Now is the perfect time to play doctor in the garden. Look for the sick or injured. Look for plants that haven't thrived, plants with disease, and plants riddled with pests. You don't want to leave any diseased plants in your garden over the winter. If you are able to do only one fall garden chore, taking out the sick and infirm is what you want to do. All these babies get dug up and escorted out of my garden. Generally I say that nothing green or brown leaves the property, but these are items I don't dare chop and drop, or compost - these sick plants go out.     Brevities #OTD  It’s the birthday of Lancelot Brown who was born on this day in 1716. Lancelot ended up at Stowe working for William Kent - the eminent painter and Landscape Architect. Stowe was commissioned in the 1730’s. The garden at Stowe was a landscape garden. Lots of straight lines and formality. The garden looked like a painting with an 11 acre lake. The main area was the Elysian Fields; 40 acres featuring buildings and monuments that flank two narrow lakes called the River Styx. The monuments honored the virtuous men of Britian and Greece. The time spent with Kent at Stowe not only transformed the land, it transformed Lancelot from a gardener into a Landscape Architect. It was his big break.  After Stowe, Brown traveled all over England as a freelancer. Brown’ skill and his nickname came from seeing the “capabilities” of the landscape. He became so popular that everyone with means wanted a Capability Brown landscape - they craved his garden designs and garden temples. What everyone wanted was beauty and Capability delivered just that: beautiful gardens. Today, at least 20 of his gardens remain and are in the care of England’s National Trust.   #OTD  Today is the birthday of Agoston Haraszthy who was born on this day in 1812. Haraszthy's family wasHungarian nobility. In 1840, he immigrated to the United States.Back home, Haraszthy had gotten hold of a book that reported the Wisconsin territory offered the finest land in America. So, he went there first. Since Haraszthy’s dream was to make European wine in America, he quickly discovered Wisconsin was not the place for that. In short order, Haraszthy made his way to San Francisco with the gold rush. But San Francisco was not a fit with the grapes. It was foggy and cold. But then, Haraszthy found the Sonoma Valley in 1857. Sonoma Valley was called the "Valley of the Moon" by the writer Jack London and it turned out that Sonoma was the perfect place to grow purple gold. After a dozen years of searching Harazethy had found a place suitable for growing European grapes - which were more delicate and more finicky than North American wild grapes. Giddy and hopeful, Haraszethy built a white villa for his wife and six children on a property he named Buena Vista or Good View. Then he went to Europe and collected 100,000 cuttings of 300 varieties of grapes; There were the rare white grapes of the Pinot Chardonnay, the green Hungarian grape, the Cabernet Sauvignon grapes, and the white Riesling grapes of the Rhine and Moselle river region, just to name a few. There is an old saying that the God of wine, Bacchus, loved the hills. Well, Haraszethy loved them, too. He was the first vine dresser to grow his grapes on the mountain sides in California. In fact, Haraszthy brought many european growing methods to his estate - which included growing the grape plants closer together. This was something other growers found unwise. But Haraszthy knew that growing grapes in close proximity stressed the vines, which in turn, made better tasting grapes. Haraszthy also performed a green harvest - something no one had ever done before. Today the technique is known as dropping fruit which means doing an initial harvest of some of the grapes; the fewer grapes on the vine - the better the flavor of the remaining grapes. That year Haraszthy also brought in a team of Chinese laborers and they worked to dig out the first wine caves