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If I were a marketer instead of someone who feels better with dirt on my hands, I would ape somebody's commercial and hype asters as the other mum. In fact, asters share many of the attributes of mums, offer some advantages and have only one real shortcoming that I can think of.

A scan of any perennial catalog that includes plants other than the latest and the greatest will offer a lengthy list of asters. There are almost more varieties than we need. The list of the ones that I didn't like would fit on one hand with some fingers left over.

Check the perennial section at your favorite garden center or greenhouse. Most will offer a good selection of asters in the fall. You might even find them in the spring. Recently there has been movement in the industry to produce asters on a schedule like the one used for garden mums. They're pretty, but I'm not sure that is garden wise.First, we are blessed with a number of native asters. The most common of these are quite tall. With selection in the wild or in the garden, and some hybridization efforts, you can find a wide range of heights. We're talking anywhere from ankle to head high.

Like mums, asters have composite flowers and a long period of late summer into fall bloom. Think daisy, but a composite is really a clump of many small flowers. Petals may be arranged in tight formation in multiple layers or singly around the flowers. Colors range from almost blue to pink, red, purple and white.

Most asters are clump forming, but need a bit of space in the garden. Even the small ones will give a clump that expands at a good pace. Do not take from the last sentence that they are invasive. They are vigorous, but not invasive.

One exception to the clump forming habit is the Aster tataricus 'Jindai'. This one blooms in October and spreads by root stolons. It came with a 'watch it' warning but in my garden for the last three years it has been well behaved. It's first blooms opened this week.

Most asters want a maximum amount of sun, although there are varieties that are native and thrive in the shade. The shades ones usually have less petals and slightly smaller flowers.

They are not picky about soil and are quite drought tolerant once established. Some of the mid-sized to taller varieties may benefit from staking, but in my garden I give them enough space so that they can flop if they wish.

Selective pinching of the young plants can also control the height and minimize the sprawl. Any plant that is pinched will be stiffer than one that is left unpinched.

The only problem I can think of is that the quality of the lower leaves sometimes suffers during the long growing season. For this reason, as well as their growth habit I would not use them as specimens, but rather as part of the meadow, or as mine often are, the wild garden.

If you are looking for a reliably hardy blooming machine for your fall garden, asters might be an excellent choice.

Thrice the same weed has bedeviled me. Each encounter drove home an important lesson about gardening, but three times was getting a bit ridiculous.

My lessons started many years ago when my occupation covered well over 100 acres of fruit and produce. In one tiny section of less than two acres a small weed thrived. It grew nowhere else on the farm.

It was just over a foot tall, had a few well-spaced maple-like leaves and a small hibiscus shaped white flower with a purple center and produced a rather large very hard seed. The hard seeds resisted chemical controls and repeated hoeing only seemed to encourage it.

The message it sent was "I am only happy at this one spot and you can't control me." For the decade or so after I quit produce, I let that area grow up in natural grasses, clover and weeds. I simply visited several times a year with the mower. The weed disappeared and I forgot about it.

Five or six years ago I was studying a seed catalog and spotted this wonderful sounding hibiscus. I ordered some seed. You guessed it, my weed was back.

We often joke that every flower is a weed someplace and every weed is a flower some place. I proved the former, but I still hope that no one loves some of the rascals that plague me in my garden.

My weed flower was again forgotten until several days ago.

About mid-summer I disturbed some dirt on the edge of that old produce field to make room to grow some shrubs. My weed is back with a vengeance in its previous haunts. A similar disturbance about fifty yards away yielded not a single weed but, they had never extended that far years ago, either.

Weed seeds can lie in the ground for many years waiting for the right opportunity. Most weeds germinate on the surface or in the top half inch of soil. There in lays part of their control. Every time we disturb the soil surface we invite more weeds to grow.

Now I am not saying don't pull weeds. By preventing them from growing and going to seed you can slowly win the weed battle.

A reasonable coat of mulch will also bury many weed seeds too deep to permit germination. To me and inch or two is reasonable. More than that you are creating an environment for fungus diseases to thrive.

If you use any kind of germination inhibiting chemical it is important to not break the soil surface after application. Any time you move soil after treatment you are bringing untreated soil and more weed seeds to the surface.

My weed is picky about its environment, it's pretty and even though it annoys me, it has given me a better appreciation of the workings of nature.

Fear of failure is the most frequently cited reason why people stay out of the garden. They might kill a plant. If I thought like that I would end up locked in the bedroom closet and you would be spared my weekly ramblings.

Fortunately, I have learned to enjoy my successes and to treat my failures as learning experiences. I hear a lot of gardeners say that they don't give up on a plant until they have killed it three times. Success comes mostly from knowing what not to do.

Here come some of my fear cures. First, think about the planting spot. At least consider light, moisture and wind. I guess I should add soil but I doubt if that is as important as the first three. Morning sun is easy and excludes few plants from the garden pallet. With shade or afternoon sun you must be more selective.

In other words, rule one is to pick the plant for the site. Do not try to make the site suit the plant.On the subject of moisture, if you have watered anything besides new transplants and containers this year you are probably over doing it. Excess water is the number one killer of plants.

That windy, cold weekend we had at the end of March this spring drove home the risk posed by the winter wind. Most plants that suffered from that experience recovered nicely for those with patience.

Do not get in a hurry. Let the garden evolve. Set reasonable goals. Buy only the number of plants that you can get planted in a reasonable amount of time. I cringe when I hear people buying plants while admitting that they still have some to plant from last week or even two weeks ago.

When we go to the garden center or greenhouse we are quick to buy what looks pretty. That's ok if you are buying plants that you know. If you don't know the plant, take a little information home with you. Read the signs, the tags or question the person taking your money.

Some plants are easy to grow and some are quite difficult. Whether you are a beginner or a seasoned veteran, it is important to pick your challenge. I frequently ask about the risks in growing a plant I am unfamiliar with.

Finally my favorite cause of death in the garden, which I learned from an instructor at Longwood Gardens, is called SID. That stands for sudden inexplicable death. Sometimes a plant just dies and the cause can't be explained.

Most of us are too young to remember when the guy on the dime said "you have nothing to fear but fear itself". He wasn't talking about the garden but he could have been.

There is no greater harbinger of the approaching fall season than the appearance of hardy garden mums. Like their counterpart pumpkins, which will appear in a few weeks, they are everywhere.

I'll confess that I probably lack the proper enthusiasm for this beautiful plant. All too often the word hardy is a misnomer. Few people experience survival rates of more than a quarter or a third of the plants put in the garden. Many now treat them as an annual.

I don't know whether it is industry driven or consumer driven, but I suspect several villains. To get the perfect mum that we expect to see, the grower pours on the fertilizer and water while controlling the growth habit of the plant.

The plants in today's market place may also stress tight branching and flower power at the expense of hardiness.

However, on the mum scene, three things fascinate me. One is a patch of stalwart plants that have thrived for more years that I can count in my mother's yard. This year they look great. At nearly 98 she gets to the garden, but I'm sure their care has not been meticulous. They bloom a bit later than we would expect, given our experience with modern day mums.

Second was a recent communication from a gardener stating that if you can find starter plants for mums in the spring and get them in the ground, they seem to be perfectly hardy. The problem is that you can't find them.

That is an interesting thought, but I doubt that the industry will push that option any time soon. After all, it may be more worried about having something to sell in the fall than what happens to them after you get them. I didn't say that last sentence, I just thought it.The other was a recent article in one of the leading popular horticulture magazines. They were talking about the old time varieties of mums. They, too, are very hardy. Some of the varieties they talked about they were able to find. For others, they could not locate plants.

These varieties will not have the uniformity of the modern mum. In my garden, I have some that are quite short and others that rise well past my knee. Flower power is there and there is an offering of colors. The selection doesn't match the modern day offerings, but that quest is probably what started the hardiness problems.

Six varieties of the old time mums that I have found include Clara Curtis (mid-sized pink daisy), Cambodian Queen (tall, single pink), Sheffield (tall, single peach), Mary Stoker (tall, yellow-gold) White Bomb (short, white), and Pink Bomb (short, pink).

Mums. Annuals or perennials. Love them or hate them. It's your choice.

Our garden calendars are rapidly racing toward a rather paradoxical date. Any time now people will start noticing the beauty of ornamental gasses in the landscape and since our natural tendency is to plant what we like when we like it, the urge to plant grasses will soar.

The problem is that many of the most popular ornamental grasses are what we call warm season plants and will establish better if planted in our warmest temperatures. Several years I took identical starter plants of a warm season grass. One went in April and the other in late May or early June.

By the end of the summer the later planted grass was much larger than the one planted earlier. I have also planted grasses well into the fall with success. Generally they waited till the following year to root in, so it took several stomps with my boot to compete with the natural heaving we get from our fluctuating temperatures in a typical winter season.

The warm season grasses include the large group of miscanthus, panicums, erianthus, and the increasingly popular native prairie grasses. The cool season ones include calamagrostis, pennisetum and blue fescue.

We'll take a few seconds to de-Latinize the last paragraph. The miscanthus are a large group with large, usually white, flower heads. You can find cultivars ranging from you knee to well over you head in size. Miscanthus have a wide variety of common names. Maiden grass, Japanese silver grass, zebra grass, and flame grass are some that quickly come to mind.

As I stated several weeks ago, miscanthus are on the invasive watch list. This year I got one seedling from maybe a dozen mature plants. Better than that, I even like the spot it picked, so it will stay.

Heavy metal, a steel blue grass, is the most popular panicum. They are dubbed frost grass. All tall grasses should be planted where they are backlighted. View the panicums against the sun on a frosty morning and you are in for a treat.

Erianthus is our climate's answer to pampas grass. The real pampas grass, cortaderia, is of questionable hardiness here. Hardy pampas grass is a 10-14 foot giant with a red cast to the foliage and huge white plumes.

There are a number of native prairie grasses joining the marketplace. These include the bluestems, Indian grass and dropseeds to name a few. They are being selected for foliage color and well deserve a place in the landscape.

The most widely planted grass is Calamagrostis "Karl Foerster" a well behaved tight clumping grass. Some new varieties are appearing.

Pennisetums are the ones with the fox tail plume. Generally they are smaller in stature. Unfortunately, the very popular red one is an annual here. Blue fescue is very short and very blue. Save this one for drier sites.

Grasses. If you are going to plant them, hurry. If you are going to enjoy them, sit back cause it won't end until snow or ice beats them down.