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Late last Thursday afternoon I pulled myself away from this fall's garden project number five, cleaned myself up and headed to Longwood Gardens to begin another series of classes. Dirty knees were the biggest cleanup challenge.

This time the class focuses on garden design. Most of us start with the plants and try to make a garden. This approach can be a collection of plants or a roaring success. Some of us are just happy if we can keep the plants alive and happy.

Garden design explores the site and the gardener's desires and after those have been exhausted, gets around to the plants.

Your garden is a place to express your ideas. One way to think about it is to do outside what you do inside your house. Your room decor reflects your tastes, wishes and personality. Why shouldn't your garden(s) do the same?

Some of us will use colors or design to express emotions and thoughts. Some will let the garden be an artistic outlet. Statues and sculpture have my attention but I'm too unsure to move ahead. I'll admit that I do have a large ceramic frog that just returned from many years of exile in the cellar. Where he is going, I do not know. Fun and whimsy is another outlet. Why not enjoy the day?

The garden is a link from the car to the house. Is there some detail in the architecture that can be duplicated in the landscape? Do you create an outdoor room? Inside your house there is no question which is the kitchen and which is the living or family room. Bring those concepts outside.

Consider your site and what you wish to do with it. You can mold it to your wishes with retaining walls and terraces, or you can maintain and build on what is there. The latter would maintain the existing natural features and plants and build on them.

A garden is not a garden without people. You need to anticipate activities and events that may occur in your landscape. Is your landscape age appropriate? Is it safe for children? What might be a peaceful stroll through the garden for an adult may be a jungle safari for a five year old.

Or do we reflect on the past of our property and do a restoration. Restoration can take aim at a historic period in the past or can be a duplication of natural conditions. Are we looking for heirlooms or natives?

Gee, that's a lot to think about. Your garden is great if you like it. Your garden is great if you are willing to make changes and watch it evolve into something better. Each tidbit of information from above will improve your garden.

To quote the great football coach Vince Lombardi, "There is no such thing as perfection, but in striving for perfection, we can achieve excellence."

The arrival of fall seems to be the topic of the moment. The obvious fear is that winter is close behind. Is it too early to start counting the days remaining until spring?

If you have some of the tender bulb or thick-rooted annuals still in the garden, time is running out if you wish to save them for next year. This list includes gladiolus, cannas, caladiums, elephant ears and dahlias as the most common ones. These won't survive our winters in the ground.

After digging, gladiolus should be quickly air dried in a warm place. Cut off the tops and shake off the remaining soil. They can be treated with a fungicide and insecticide before storage if that fits your program. With or without chemicals, it is wise to discard any bulbs showing insect, disease or physical damage. They should be stored in an airy, dark place.

With dahlias, I am referring to the tall ones with the large roots and big flowers. The smaller ones with smaller flowers are grown from seed and are not worth fooling with.

Immediately after the stems have been blackened with frost, cut off all but the last four inches. Carefully dig the tuberous roots. Discard if the crowns are damaged. Turn the roots upside down and let dry for a week. Pack them in peat moss and keep at temperatures in the low 40ies. Packing in peat moss is an excellent way to create a humidity level that's neither too wet nor too dry.

For cannas and caladiums you may wish to beat the frost, as they are a bit more temperature sensitive than the first two. Again, dry and shake off excess soil from the rhizomes. Storing in peat moss is the best with minimum temperatures of 50 degrees recommended. Good-sized damaged root sections will often be good for new plants.

Caladiums need high temperatures to get started in the spring, so of the above group they are the most difficult to keep going. So much for the bulb or bulb like plants that you plant in the spring.

Now is a good time to do any last minute planting of spring-blooming bulbs. Daffodils are easy to find and easy to grow. They are happy in most soils and do not seem bothered by lots of sun or lots of shade. They thrive in our climate and multiply freely with little attention. In five to seven years a clump may need division to prevent overcrowding. Unlike many other spring flowering bulbs, daffodils are not squirrel food.

With tulips and hyacinths pick larger bulbs. Larger bulbs have larger flowers. You can keep them going successfully with regular fertilizer if you have a sunny spot with rather light soil. Unfortunately, the best results usually come in the first year so replant regularly. Think about the squirrels with these.

There are many different crocus varieties out there. They perform very well if one can resist cutting off the tops until they have dried. It's ok to mow the crocus section of your yard at the highest setting several times. Besides, you can go faster. They also prefer the driest sections of your yard or rock garden.

Bulbs play a wonderful role in the garden. Plant the spring bloomers now. Dig and store the spring-planted ones now or forget them and start over again in the spring.

My calendar seems to flip through days, weeks and months about as fast as my car's odometer flips through miles on a hurried trip. It's October already. Where did the spring and summer go?

The good news is that our fall weather has been ideal and you still have time to plant. I hope so because I am just about halfway through part three of a four part landscaping project surrounding the cobblestone walks I completed last fall. Projects five through eight have already been filed in that huge box in my mind labeled, "wait till next year."

As we plant into approaching colder weather there are a few tips to follow. First you need to make sure that plants enter the cold season with adequate moisture. This season with its adequate rainfall should present no problems. I am watering as I plant and once a week until we have had an inch of natural rainfall. I then go away.

Second and more importantly, the key to prevent winter heaving is to plant, wait until the soil freezes, and then mulch to keep the soil temperatures more stable. Winter heaving is the process where newly established plants are raised, even expelled, from the ground by the repeated freezing and thawing of the soil. If you spot plants that are coming out of the ground during the winter, a well-placed large boot is an appropriate solution.

Turning to the vegetable garden one might think of a fall cover crop to add organic matter to the soil. We have been gathering the yard clippings and piling them on the garden. I am debating whether to roto-til the garden this fall or wait for spring. Remember that anytime you add green organic material to a garden you give up some nitrogen to the decomposition process, thus a little extra nitrogen is advisable as long as you remember that most vegetable crops are not heavy users of fertilizer.

I am also eying my grass clippings for an experiment. I am tempted to try to follow the lead of a friend who claims great success with growing potatoes on the soil surface. He lays the seed potatoes on the ground's surface, covers them with organic material and waits for a normal harvest. He uses hay. No digging, just pulling the hay away at harvest time.

Also, if you have dying or decaying plants in the vegetable garden it is wise to either remove them or incorporate them into the soil now. I had some disasters this season, which I blame on the cooler, wetter spring and my unwillingness to spray as needed. My tomatoes were the worst in years. Leaving diseased litter in the garden is an invitation for disease and insect problems next year.

Also think about any weeds still out there. Hopefully, it is not too late to grab them before they scatter their seed. The only way to get rid of weed problems is not to have any weeds. If you think about that last sentence long enough it might make sense. If it doesn't, just go pull a few weeds and it won't matter.

If you are desperate for some fall color you could add a few pansies, ornamental cabbages or garden mums. The pansies will generally survive the winter and give you a head start in the spring. The ornamental cabbage will last at least until Christmas and longer without severe cold. The mums are great color but please notice I omitted the word hardy. You will get some winter survival but will usually be disappointed if you plant them thinking that they are perennials.

The time is also coming to start thinking about those annual bulbs and tubers in the gardens. Primarily I am thinking about gladiolas, cannas and large flowered dahlias. There are others. You either leave them in the ground and start over next spring or dig and store them. We'll talk about that next week.

Once this is off to the editor I'm going to get a few stepping stones for my projects. After last night's rain it will be a day or so before I can resume planting, but I can still find something to do because the season is fleeting away and I'm not ready to think about next year yet.

My birth year is such that I vaguely remember saving the large ears on the corn wagon to be seed for the next year as well as seed buyers inspecting and selecting some small grain fields for use as seed.

Very plainly I remember grandmother and I saving seeds of zinnias and marigolds and I guess other flowers. We also let lots of seeds fall and patiently waited for them to germinate in the spring to provide us with flower transplants.

The marigolds we grew from saved seed were generally uniform but every now and then you would get a plant showing great variation, usually in height. My guess is that we got that level of uniformity because we only had a mid-sized plant with medium orange and yellow flowers.

As we implied last week, hybridization has changed all that. Hybridization came first to the field crops. Vegetables were the next to get attention, followed by the annual flowers. Perennials, shrubs and trees have been hybridized, I think to a lesser extent, in that order.

Commonly today many plants are grown vegetatively (cuttings or tissue culture) thus by-passing the need to worry about seed uniformity. Cuttings and tissue culture always produce a perfect clone of the parent plant. Tissue culture is a complicated process that permits you to take a few cells from a plant and end with hundreds of baby plants.

Meanwhile, back with the seeds. If you plant seeds from a hybrid plant the offspring will be very mixed. Hybrid seeds must be purchased.

With seeds there are some other interesting outcomes. There are naturally occurring white and purple coneflowers. If grown together, the offspring will be purple. The same can be said for the yellow and red native columbines. Their offspring will be red.

The red columbine and the purple coneflower are dominant. To get white or yellow, the recessive colors, they must be crossed with other recessives. To explain, both my daughter and son-in-law are redheads. You can guess the color of my grandson's hair.

If you plant a mixed bed of the fancy columbines that are available in the market place today and let them colonize, you will, in a few years, have a patch that is uniformly unattractive. To keep uniformity, you must segregate each cultivar.

The vine wisteria often gets a bad rap about blooming. The problem may be that it was seed grown or from a cuttings from a poor performing parent. To be successful, look for a plant in bloom or quiz your plant source about its parent.

Sweet shrub, that sweet shrub that graced almost every grandmother's doorstep when I was a child is also naughty. More often than not, its seedlings are rather unpleasant smelling. The sweet shrub is the one that had an odd shaped, mostly purple flower. There is also a very nice white one in the marketplace today.

If you plant a seedling of a ginkgo tree you may get a nasty surprise in 15 or 20 years when it reaches fruiting maturity, The flesh of the fruit smells like rotting fish. I see seedlings offered regularly, but you want a male. Planting a grafted tree is the only surety that you will not be disappointed in a decade or two.

I could ramble on with more examples, but I won't. My intent is not to discourage seed saving, but to close with a baseball analogy for further explanation. Strikeouts are a lot more common than homeruns.

Several days ago someone tossed me an interesting question. He had bought a fancy gourd some place and had saved the seeds. On two tries he had gotten nice plants but no fruit. His question was, "what was going on?"

My first inquiry was about pollinating insects. My second question was, does the plant have excess fertility? Both questions were answered to suggest that the problem was more elusive.

When I told my daughter about the conversation, I got a quick lesson in genetics. Let's start by saying that hybrids are common today because of their superior characteristics.

To get a hybrid, you must bring pollen from one plant to the flower of another. This can get laborious since most plants are self-pollinating and any self-pollination would destroy the hybridization process. You have all heard about the gangs of youths hired to de-tassel corn.

Plant breeders have developed male sterile lines of plants to facilitate the production of hybrid seeds with a lot less labor. Unfortunately, hybrid seeds produced with a male sterile parent will produce plants that produce sterile seeds. Flowers formed on such plants would not have the ability to produce male pollen and thus no fruit forms.

This may be the cause of the fancy gourd with seeds that will produce plants but no fruit. The solution would be to introduce a pollinator, but then who knows what the fruits would look like. In other words, if you plant seeds from a hybrid plant you can't predict what characteristics the offspring will display. They will vary greatly.

I also got a related question about how to get seed for a seedless watermelon. The temptation was to suggest, go to a seed store but that one too has an interesting explanation.

Most plants are diploids meaning that the plant cells have matched pairs of chromosomes, which divide in reproduction or seed production, producing another diploid plant. Plant breeders using either X-rays or a chemical process can produce plants with four matched chromosomes. These are called tetraploids. A lot of fancy large flowered daylilies are tetraploids. As in the last paragraph you will guess that when you cross tetraploids the matched chromosomes divide evenly, forming another tetraploids.

Seedless watermelons result when you cross a diploid watermelon with a tetraploid watermelon. The resulting offspring have three matched chromosomes and thus are unable to divide evenly resulting in sterility or the production of no seeds.

You can buy seed for seedless watermelons. In fact there are a lot of seedless varieties available. They remain much more expensive than seeds for a traditional seeded melon. Also, you must plant a separate pollinator with the seedless varieties.

It's amazing what the plant breeders are doing. Saving our garden seeds isn't predictable like it was when grandma and I gardened. Hybrids have created a whole new plant world. We will continue our visit to seeds next week.