If your garden looks a little sad right now, it could probably benefit from the addition of some no-fail fantastic fall perennials.   Here are some of my favorites:   If you have a sunny, wet area, Joe-Pye weed is a perfect choice. The blooms are super tall and a favorite with pollinators. The latin name is Eutrochium purpureum.    Sedum ‘Autumn Joy’ (Hylotelephium telephium) is fantastic this time of year. It's super easy to propagate as well - in the spring when it starts to grow, I'll give it a hair cut and then simply place the clippings together in well-drained area in the garden and viola! A new Sedum ‘Autumn Joy’ is born. It's just that easy to propagate them. Up at the cabin, I have three new autumn joys thanks to the haircuts I gave the parent plants in mid June.   Asters are glorious right now. You can grow them from seed or from transplants. If your asters are tall and leggy, make a note to give them a few haircuts during the month of June. I'll keep mine cut back to about a foot tall until the 4th of July and then I'll let them be. As with Joe-Pye and Autumn Joy, the Chelsea Chops keep my asters more compact - the way I prefer them this time of year. The latin name for New England asters is Symphyotrichum novae angliae (They were moved into their own genus.)   Finally, sweet autumn clematis is in it's glory in the garden right now. Throughout the spring and the summer, I'm not very nice to the young vines. They can act a bit thuggish and I rip out everything I find during the months of May and June. The vines that make it to fall are the lucky ones - benefitting from my absences in the garden during the summer; weeks when I was too busy or away for travel.  While I was gone, the remaining vines made big enough strides to earn the right to stay through to fall. The beautiful blooms give me pause for the way I treated them in the spring, yet I know my garden would be overrun if I didn't at least attempt to thwart it in the spring.         Brevities   #OTD      Today is the birthday of Stephen McCormick who was born on this day in 1784.   McCormick was from Auburn, Virginia and he patented a cast iron plow with replaceable parts.   Inventing equipment for agriculture was something of a family activity; his cousin of was Cyrus McCormick, inventor of the famous reaper.   The concept of removable, replaceable parts created the need for factories to build them. Farmers liked the idea of only needing to buy the parts they needed; instead of buying an entirely new plow.   In a little over a decade, McCormick had sold more than 10,00 plows.         #OTD     Today is the birthday of Edward Beard Budding who was born On this day in 1796.   Budding had been working part time at carpet mill.    During his shift, he watched a machine remove the nap from wool.   It gave him an idea. Inspired by the machine from the carpet mill and working mostly at night, Budding adopted the machine into what became the world's first push lawn mower.  Budding even tested his machine at night - to avoid the curiosity of his neighbors and also to make sure they wouldn't make fun of him.   In South Downs in West Sussex, England, there is the Budding Museum of Gardening which features some of the very first lawn mowers preserved and researched by an ex-bank manager named Clive Gravett. In addition to the museum made up of Gravett's impressive collection of mowers spanning the past 150 years, Gravett created a charity dedicated to Budding.   A year ago, Gravett wrote a book called, Two Men Went to Mow: The Obsession, Impact and History of Lawn Mowing. In it, Gravett tells the full story of this the lawn mower and it's impact on the world. A passionate gardener with a love of history, Gravett has helped to preserve Budding's legacy. There's just one piece of Budding's legacy that has remained illusive: one of his original lawn mowers. Gravett suspects they ended up being used as scrap during the first and second world wars.         #OTD    Today in 1959