and grain was yellow”
(Song by The Brothers Four)

I think of September as the most ambiguous month of the year. I never know whether to be happy or sad. Summer still lingers, but Autumn is in the air. Our gardens are still green but there are touches of gold everywhere. At Kruse the gardens are still blooming gloriously as you may have seen at the Ice Cream Social. Still, there is that overall feeling of a declining summer holding its breath as Autumn creeps in. I love the crispness of a September day, but I hate watching August’s grandeur fade away.

During our most recent workday at Kruse, we weeded and deadheaded, hoping to hang on to that last bit of blossom, but spent the break talking about what we would be doing next year, already transplanting and dividing in preparation. I will miss our “group gardening” in the coming months, but I must admit that the chance to step back and take it easy sounds very enticing indeed about now.

“Try to remember a kind of September when life was slow and oh so mellow.”