This Doesn't Happen Very Often

Last week we drove north to Massachusetts to visit one of our favorite places, the Berkshire Botanical Garden. We had lunch in town in Stockbridge, then drove out to the garden for a short walk around. It was colder than we dressed for.

Greening mountains in the background, a field of dandelions in the lawn, and flowering crabapples everywhere. Just add in some chilly temperatures and you have spring in the Berkshire Mountains.

A potting shed with living sedum roof and raw timber posts would, of course, be perfect for my needs.

Shades of pink and white are everywhere in early spring.

It is a small botanical garden and can be walked in an hour, even with lingering. There are educational areas, plant sale areas, a tropical hothouse, several beautifully designed perennial borders, an inventive children's garden, a tidy vegetable demonstration garden, all packed in 15 acres.

But we visit just for the views like this one.

I usually come back from a visit to a mature and elegant public garden all pumped up with ideas for my own garden, which quickly turns to deflation as I look around my yard and see so much to do, so many immature and dinky plants, and little cohesive design.

But last week something different happened. We arrived back home from the Berkshires late in the afternoon and the light on this cold May day was still pretty.

I looked around, took a walk in the yard and out into the paths Jim has mowed in the meadow, and I thought . . .

. . . this is just as nice.

My own garden is immensely pleasing in its own smaller scale and relative immaturity. I like it all, even on the same day I saw an established and professionally cared for garden.

I do not have pink and white clouds of flowering crabapples, but there are pinks and whites in my garden to be seen.

It's not that my own garden looks anything like the botanical garden or could rival it in any way. It was simply that it felt as nice. What I saw as I walked around really pleased me in just the same way I had felt at the Berkshire Botanical Garden.

That doesn't happen very often.

Spring Tree Party

There's a party going on in my garden, and it's the spring trees that are hosting.

Cornus florida, a pink flowering dogwood, still bears the scars from a snowstorm in 2011 that broke off the center branches, leaving a gap in the middle, but it is slowly recovering. From some angles you can't tell.

The 'Forest Pansy' redbud that I wrote about recently is done flowering and is now opening its leaves in the shapes of tiny crimson hearts. This takes my breath away.

'Orange Dream' Japanese maple is turning from rich coppery orange to yellow and chartreuse, its summer colors. A lacy white Aronia 'Brilliantissima' photobombs the shot.

A longer view in cool evening light shows the pinky white aronia having fun next to the coppery 'Orange Dream' maple in the distance. A very new variegated white and green sweetgum is in the foreground, tied up because it wanted to lean over and I did not think that was acceptable.

A brand new Aesculus pavia, red buckeye, is spreading its floppy palmate leaves, and they are so crisply pleated, on such a little tree that I am amazed. The tree itself is just a stick of a sapling. But even at this young age, it has big red candle flowers opening.

A paperbark maple, Acer griseum, looks kind of stately as it leafs out in spring. I never thought it would happen -- this tree always looked like it had been assembled by a 7th grade shop class -- but this year it has outgrown that awkward stage and is truly party ready.

The red maple, Acer rubrum, that anchors the end of my "allee" (that is, a 25 foot walk along the side of the house) was deformed by storms a couple years ago, but is regaining its big rounded maple shape now.

Black gums, or tupelos (Nyssa sylvatica) are very late to leaf out in spring. After waiting forever, they slowly and tantalizingly unfurl their greenery.

And finally. . . . finally, my sourwood, Oxydendrum arboreum is just beginning to open its leaves. It took its time this spring, but has finally decided to join us. A real latecomer to the tree party in my garden.

 

Spill, Tumble, and Spew

I love the early spring look of densely flowering ground covers spilling down slopes or tumbling over edges and walls. But I have discovered it is not an easy look to achieve.

Here is my attempt to get Basket of Gold, Aurinia saxatilis, to spill over the edges of the gravel. I wanted it to blur the lines between the mulched bed and the pea gravel area, but instead it has grown in a straight line, apparently afraid to touch the stones.

After flowering I will divide and spread out the individual clumps, and if I stagger the clumps a little better I might break up that straight edge.

And I need a lot more. It should form a long sea of bright yellow spreading all down the borders of this sitting area. Right now it is more of a yellow puddle than a golden sea.

I do love to see it through the emerging red foliage of a smokebush. I cut the smokebush down to two foot high stubs in late winter, and this is what it looks like by mid May. This is Cotinus coggygria 'Grace'. Within the month it will get huge and leafy.

Here's another attempt at spilling plants that has gone a little wrong. These are Forget Me Nots tumbling out of a pot laid on its side.

You can see this kind of thing all over Pinterest, mostly using alyssum as a river of dense flowers running out of a pot. I think it looks dumb, but that didn't stop me from trying to imitate it.

My problem is that the Forget Me Nots (Myosotis) are spreading uphill. You can see it a little better from the other direction in the shot below. It gives an aggressively spewing effect rather than looking like a gentle tumble down the creek bed slope.

Honestly, it looks like the flowerpot belched this blue stuff out and now regrets it. I'm sorry, it just does to me.

See what I mean? I'm going to divide these, spread them about in spots in the gardens for a more natural look, and stop copying ideas from Pinterest.

Who knew growing flowering spreaders would require such fine tuning?

 

Here We Go Again

I am on my fifth attempt to grow a redbud tree, a Cercis. I have lost four so far, but, ever hopeful, here we go again.

This my latest attempt --- Cercis canadensis 'Forest Pansy' and I am so excited to see the first tentative pink blooms opening. I planted it last summer, so this is the first time I am seeing it flower.

It is the purple-leaved variety, and the leaves are a striking, very deep wine color in spring and early summer. Here it was last summer.

After the early summer flush, the leaves fade a little, but the effect becomes kind of jewel-like with mixed greens and reds.

What happened to the other four redbuds I tried to grow?

Well, there was an earlier 'Forest Pansy', planted in this exact same spot, but it was decapitated in a snowstorm its first year. The following spring it made a valiant effort to carry on, and the foot high stub of the remaining stump tried to bloom, but it didn't make it.

Then there was Cercis candensis 'Silver Cloud' with variegated white and green leaves, but it refused to come back after its first winter. I learned from other gardeners that it is not a robust cultivar. It wants just exactly the right amount of partial shade and just the right amount of water and it apparently didn't trust me to provide either.

My one success, until I lost it, was Cercis reniformis 'Oklahoma'. It was a spectacular tree, and I had it for five years before a freak October snowstorm in 2011 took it down.

It was most beautiful in bloom, in late April, just outside the bedroom window.

After blooming on bare wood in early spring, 'Oklahoma' would fill out with glossy heart shaped leaves. It had become a shapely round headed tree, just the right size and a pleasing form.

But this was the last I saw of it after a too-early wet snow hit before the leaves had fallen:

And there was another redbud that I lost. It was one of those 10 free bare root seedlings that comes in an envelope in the mailbox when you donate to Arbor Day. It was about seven inches tall when I planted it in 2006, and six years later it was a sizable young tree. This was a species Cercis canadensis, not a fancy cultivar. I put it out in the meadow, where it got no special attention, and it grew into a multi-stemmed wild child. It did great. Then last year it died.

So, four failures, and here I go again with my hopes rising for my newest 'Forest Pansy' redbud as it opens its pink flowers this May and promises wine red leaves for summer.

 

Come Back in a Couple Years

May 12, 2010 when I originally posted

In May of 2010, just after I started this blog, I wrote a post about a climbing hydrangea, (Hydrangea anomala petiolaris) that I had planted four years earlier. 

You can read it here.

In that post I went on about how this vine wasn't growing up to reach the top of a pergola over the garage, and would it ever do so?  I wondered about pruning it below, and how to do that. 

Commenters, many of whom are still faithful commenters to this day, were full of encouragement and advice for me.

I ended that post by saying "I'm inviting you to come back in a couple years and see if it ever makes it up over that pergola."

Well, it's been three years now. Look:

May 4, 2013

This is so amazing.

First, because the vine has reached the pergola.

Second, because you all said it would and you were right.

Third, it's amazing because when I added that last line inviting anyone to come back to check on my progress in a couple years, it was a throw away line. I had only been blogging for a few short months, and didn't think I'd ever keep it up, or that anyone would keep reading.

Three years later . .  .

Here is an update on what has happened over the intervening years:

In late winter 2012 I got the courage to prune it pretty severely to keep the bunchiness at the bottom at bay. It is still inside the tower for support. Because I pruned it in late winter I sacrificed flowers that spring.

April 2012, pruned but awkward

The shape is contorted now as it stretches desperately for the pergola. It still wants to grow out toward the window but I have become bold with the pruners.

I became emboldened by the specimen I saw on a local garden tour. This climbing hydrangea is what I have in mind, and see over on the ride side of the garage doors how they have pruned the lower stems up bare?

That's what I will do. Mine has now reached the pergola and can start to support itself there, so I will prune it so the lower trunks are bare, and then remove the support tower (I'll have to cut it away). But not yet. It still looks a little gangly and needs something below to hang onto for a while longer I think.

In the past three years I have also learned that my climbing hydrangea is in too much sun. It suffers in the heat of summer and I have to water it quite deeply. But I wanted it to grow over the garage, and the garage faces west, and neither the garage nor the plant is going to move.

Here is how climbing hydrangea is most often grown, I now know. It is sent scrambling up the tall trunks of trees in the woods, where it loves the shade.

These are old specimens that I saw in a private garden. You can tell how happy they are wrapped around tree trunks, not caged in a wooden pyramid. These are unpruned, not struggling to reach the edge of a structure over the garage door. They flower beautifully in deep shade.

So -- mine is not a woodland beauty, and it gets too much sun, and I still have some serious pruning to do. It's an awkward shape right now. But it grew! It grew.

And once again I invite you to come back in a couple more years and see what it looks like fully draped over that pergola.
 

Well, I'm Embarrassed

For a while now I have been touting my winter hardy rosemary, 'Madeline Hill', which has survived outside in my northern Connecticut garden through deep snows of winter, several nights that got as low as zero degrees F, and wet muddy springs.

It thrived and my garden friends were impressed. And admit, it, what do we garden for but to impress our friends and neighbors by growing something they can't manage?

Each spring it came through, greened up and looked lovely.

In summers it was a fragrant mass, adding visual weight and an upright form to the garden, and in fall it was a green foil for the scarlet colored blueberry shrubs around it.

I was pretty proud of my ability to grow a rosemary here in my northern zone 5/6 wet garden in winter, and told people about it.  I wrote about it on this blog.

Well, this is embarrassing. This year I think it is dead.

Dead as a bag of hammers.

Yep. When I brush my hand over a branch, tinder dry needles fall off.

I am no longer talking about how easy it is to grow rosemary outside in this climate.

I am counting this as a Garden Oops. It is the first of the month, and Joene sponsors GOOPs, where we get to tell others about our garden mistakes. You can read more on her blog.

My mistake was not so much in having a marginally hardy plant die on me. My error was that I bragged about growing it. I'm embarrassed about that and am hoping all who listened to me will forget what I said.

I will miss Rosemary Madeline Hill, though.