My Weeds Are Very Sorry

The Corrections - 2nd Installment

2012-01-26T00:07:00.000-05:00

This is the second installment in a list of corrective actions that I must take in 2012 in my gardens. It's starting to overwhelm me. All the work.

A Correction: I must do something about the front walk.

I liked it a couple years ago when the green buns of chamaecyparis and the little shrub itea and the pretty winter-flowering heath all worked together, and there were tulips and flowering onions in spring. But even then the horizontal overwhelmed the vertical in this strip and I knew it.

In 2010 a family of voles came to the same conclusion, and helped me out by removing every single shrub and bulb, from the roots up. They destroyed all living plants in this strip. In 2011 I had to start over.

Originally there were tulips . . .

. . . followed by globe onions and rosy garlic and yellow allium moly to welcome you along the walk. . . .


. . .and originally I liked the fall colors and textures. But the voles and I agreed it was all too horizontal.

In 2011 almost everything was removed. I stuck in zinnias and irises and gaura from other parts of the garden and it looked chaotic. I was not happy with it. In 2012 I must make changes.

Not happy with this last summer.

The Correction: dig it all up and start over.
Degree of Difficulty: not too bad, the soil is loose and crumbly and the space is small. But what to plant?

Another Project: I must prepare for a garden tour.

On July 15, 2012 visitors from the New England Wildflower Society are coming to my garden, to study it during a two hour guided tour conducted by Ellen Sousa, who will be demonstrating how to create wildlife habitat even if you live in a development in the suburbs with covenants and homeowner restrictions.

I am a little stunned I said yes.

Hypericum androsaemum 'Albury Purple' (St. Johnswort) in my garden. Not native. Invasive in fact.

I must mulch, edge, remove non-performers, add color, move the struggling plants and re-plant in the gaps. Widen, amend and prune. Find abandoned tools and put them away. Fertilize. Chop back as much of the bittersweet as I can reach.

I must decide what to do about the most egregious non-natives (hypericum, should I keep it?) Get everything in the newer gardens to grow two seasons' worth of foliage. Replant all of the tree saplings I lost on the back hill, or at least a dozen of them. Remove dead things.

Weed. Thin out the bunchy stuff. Plant up the bare places. Redecorate the compost dump. Water everything since it will be hot and dry and 100 degrees then.

The Correction: hide until the visitors go away.
Degree of Difficulty: daunting.

Be Warned

2012-01-24T00:30:00.000-05:00

It is every bit as addicting as they said it was. I am hooked.

I don't tweet, I dislike facebook although I am on it, and I have no patience for all this social networking sharing stuff.

And then I joined Pinterest. Yikes.

Endless arrays of pictures and ideas. Easy, so easy to grab something from the internet and "pin" to idea boards. Or grab it from someone else's idea board. It's like a big menu of Tumblr blogs, but organized into topics and set up so you can see everyone's and they can see yours easily.

There is constant endorphin gratification as pretty photos slide by, and creative projects ping in my mind. Instant reward as "re-pins" and "likes" validate my tastes. It's like blog comments only more fleeting.

It's ephemeral, visually rich, quick, and it opens all kinds of creative possibilities. I am losing big portions of my day to it.

There are wonderful garden photos all over Pinterest. Plants, designs, hardscapes, tools, inventive projects, check it out. Then go look at the home design and fashion and oh my god the food ideas.

You can see whether anyone enjoys your blog photos, by checking if they pin them to their idea boards. Type pinterest.com/source/your blog url.com into your browser and it shows you any of your photos that people have discovered and grabbed, and who they are.

(Pinterest always includes the link back to your blog with credit.)

So go sign up.

It's free. You have to go through a weird invitation process that takes a couple days, and there's a waiting list (huh?), and you have to sign up with a facebook or twitter id, which is kind of annoying.

But be warned. I did not believe it could be so addicting.

Salad Bowl

2012-01-21T00:36:00.000-05:00

This wide, shallow bowl is my favorite container planter.

It is big, 26 inches across, and it is light, made from fiberglass and sand blended together. I can lift it, empty or filled with potting soil.

Even though it is fiberglass, it has a rough texture and mossy patina that gives it an aged look of old concrete. Nicer than hypertufa, but nowhere near as cheap.

It did not come with drainage holes so I had to spend an afternoon with Jim's drill and the biggest bit in the case, drilling holes in the bottom. Why would an expensive plant container not have drainage holes?

Originally I put a rosemary plant in the bowl, so that I could bring it into the closed porch for winter, protecting it from cold and wind outside.

The rosemary plant is Rosmarinus officinalis 'Madeline Hill', which is one of the hardiest, surviving temperatures down to 0 degrees F. (-18 C.), if you can imagine, but it is still a Mediterranean sub shrub that doesn't like winter wind.

I loved the look of the rosemary in the bowl, sharing the edges of the container with an ornamental oregano Origanum "Kent Beauty'. Loved it. But you know where this is going . . . . the rosemary got too big, and the oregano did too.

They outgrew the container, and I could barely lift the bowl to bring it in each winter, it was so heavy. It was time to plant Madeline Hill outside in the garden, let her hunker down in the cold of winter and see how she would do.

The rosemary looked good after transplant this summer. She can billow and bulk up out there, as rosemary should.

Madeline Hill transplanted well

It is January now, and we finally have a little snow cover after a month of wind and sun. Temperatures this month hit 6 degrees F. one night (-14 C.). She still looks good, but the real test will be how this plant actually looks in March.

Madeline soldiering on in the dead of winter

The Kent Beauty oregano has also been planted out in the garden, but it's a zone 6 plant, quite tender, so I don't expect to see it next spring, but you never know, right?

Now . . . what to plant in the bowl? Annuals, I think. Not large permanent things like a big shrub this time.

Violas or pansies would be lovely, and make a big statement, especially against the neutral cement color of the pot. A whole bowlful of these beauties, filling the entire big container, would make me happy. But kind of predictable. I've done pansy containers before.

I might plant a trio of lettuces instead, using green and red leaf varieties, to get foliage contrast and salad fixings to boot.

Lettuce is often used as bedding plants, massed for great color effect. I could do a mini mass in this container and keep it on the deck outside the kitchen door. (Do you think it would be safe from rabbits so close to the house, in a container, elevated on a deck?)

Whiteflower Farm has a trio of lettuces that are ornamental and edible and would look nice massed together in the bowl, but any combination of several lettuces would work.

http://www.whiteflowerfarm.com/4809-product.html

I don't like fussy container constructions with spillers, fillers and thrillers. My containers are usually just one plant or two, and I like to keep things simple.

And what could be simpler than a big bowl of lettuce on the deck? Or more convenient for dinner?

The Corrections - 1st Installment

2012-01-17T07:22:00.000-05:00

In 2012 I must do some corrective gardening.

First, I must move the blueberries (vaccinium corymbosum 'Northblue'). They were so small when planted, and the three amsonias behind them were tidy things (Amsonia tabernaemontana).

But as nature intended, the amsonias put on serious size in the third year, and the blueberries bulked up and we had a territory dispute.

They are fine in the spring before the amsonias emerge. They get sunlight, they leaf out and bloom beautifully, but by late spring they are completely overcome. The blueberries get shaded and crowded, and the amsonias collapse over them in wet weather.

The foliage gets fungal spot diseases. Blueberries like moist soil but not wet leaves, and certainly not wet leaves from being smothered. Because they are struggling they defoliate early, and I never see the glorious red color in fall that is their hallmark. I must move them.

The first fall the spindly blueberries and tidy amsonias got along uneasily, but ok.

The following summer the looming amsonias were plotting a takeover.

The Correction: dig up the blueberry plants in spring and put all four along the sunny, open edge of the new gravel garden. They'll move well, as they are shallow rooted and still small shrubs.
Degree of Difficulty: easy

The mid level in there between the amsonias and the geraniums is where the blueberries are struggling. I'll take them out and this corner will be full and fine with just the geraniums at the foot of the amsonias, don't you think?

xxx

Second, I must move the yellowroot groundcover (Xanthorhiza simplicissima) that is being overtaken by huge spruce trees along the berm. Who knew that Colorado spruces would become such huge trees? I mean, I knew, but who knew it would happen in my lifetime?

The yellowroot plants have spread from six small plugs in 2007. They send out runners and cover ground enthusiastically. The runners are easy to dig and divide, so I have helped them along by digging and re-planting as they spread. Now they are too close to the hollies and spruces behind. I must move them.

The yellowroot groundcover shrubs are crowding the lowest branches of the spruces and hollies.

I wish these could just walk themselves forward 3 feet. I hate digging out sod.

The Correction: dig out more lawn in front of the berm, maybe another three feet out from the edge? Will that be far enough? Four feet? Then dig up every last yellowroot shrub and sucker and reposition them further out in front of the berm.
Degree of Difficulty: not hard but tedious. This is a very long line of plants, but they do dig up easily and root easily. Removing three feet of lawn along the whole edge will be the hard part. I hate removing sod.

Third, I must move my beloved sourwood tree (Oxydendrum arboreum). It's a really interesting tree, small and narrow and perfect as a focal point near a patio. But it is very, very, very slow growing, or else mine is just not thriving even though it looks ok.

What I need at this spot near the patio is shade. This is the west edge of the patio and the sun bakes the entire area with no relief in summer. Umbrellas and arbors and structures haven't worked there in any way that is satisfactory.

The sourwood is a pretty little thing, almost more of a tall shrub, but it offers no shade at all, and won't for many years. I think I should move it.

I love this little tree, but it's more decorative than shady.

In fall sourwood is a stunner.

The Correction: dig up the sourwood and re-plant it near the new gravel garden. Then put in a fast growing, shade-producing, big, leafy river birch next to the patio. I even have one, a four foot tall sapling that needs a home. In two years I will have plenty of shade on a summer day.
Degree of Difficulty: yikes! Digging up the sourwood has me nervous. It is a finicky tree, the roots don't like disturbance, and even though it is too small to shade anything, it is as tall as I am and has been in the ground for five years. Can I do this? Should I do this? Why would I think about doing this?

Planting the river birch next to the patio will be easy.

This is just the first installment in a longer list of things that need to be moved, corrected, and altered in my garden in 2012. I have all winter to plan, and a full season to anticipate how the heck I am going to get all these things done. I'm exhausted already.

Stay tuned for the second installment of corrections to be made.

Surgery

2012-01-13T13:13:00.000-05:00

Ouch. Does it hurt?

We put it off too long, but we finally had surgery here.

In 2010 winter snow split a beautiful weeping Japanese maple 'Crimson Queen' right down the middle and I thought it was lost.

But it wasn't. Temporary splints and traction were put in place --- a clamp, some plastic rope tied to provide tension --- and the two halves of the little maple came back together and held.

The clamp was temporary until I could do some tree surgery with a permanent bolt.

But you know how that goes. I got busy, the tree leafed out and I did not remove the clamp or ties. I didn't do anything, and it looked great all summer, hiding the yellow clamp and plastic ties under its beautiful leaves. A full year went by.

You can't tell this tree is trussed together with hardware

Because the clamp presses in on the outer layer that transports nutrients up and down the trunk, it can impede the tree's function. And sure enough, when we finally got to it last week and removed the now rusted clamp, there were severe indentations in the bark. I should never have left the clamp on all year.

Jim put plenty of wood glue deep in the center of the split, all the way down, and then drilled the hole and inserted a 4 inch stainless steel bolt. It was awkward work from underneath the low, dense canopy, but he got it done.

Lots of glue and a 4" bolt. (There is plenty of glue in the top of the wound above the bolt too)

Last year - You can see how severe the original injury was

I enjoy updates like this. Last winter I thought I had lost this tree. This winter it seems to be okay.

Over time the bolt will be incorporated into the growing tissue as the trunk increases in size, but it will hold the two halves together as that happens.

Even though I waited a full year, I believe the surgery was a success.

Pink Barns

2012-01-09T15:58:00.000-05:00

Flowering tobacco in my garden - Nicotiana alata

When you think of tobacco plantations you think of Virginia or North Carolina. You don't think of tobacco as a New England crop.

What comes to mind in New England are images of apples and pumpkins and maple syrup and colonial herb gardens, but not agri-business crops like tobacco. But in the years I was growing up in north central Connecticut, tobacco farming was a big industry.

Tobacco plantations covered a lot of land in the Connecticut River valley, and the landscape of my childhood in the 1950s and 60s was dotted with long drying sheds that had hinged siding which could be opened outward to allow the air to circulate as the harvested leaves were dried.

Tobacco sheds have historic preservation status now in Connecticut

The sheds on one local farm have been re-purposed and painted a lovely (?) shade of pink. Every time I drive by, I am amused. The sign says "Rose Farm" but I don't think they are raising hybrid teas. I think the farm is named for the color of its outbuildings.

On a farm in Suffield, CT a dozen former tobacco sheds have been updated, upgraded, and painted pink

When I was a teenager, the local summer employment was working tobacco, and it was hot, dirty, awful work, but almost the only wages available to unskilled kids. Girls and boys both, although the girls got to work in the sheds rather than in the fields.

Copyright information The Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford

It was that kind of work that brought earlier generations up from the south to work on the Connecticut tobacco farms.

"During the summers of 1944 and 1947, Martin Luther King, Jr. spent time harvesting tobacco in Connecticut. He was one of many African American men recruited by summer work programs administered through southern colleges and high schools, which were designed to ease the dearth of labor brought about by World War II. King's recently published letters reveal the impact his time in Connecticut had on his life. For the first time, he experienced a society in which he could worship, eat, and travel in the company of whites as an equal. King later wrote that beginning in that summer, 'I felt an inescapable urge to serve society... a sense of responsibility which I could not escape.' "

--- from Cora Murray and Mary Donohue, Connecticut Historic Preservation and Museum Division

Density of tobacco farms in 1942

Native populations were growing tobacco - Nicotiana tabacum - when the first settlers arrived in the Connecticut River valley in the 1630s. By 1700 it was being exported to Europe, and in the 1800s the valley was growing cigar wrapper leaf to compete with Sumatran exports. By the 1900s there were huge consolidated plantations being run as petty dynasties, with migrant labor issues, competitive tensions and enough grist for a Claudette Colbert movie (see the classic "Parrish". Really, you must rent it.)

Growers discovered that the labor intensive process of growing the plant in shade, under yards and yards of cheesecloth, produced a high quality leaf that was prized for the outside wrappers of cigars. An early photo shows how the white shade netting appeared as big lakes from afar.

Copyright information The Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford

From my childhood I remember the billowy netting, suspended from a forest of poles that held up acres of cloth to shade the plants below. Shade tents were everywhere, becoming just so much background around our towns and neighborhoods.

Poles and netting, early in the season

By summer the cloth bulged with 9 foot plants straining against the cloth

In high school my best friend's Dad was a tobacco executive for Consolidated Cigar and he was cool. We were filled with the romance and intrigue of "Parrish" (Really, you must rent this classic movie right now). What would we think of him now? You sell tobacco??

My own Dad was cool --- he was a pilot for an aircraft engine company. He came from the midwest, and told stories of being disoriented when he began flying in Connecticut, because the shade cloth that stretched over miles of fields below looked like rippling water. He thought he was flying over lakes that he could not locate on his charts. Can you imagine what google earth would have shown back then?

Those miles of shade tobacco tents are long gone. There are only 2,000 acres left in cultivation here now, just a smidgen of the tobacco plantations of 50 years ago.

For years I resisted planting flowering tobacco in my garden, because it sounded like growing soybeans. It was an agricultural crop in my experience, not an ornamental flower.

I'm glad I finally did plant it, for the delicate flowers and the heavenly sweet scent. And for the associations.

My garden plant is Nicotiana alata and not N. tabacum, and my garden is a former cow pasture, not an old tobacco farm. But the leaves of my flowering tobacco are so reminiscent of those big monster cigar wrapper plants pushing their stalks up against their cloth ceilings. I never smoked, and I certainly never smoked cigars, but the sight of a tobacco plant brings on such memories.

It is one of those garden plants that evokes associations and reminiscence. It is planted around my patio, where I can smell its fragrance up close at night, when I am most likely to be remembering things.

The sight of an aging shed falling in on itself in the distance brings on memories too.

Even the ones now spiffed up and painted pink.

Is This Supposed to Happen?

2012-01-07T00:48:00.000-05:00

It's January. It's been cold. A few nights ago it got down to 8 degrees F (- 13 C). But mostly this season it's been above normal for winter, and it's unsettling.

The tulips are coming up. Is this supposed to happen in January?

The unheated porch, where I store dormant plants for the winter, has been 30 degrees F at night and in the 40s in the daytime, sometimes up in the 50s in this warmer than normal winter. I know because I keep a thermometer out there and check it. When I looked yesterday, I saw green nubs coming up through the soil.

Last fall I planted tulips in pots, having given up on using them in the ground, where they are dinner for so many garden visitors.

I put the pots on the unheated porch and now, in January they are sprouting.

I planted six 'Spring Green' (white with green markings) in the center of each pot, and surrounded those with twelve 'Groenland' (pink with strong green markings). I crowded them together to mass them, then topped the pot with several inches of potting mix.

These are viridiflora tulips, with blooms that are streaked with green, which I think is a soft and interesting take on the bold colors that tulips can sport.

'Groenland'

'Spring Green'

I am no bulb expert. My experience with tulips is limited mostly to planting them in fall and regretting them in spring when they don't show up.

Perhaps I planted too early? My journal shows I planted up these pots on September 30. Too soon?

Perhaps they needed to be deeper? I covered them with several inches of potting soil, but it is loose and crumbly and maybe they needed to be a good 8 to 10 inches deep?

Bulb growers out there -- what should I do?

I left the pots outside originally but the very wet fall drowned them and I thought the bulbs would rot in their perpetually soggy pots, so they came into the unheated porch.

Should I cover the pots to keep them in the dark and hope they don't sprout further? Put them back outside where it is consistently 10 degrees colder?

Leave them alone and enjoy tulips on the porch at Valentine's Day?

The times I tried to grow tulips in the ground, they got eaten and never came up. Now, planted in pots, they are coming up in early January. My next experiment may be to buy hand painted silk tulips --- if I can just find any with green markings.

A Design Quiz

2012-01-03T09:59:00.003-05:00

Casa Mariposa posted a survey to help determine whether your garden has any good bones or not. It was amusing and eye-opening, and I had to take it myself.

Here's how I fared:

a permanent structure with decorative/architectural appeal +10 points

but it's in your neighbors yard -5 points

Yep, I got a shed and it's a beauty but it is in my neighbor's yard, sigh. (Net 5 points)

not mine

large trees +10 points

Yes, I do have large trees around me, just not any in my yard. I see this big silver maple from my window (do I get the full 10 points for this?)

a borrowed view of a large tree

shrubs/trees taller than you are + 10 points

Well, my doublefile viburnum 'Shasta' reached 5 foot 6 inches in height last spring, and it is now an inch taller than I am. (I get 10 points)

Doublefile viburnum getting taller each year

little trees/shrubs with lots of potential +5 points

I think these have potential. In 60 years I will also get points for large trees. (I get 5 points for this, but will double that as I have planted over 100 little trees/shrubs around here. I'm interpreting the scoring)

they'll grow

meandering paths +10 points

a path trampled through the grass by the dog -5 points

Yes, I have a path, but it's not meandering. It's straight, but then disappears around the corner. (So I'll substitute "curving" for "meandering" and give myself 10 points)

not winding, but it's a path and it goes somewhere

stonework +10 points

a pile of stone you might do something with eventually -5 points

Definitely. It was a pile of stones I dug up around the property before it was a dry creekbed. (10 points for this, and I'd like extra points for doing the work myself)

a lotta dug-up rocks went into this streambed

dogs, cats, chickens, etc all of which are full of bones +5 points

No, we do not have pets in our garden. The two Siamese cats are indoor animals and are quite bony in their old age now, but the deer, bobcat, weasels, mice and other outdoor wildlife aren't "mine", really. They think the garden is theirs, though. I'm forgoing any points on this one.

attractive gate/fence +10 points

but it's held together by a bungee cord -5 points

I don't have a gate or fence, but I really want one at the entrance to a new garden I just put in. Can I get points for wishful plans?

bird houses and bird baths +10 points

Oh yes, of course. (Easy 10 points)

Naturally we have homes for the birds

a pond or water feature +10 points

Not sure. Does a dry creekbed qualify as a pond or water feature if fish live in it? (I'm giving myself 10 points anyway.)

Trout swimming upstream in my dry creekbed

a container pond +5 points

I'm going to have to count the birdbath as a container pond. It's a structure that contains water. (5 points, no arguing)

Container pond of sorts

a patio or deck +10 points

Yes, a patio and a deck. Double credit for having both. (20 points awarded)

We got both.

evergreens +10 points

a can of green spray paint and red plastic berries -5 points

Yeah, I have evergreens, all kinds from dwarf to massive. Real ones! (Another easy 10 points)

spruces and hollies and good bones

Thanks, Casa Mariposa, for a fun romp through my garden with an eye toward its structure.

With some interpretation of the points, I scored pretty high (you have to go to her blog post to see the scoring!)

We are mighty pleased.

Here's To All My Blunders

2012-01-01T07:14:00.000-05:00

Joene of Joene's Garden sponsors Gardening OOPs on the first of each month, where we confess the mistakes we make in the garden, in the hope that we will scare readers into not doing the same thing.

I began documenting my GOOPs on April 1, 2010, and have participated almost every month since.

I intended to blog about past mistakes I made as a beginning gardener, and learned from. Instructive, careful lessons about what NOT TO DO. Instead I seem to have an unlimited capacity to make new mistakes.

Today is the first of January and the first day of 2012 and in honor of that, I culled 18 months of posts and have made you all a Top Ten List of my mistakes. Click on the photo captions and read the disasters in full from the original posts. Study and learn from each. I certainly didn't.

TOP TEN EXAMPLES OF ERRORS TO AVOID IN YOUR OWN GARDEN

1. Wrong plant, wrong place, wrong idea, wrong zone.


9/1/10 - This Was the Worst Thing I Ever Planted

2. Crushing discouragement for a new gardener.

4/1/10 - Planted 100 Bulbs, Got 2

3. Planned, paid for, planted and pampered these. Couldn't remember any of it.

5/1/11 - Planted Them, Dug Them Up, No Idea

4. Sprayed stuff heedlessly.

7/1/11 - A Gardener With a Spray Bottle is a Danger

5. What was I thinking?

4/1/11 - This Just Looked Stupid From the Start

6. This is gone now, taken out by a storm.

12/1/10 - I Regretted Planting This

7. This was NOT my mistake. I'm saying.

5/1/10 - Outdoor Spelling Errors

That's seven, I can't go on. The next three oops in a list of ten would be:

I crammed everything too close together and never thought they'd grow so big.
Don't crowd tall shrubs under short trees and fill in with steroidal perennials.
A 40 foot tall tree is not going to do well in a 6 foot wide bed up against the house. You can't make it fit.

Those last three are all the same mistake. I am horticulturally unable to space permanent plants appropriately, especially large things like forest trees, rampant vines or car-sized shrubs . I just can't do it.

Happy New Year!

Here's a toast to making lots of horticultural blunders in your garden in 2012.

I'll let you know about mine.

Goodbye 2011

2011-12-27T08:49:00.000-05:00

January 2011. Three tall panicums 'Northwind' glow in the snow.

February 2011. It kept on snowing. Acer palmatum 'Crimson Queen' tucks in.

March 2011. The reward for getting through January & February.

April 2011. The reward for getting through March.

May 2011. View out the window. Then. Cercis 'Oklahoma' is gone now, felled by a storm.

June 2011. Happy nasturtiums in a sea of green.

July 2011. First year that Aesculus parviflora (Bottlebrush buckeye) bloomed for me.

August 2011. Lobelia cardinalis, cool looking and hot colored in the summer shade.

September 2011. Caryopteris appears and bees go wild.

October 2011. The month started like this . . . .

. . . . and ended like this. This is just not supposed to happen in October.

November 2011. Fothergilla and grass seedheads warm things up after the snow melted.

December 2011. Ilex verticillata 'Red Sprite' winterberries never outlast the deer, but they're pretty in early December.

Goodbye 2011. A little less snow for next year, okay? A lot less rain, and more moderate temperatures in July, please. That's all I ask.

And better light. We had too many slightly overcast skies this year and a lot of my pictures came out flat. A little earlier spring would be nice, but I won't push it.

No freak October snowstorms of any kind in the coming year.

Breathing Light

2011-12-23T07:46:00.000-05:00

It is Christmas. You are expecting a red and green theme, some holly and berries, evergreen trees and bright red ornaments, right? And you know it is the season of miracles. So here is my red and green post, and it tells of a miracle, one that happens all around us.

As a young student, Donald Culross Peattie was amazed to discover that plants breathe light:

"Using spectrum analysis, Peattie learned that the constituents of a chlorophyll molecule were eerily familiar. 'To me, a botanist's apprentice, a future naturalist,' he writes, 'there was just one fact to quicken the pulse. That fact is the close similarity between cholorphyll and hemoglobin, the essence of our blood.'

This is no fanciful comparison, but a literal, scientific analogy: 'The one significant difference in the two structural formulas is this: that the hub of every hemoglobin molecule is one atom of iron, while in chlorophyll it is one atom of magnesium.'

Just as chlorophyll is green because magnesium absorbs all but the green light spectrum, blood is red because iron absorbs all but the red.

Chlorophyll is green blood. It is designed to capture light; blood is designed to capture oxygen". *

This didn't just quicken the pulse, it stopped me in my tracks. I'm sure science majors and Master Gardeners learned this, but I never knew.

Gardening has so much to teach me. I have so much to learn.

Merry Christmas and Peace on Earth to all the creatures breathing oxygen and all those breathing light in our world.

* Quoted from Tree, A Life Story by David Suzuki and Wayne Grady (it follows the 500 year life of one douglas fir). Also, read Donald Culross Peattie's book: Flowering Earth.

This is the chemical diagram, if it helps.

from Wikimedia

How Tall Are Your Deer?

2011-12-20T08:40:00.000-05:00

My deer are four feet three inches. I know because they leave a browse line, nibbling everything up to exactly 4' 3" above the ground.

The birds never eat the berries on my winterberry hollies (Ilex verticillata 'Red Sprite'), but the deer do. Like clockwork, the herds check their calendars and when it says November 15, they send the word out -- "Winterberrries are ready. They're ripe now. Let's go eat."

And they arrange to meet in my garden and have a hollyberry party.

Apparently winterberry fruits are not yet ripe in early fall. No wildlife touches them at this stage.

These are ripe. Every berry below this level has been eaten by Thanksgiving.

Ilex verticillata stripped bare except for the topmost berries.

Those last uneaten berries at the top of the shrub stay there all winter. You'd think the birds would at least eat what the deer leave, but they don't. There must be a territory issue, with the birds respectfully leaving the hollies untouched for the deer herds, or maybe after the initial feasting, the berries go stale later in the season. Who knows what rules are followed out there, I am only the gardener.

You'd also think when the deer are starving in winter they would come back for those remaining fruits, and stretch a little to get what is just inches above their browse height.

They're not that far out of reach, but my deer don't make the effort to get anything above four feet three inches, so the berries hang on.

Maybe late in the season those top winterberries are like the sludge at the bottom of your cereal bowl. Just not that appetizing after a while.

Where the Magic Happens

2011-12-17T07:38:00.000-05:00

This is where the magic happens. This is my potting bench, as seen the day after Jim brought it up from the basement when he built it several winters ago. It never again looked as neat and tidy, but that first day on the patio it was pristine.

We live in a community that bans outdoor structures (and swingsets and clotheslines, sigh), so we cannot put up a garden shed. I am a serious gardener, making horticultural miracles happen without a shed, greenhouse, cold frame, storage structure, or tool depot.

But I have a great cedar potting bench, custom built.

Of course it is rarely used for potting up. It is a staging area, a work table and a place to stash stuff. The metal cans have tight lids, so things that need to stay dry, like pruners and gloves, are stored in there. Empty pots accumulate around the bench, and all the miscellaneous dirt encrusted things from the garden make their way to the bench, bringing half the soil from my garden onto the patio.

Big manly tools, like shovels and wheelbarrows, live in the garage with the John Deere. There is a lot of schlepping back and forth between the patio and the garage on the other side of the house.

And the compost pile is hidden behind some spruces way at the back of our property, nowhere near the bench. Again, more tromping between the compost pile and the patio. I walk back and forth a lot when I garden. It's not ideal.

Some of the magic happens on the porch. It's unheated but gets bright daylight, and it's where the tender plants live during the cold season. It's cramped and not ideal here either, but it suffices.

Here is where the real magic happens --- indoors, at the dining room table.

This is, in fact, an ideal workplace, the best place to garden on a winter afternoon.

Is This Plant OK?

2011-12-14T08:04:00.001-05:00

Is Nandina domestica supposed to look like this? This is dwarf heavenly bamboo, and it is assuredly not celestial looking. It looks sick.

Nandina domestica 'Firepower'.

The foliage has been a bright offputting orange with streaky white since I planted it this spring. It has stayed a small clump all season. Does this plant look OK to you?

I read such glowing reports about nandina before I planted it. Southern gardeners say it is too rampant and a problem, but northern gardeners say it is a dieback shrub that stays within bounds and delivers so much. Specifically ---

Red berries if you plant en masse (but I only have one).
Deep green foliage in summer.
Fall color to die for. To die for.
Dwarf size for restricted areas ('Firepower' stays low and small).

I'm not seeing it. It's gaudy. Too orange. Too shaggy blobby. Too clumpy.

This is 'Firepower' fall color as Wikipedia shows it.

I learned long ago that the first year for a plant in your garden is not indicative of what that plant will really look like. The puny penstemons became lush specimens after I gave up on them.

The nepeta languished and was wimpy and wispy until the following year. The amsonias didn't rise to the occasion for three full years. So many other plants underwhelmed until they got going in a year.

But is this plant OK? Will it morph into something beautiful next year? Or is it just unhappy up here out of its normal range? Does it really have such garish fall color? Does it belong as a single dwarf blob in this horizontal strip?

There is a clematis that will climb the wire trellis in spring, but for now this is a flat narrow strip, punctuated by a too-bright ball of nandina, and the whole scheme needs help.

Does anyone grow Nandina domestica 'Firepower' up north? And do you like it? You are going to need to convince me.

Wine Party

2011-12-11T00:16:00.000-05:00

The aluminum fire bowl was banished to the basement the first time it was used.

When we bought it many summers ago, I laid a few pieces of firewood in the bowl, and fired it up that evening in anticipation of cocktails on the patio on a summer's eve. Firelight, drinks, conversation and balmy breezes laced with sweet wood smoke.

Within minutes, as thick smoke billowed into the open kitchen windows, all I could hear was roaring shouts, windows slamming shut, and Jim's helpful but forceful suggestion to move that damn thing or put it out. The fire bowl has been in the basement for six years now.

So imagine my surprise when he brought it up a few nights ago. He placed it among the chairs in our new gravel garden. He got some firewood at the store, and spent the afternoon cutting it up into chunks small enough for the bowl.

As darkness fell (4:30 this time of year), he brought out a tray of wine, cheese and crackers, and we had a wine party around the fire on a cold evening.

It was chilly out, and it is densely dark in December in the early evening. But the firelight danced, the aroma of wood smoke was delightful, and the stars twinkled above. It was very romantic. The air was crisp. The wine was fortifying, and it was all so enchanting.

Windows in the house were shut tight against winter, so smoke from the fire swirled around us without any threat of inside invasion.

There was only one glitch. There was no place to put the tray of food and wine. Years ago I rescued a slice of a cottonwood tree stump from the side of the road (there's a story to that, posted here).

It is the perfect rustic side table next to the chairs, and you can set a glass on it. But after years of sitting in a wet garden spot before I moved it out to the sunny gravel area, it has fungus growing in beautiful patterns all over it. I could not have arranged the overlapping scattering any better or more elegantly. It has weathered into a work of art.

With the fungus on top, you can't put much on it. So we nestled the tray of goodies in the gravel at our feet, and all was well, as long as we were careful not to step on the cheese platter in the dark.

I do need to find something to use for a flat table to hold a tray, though. There is no way I would scrape those beautiful rings of sculpture off the top of the cottonwood stump.

I'll have to scour the woods and see what I can find. So many trees came down in the freak storm we had at the end of October, and utility crews have been running their chainsaws for weeks now. I'm sure there are treasures out there that I can salvage.

Do I Dare?

2011-12-07T00:35:00.000-05:00

I want to plant an American holly. Do I dare?

Ilex opaca is a native holly, and it can get to be a huge tree. It's not the small foundation holly bush that you see around homes. It's a tree, and a spectacular one.

I took this photo last summer at the Connecticut College arboretum in New London (along the Connecticut shoreline). It is about 25 feet tall. It is in a sunny clearing in the woods, not far from the ocean, apparently the perfect conditions for it.

It has it all --- it's deep green (not so glossy as English holly, though), it is evergreen, perfectly shaped, and it has berries. It has branches that grow to the ground, although old specimens become more open.

It looks like Christmas all year long. Joene from Joene's Garden suggested it for the open space next to my house where the former Bradford Pear tree met its demise.

But do I dare experiment with one? My reservation is that no one sells them here in zone 5 northern Connecticut. When I tried to get Ilex opaca at local nurseries I was told they are hardy (marginally), and will survive the winter temperatures but are too prone to winter burn. They need to be grown in a protected spot, which I don't really have. The east side of my house will give it afternoon shade in the summer. But not much protection in winter.

This is where Ilex opaca grows naturally (from Wikipedia).

Can you see the little green dot in Boston and a few along the Connecticut shore? Its range includes southern New England, but only the coastal areas. Do you see any green shading in northern Connecticut? No, me neither.

One landscaper said he could get an American holly for me and would plant it, but would not give me the standard one year planting guarantee. And yet there are mature holly trees around here, planted many years ago in parks and estates. The green shaded native range map from Wikipedia just shows where they grow naturally, not where they CAN grow.

I so want this perfect looking tree. Do I dare?

I have pushed zones with some trees and they do well (my sourwood, Oxydendrum arboreum, shouldn't grow here but does. And a persimmon, Diospyros virginiana, is native further south but thrives for me.)

I took this photo of Ilex opaca at the elevated High Line Park in Manhattan this fall. It is about 10 feet high. It is potentially exposed to winter winds up there, 30 feet above New York's streets, but it is near the moderating ocean.

Apparently an Ilex opaca north of its preferred range will not get as big. But what I really want is that tree from the photograph I took at Conn College last summer --- the photo at the top of this post. That is what I want growing in an open sunny spot in my garden where the poor beknighted pear tree once was.

Joene tells me she has seen open planted specimens in her neighborhood, planted out where the sun and the wind are. And they do well. She is only a few miles south of me in central Connecticut.

Do I dare try one? What if it winterburns and looks horrible and is a mistake?

If you garden inland north of the Mason Dixon line, and you have grown Ilex opaca successfully, and it looks great and doesn't get crispy in winter, send me a picture and some encouragement.

The University of Connecticut (UConn) plant database shows some huge American holly specimens, and the school is located in northern Connecticut. I just don't know if their photos are all campus shots or if they post pictures from other parts of the country.

The 99% Rule

2011-12-03T13:21:00.001-05:00

You just can't do this. You can't wrap MOST of your young sapling trees in protective mesh and expect ALL of your young sapling trees to be okay. You have to wrap each and every one.

Male deer will find any unprotected supple trunk and vigorously rub the felt off their antlers, shredding bark in the process, enough sometimes to kill a young tree.

I forgot to enclose this maple sapling in a mesh cylinder this fall. Look what happens if you don't do that.

Wrapped now, a little late.

Here is the Rule of 99% regarding male deer in autumn:

If hunters were allowed to hunt at will and if they killed 99% of all the bucks in the area, every doe in the same area would still be pregnant. Deer are prolific reproducers and all it takes is one male deer. Just one. Hunters want antlers, but killing a lot, but not all, of the bucks does nothing to control herd size.
If gardeners protect 99% of all the vulnerable tree trunks in their gardens each fall, saplings will still be damaged by bucks rubbing their antlers on bark. The sole unprotected trunk, tucked in behind other plants and hidden in the general planting scheme, will be sought out, found and trashed.

This season there has been a young adolescent male in our yard and he has been so funny to watch. He is confused, uncertain, without any antlers yet, so he was not the bark shredding culprit. This time.

He is not feeding or browsing, just wandering around and it doesn't bother him at all that I am out in the yard. He is big, with giant hindquarters that don't fit his clumsy body yet. He doesn't bound gracefully, he forges about heavily, tromping across front yards and driveways.

All summer the female deer and I have an agreement --- when I scream and run at them, the does very sweetly agree to prance away into the woods while I carry on, and then nicely come back when I go inside. This dumb young male doesn't get it.

I try to scare him and he stands there hanging his head, knowing he is doing something wrong, but not sure what. I clap and bang and threaten, and he looks around to ask "does this mean something? Am I supposed to know?"

Jim throws small rocks at him, and he shifts position, then crashes about in confusion as he heads for the meadow, veering back and forth in random directions. He's just dumb, dumb.

But I'm 99% sure that in another year, all the fawns in the neighborhood will be his.

Digging Daylilies

2011-12-01T06:36:00.000-05:00

this one was highly fragrant

On the first of the month Joene sponsors GOOPs, or Gardening Oops. It's an opportunity to confess what you have done in the garden that you just shouldn't have done.

I should not have planted daylilies. At least not where I planted them, weaving in and out among mixed plantings.

I love daylilies and I particularly like ditch lilies that are so orange and so summery when they explode all along the roadsides in July.

arange daylilies crowding a young doublefile viburnum

They look best in big colonies, or in long rows, massed together where each new day's flower can mask the stalks of the spent ones and the untidy foliage blends together in a big sea of green. But in a mixed border scattered about with other plants they just don't work.

First, daylilies are crowders. I wanted to fill all that empty space in the big bare swaths of mulch that were my early garden, so I thought planting dozens of them would be just the thing.

They quickly took over and shouldered aside anything else I wanted to put in the border.

Second, daylilies flop about. I wanted mounding, arched foliage to fill spaces with a lovely cascading effect. I got wildly unkempt fountains of strappy leaves that laid down all over the other plants.

this wasn't the cascading foliage effect I was going for, it's just messy

Third, they don't flower. The deer eat the buds, never the leaves. They were all messy foliage and few redeeming blooms. Using lots of smelly deterrent spray I did get them to flower at points during the season and I have pictures to show me that they were pretty in bloom. But it was a struggle for the occasional pop of bright color.

Finally, they add nothing to a mixed border. They are too unstructured and too big to play well with companions. They need space of their own.

They need to be massed.

These escaped the deer one season

This fall I dug most of them up to give away, and the beds look better already, cleared of all the chaos. I left some, but even those should be dug and moved. I have plans for that next spring just as soon as I can find a separate new spot for a daylily patch.

I never kept the labels to know which cultivars I had. I would have liked to know what the magenta one was, or the name of the very fragrant yellow daylily.

It was a lesson learned, an oops from a beginning gardener. I thought so many daylilies interplanted in curving sweeps among shrubs and perennials would be such great garden fillers, but they weren't.

Now I am digging up daylilies.

Do you see the mistakes in this beginner garden? Everything too close (the doublefile viburnum on the left will get immense and swamp everything), and those strappy daylilies in the middle will soon engulf their neighbors. It all looked so tidy for a while.

The Steve Jobs of 1780

2011-11-28T08:15:00.000-05:00

I like a little bit of history, and I like living in New England where much of the past centuries' imprints on our landscape have been preserved or restored.

I particularly like the Shakers. They were a utopian religious group in the 1700s and 1800s with some beliefs that we find unusual today. I like them because they were innovative gardeners.

The Shakers were the Steve Jobs of their time, known for exquisite simplicity of design in their furniture, buildings and tools, and for doing things in new ways. They created essential everyday products the early settlers didn't even know they needed.

They were the first to collect seeds, put them in little envelopes and sell them. Think about the innovation of that simple process as you sow your garden next spring, and thank the Shakers.

Last month we took a day to visit the Hancock Shaker Village in western Massachusetts. The village was built in the 1780s for the community of Believers that eventually grew to 300 people in the 1800s, but by 1959 there were no more Shakers at Hancock. You can now wander through 20 carefully restored buildings and tour the gardens and fields they farmed.

It is famous for its iconic round barn, a stunner of an innovation when it was built in the early 1800s. Feeding the animals arranged around a central silo inside was an efficiency improvement, and it was simply a beautiful building as well.

This is the entrance to the village. Do you see something odd behind the white fence?

It is a large ground mount installation of solar panels, and a roof array that spans the entire antique barn roof. This is what greets visitors as they head into the village and step back two centuries.

And it is completely appropriate.

A small sign tells us that if the Shakers were still an active producing community here, they would have been the first to embrace solar technology. The panels provide a third of the energy for the whole complex, which includes a visitor center, museum, offices and a cafe.

Simple, elegant looking, efficient and useful.

Now, when I see solar panels on buildings and homes around the city, I think of them as Shaker Panels.

Shaker seed packets

Replacement Tree - suggestions

2011-11-25T07:38:00.000-05:00

This is my pear tree, Pyrus calleryana --- this is the best it has looked since I planted it in 2005:

It came down in the freaky October snowstorm that buried southern New England and tore down so many trees. The Bradford pears are weak wooded and prone to falling apart, and they did not survive the heavy snow.

Other types of trees recovered from having their branches weighted to the ground in the snow, but the pear did not. Here is mine, the day after the storm. The drooping limbs did not pop back up when the snow melted, they snapped off or tore apart.

It was a good sized specimen, about 25 feet tall, standing alone in the side yard. But I never liked it, so I was not too upset when the branches broke off and we had to take the rest of it down.

I never liked it because it did this all the time --- it suckered. I cut back the sprouts a dozen times a season and they were always there the next week.

I never liked it because it was an ungainly, odd-branched shape, although other Bradford pears do have tightly pyramidal, shapely forms. This one did not.

I never liked it because it did not develop any fall color. Other Bradford pears are known for good deep color very late in the season, but this one just turned an indeterminate brown-green color with overtones of mustard.

It had its moments.

There were showy white flowers that covered the bare branches in early in spring. There were fruits that the birds devoured each year in one single day, swarming the tree and stripping it bare in three hours.

But it's gone now, and I am okay with that. More than okay. In fact, I am excited about planting a replacement and I need suggestions.

This is an open area of the yard, to the east side of the house, not tied to any gardens as you can see in the pictures. I want a large tree, a looker, a presence to fill the grassy lawn.

Suggestions? It doesn't need to be a flowering tree, but it needs to look good standing alone, sited in between the flat boring side of the house and the flat weedy meadow on the other side.

And it needs to hold up in a snowstorm.

Not Everyone's a Star

2011-11-21T07:40:00.000-05:00

Recently Curtis at Native Plants With Adams Garden posted a profile of chokeberries, a lovely native shrub, and one that I grow in my garden.

Aronia, or chokeberry (it really does have an unfortunate common name), is a great alternative to invasive burning bush, mainly for its red fall color, as he writes.

But whoa, mine did not look anything like the photos he posted.

I have a small stand of Aronia arbutifolia 'Brilliantissima' in the center of a roundish bed. They are leggy, bendy and tall, growing in a willowy vase shape.

Pretty in bloom (as you can see here next to a young Japanese maple 'Orange Dream'), but quite naked belowdeck.

The pictures he showed were of full, rounded shrubs, with brilliant red fall color.

My aronias are not full, not rounded and not so brilliant. They have some nice red fall color above the bare stems, but it is a softer color compared to the deep garnet itea nearby.

The leaves drop earlier than the itea, so it is naked all over just when fall colors get going. But it makes up for that with its red berries --- not an explosion like the winterberry hollies, but some nice red berries nevertheless. Nobody out there likes the berries (hence the name chokeberry I guess) so the birds leave them alone. The deer did sample them one cold winter.

Curtis suggested that I could cut back the older stems and encourage suckering below for fuller plants. Aronia does send up shoots and form large stands, but rabbits seem to love this plant and they get all the suckers when they are a foot high. My leggy plants don't get a chance to bulk up.

Besides, I kind of like the wavy, tall presence in the center of this garden. The aronia's branches arch out over the top of the iteas and other shrubs and anchor the middle of this space. There are too many full moundy shapes in here, and the tall arching aronia is a pleasant contrast rising in the middle.

In this garden chokeberry is a background plant. It doesn't have the star attributes that Curtis profiles.

It has pretty apple-blossom like flowers in spring but they are subtle and brief. It has a nice open shape but it is wispy and needs other things around it. It has fall color and berries, but mostly serves as a foil to other deeper colors and fuller foliage. It is too tall and too bare to be a specimen by itself.

But I really like it. Not everybody needs to be the star.

A Re-Post from A Year Ago

2011-11-20T10:13:00.000-05:00

The marigold in my garden, the sturdy one, the reliable bloomer with the short stocky form and the colors of sunshine. The most dependable, easy going, funny plant I grow. Yes, the marigold is funny, it tells jokes and makes the other flowers laugh.

He made me laugh.

Marigolds never ever fail you. They are like the repairmen of the garden, ready to fill a spot with brightness, or repel trouble on nearby veggies with their spicy scent.

When I needed him, he was always there, repair tools in hand.

The marigold is an easy plant that gets along with every other specimen in the border. A fussy mass of blooms is always anchored by the addition of structured, unpretentious marigolds tucked in among them.

He was the stable backbone of our messy, jumbled lives.

My brother in law, my sister's husband, the marigold in my life.

It was a year ago today that he left us.

Still missing him.

Why I Don't Weed

2011-11-17T06:50:00.001-05:00

When I began digging new gardens all around our half acre, weeding all the bare spaces was daunting. So much new, disturbed earth. So much empty space for weeds to fill, and they did, immediately and speedily.

I thought a fact of life was that you had to be out in the garden almost every day, in the summer heat, in the humidity, on your hands and knees, weeding around the shrubs and perennials. So I weeded. I mulched. Then I weeded the mulch.

But not now. Now, five years into this project, I spend very little time pulling up unwanted stuff. Why is that?

Groundcovers. Groundcovers are the secret weapon. I planted low spreading plants in every border and bed. Once they spread, I eliminated almost all weeding in the areas they cover.

Here are my favorites for:

weed suppression,
ability to spread quickly and nicely (no thugs), and
sheer good looks:

Himalayan Fleeceflower, Persicaria afinis 'Dimity' (or 'Superba'). It forms a low, tight mat that nothing grows through.

Rosy pipecleaner spikes bloom from summer through late September. Clean green leaves are red tinged.

Scarlet 'Dimity' between soft yellow dwarf amsonia and a border of liriope in fall. Some years it's more maroon or rust red.

Yellowroot, Xanthorhiza simplicissima. It's a taller, woody shrub that gets to about one foot high and loses its leaves in winter, but only the rare tall weed grows up through the woody stems, and is easily pulled.

In April, before the leaves appear, yellowroot has hazy purple blooms

Celery-like green leaves in summer . . .

. . . give way to soft wine tinged foliage in October . . .

. . . turning bright gold in November. Some autumns it's more bronzy, some years multi colored like a Persian carpet.

Fragrant sumac, Rhus aromatica 'Gro Low'. Another low woody shrub that loses its leaves in winter. It can get more than a foot tall but is easily pruned lower. It spreads widely and densely and very quickly. My plants just went in this summer.

Fragrant sumac leaves are glossy green. They bring a shine down to the lower level of the garden.

This is how dense a mature patch of rhus aromatica gets. No weeds grow in here. This is on a slope at Arnold Arboretum

Rhus aromatica in fall. This is not mine -- my patch was just planted this summer, but I can't wait to see it turn to this next fall. Photo is from Fine Gardening, credit Karen Bussolini

Geranium, there are many good spreaders --- mine is Geranium wlassovianum. Geraniums smother absolutely everything under them. They are kind of weedy themselves, needing to be cut back and trimmed each season, and they leave bare earth in winter, but they are so pretty.

Geranium wlassovianum fills a corner in front of bushy upright amsonia tabernaemontana.

It turns winey red in fall.

Kinnikinnik, Arctostaphylos uva-ursi. I've written a lot about this groundcover before. It's a favorite of mine. The occasional bittersweet seedling pops up in the woody branches but can be pulled.

It's evergreen, it's glossy, it has sweet pink bells for flowers. I love this groundcover.

A few plants spread easily to make this mat, and will keep going into the bare areas up to the brick wall.

Thyme, the low mat kind, mine is Thymus serpyllum 'alba'. A few grass strands want to grow in the mat, but the dense competition keeps them stunted and I can pull them out when I get to it.

Creeping Thyme is dense and spreads easily. The white blooms go on for a month in early summer.

Groundcover Sedums (mine are 'Angelina', 'Red Carpet', and the mouthful 'Weihenstephaner's Gold' but there are many others). All nice. All easy. All low, and nothing grows through them. If you do nothing else, plant these and you will not weed. I have them everywhere.

Some other groundcovers that are nice but are still problematic for weeds:

- Cranberry Cotoneaster. It's glossy green with red berries and it spreads low and wide, but tenacious bittersweet and slender grass shoots get established in open areas under the arching stems and they are hard to eradicate.

Cotoneaster apiculata

- Epimedium. Lovely, and a mature stand in dry shade under a tree is awesome, with beautiful foliage. I love them, but they take a good four years to establish and spread. That leaves a lot of weeding to do before they get going.

Epimedium 'Frohnleiten'. There are many varieties.

- Salix yezoalpina. A groundcover willow. Really. It has very attractive wide glossy leaves and it stays low and spreads out many feet. The leaves turn buttery yellow in fall. It is too new for me, I have no experience yet to know if it will keep weeds down, but it is great looking so far. More to come on this one.

Groundcover willow, newly planted last summer

There are so many choices, including the low mounding hakonechloa grasses, and liriope, and other plants that fill in at the feet of more upright perennials and shrubs.

For every plant that I put in the garden, I stuck a groundcover below it and hoped they would get along. To my delight, my weeds fled, very sorry that they tried to grow in my gardens.

In My Backyard

2011-11-14T08:34:00.001-05:00

Our bobcat came for a visit.

Seen yesterday, strolling in our back yard, then plopped in the November sun a few yards from the house. A bobcat is smallish but muscularly powerful, even doing a slow amble. And look at that face. So fierce, so contented, so . . . . catlike.

I have written about the bobcat before and taken pictures of her stalking outside our dining room windows.

We see her (him?) often, patrolling not just the weeds and meadow by the woods, but smack in our back yards. This photo was taken by my neighbor Gwen, and it was no challenge for her to get a shot of this elusive hunter. The bobcat simply laid down in the lawn in full daylight for half an hour and practically posed.

If I had whiskers like that I'd want my picture taken too.

Zelkovas in Skirts

2011-11-11T15:59:00.000-05:00

Zelkova serrata from UConn database

Very few people have heard of a tree called a zelkova.

It is a shade tree that has been widely planted to replace the elms lost long ago in our cities. You have them all over newer neighborhoods and planted up and down urban streets. But almost no one knows the name.

It doesn't have a common name, for some reason. Zelkova is the genus name and it sure doesn't roll off the tongue.

Zelkova serrata is vase shaped, like American elms. But to my eye they lack the grace and proportion of elms. They don't even come close to being a replacement for what we lost when all the elms succumbed to Dutch elm disease.

But they are a nice enough lawn tree, very tough, not bothered by much. Fall color can be eye catching (see the New York City trees in Marie's post at 66 Square Feet). Older trees have patchy, peeling orange bark that is really interesting. I have not planted one, but there are several at the end of our street.

In the October snow storm here they suffered damage, but being tough survivors, they will be okay. What was so funny was the pattern of damage, which was identical in each tree: every zelkova dropped two branches down around its knees, creating a little skirt. Just two limbs, no more.

A pair of branches snapped from the center of each tree and then carefully draped themselves around the naked trunk.

One young zelkova cracked up and completely split apart, but all the others (5 of them in total), did this identical thing and as a group they look like they were seized with a fit of modesty and had to cover up. Trees do funny things.

They are wonderfully resilient growers and will look just fine next season. Someone will have to remove the two branches dangling around each tree's trunk, but in the end, I think they look better pruned this way a little bit.

I just hope these modest trees aren't too embarrassed to have their skirts removed.

Slow Growers

2011-11-09T07:33:00.000-05:00

Red maple and river birch the day after the storm

Tammy at Casa Mariposa asked me which plants in my garden did well and survived the recent October snow catastrophe.

The ones that came through unscathed were the slowest growers.

Slow growers have strong wood. Stiff branches, small leaves and dense wood helped them shrug off tons of heavy snow that crippled, bent or snapped other trees and shrubs.

Here are some of my young trees that survived the storm well:

Black gum (Nyssa sylvatica) is a lovely forest tree that grows very slowly, driving me crazy as I wait for mine to gain any size as shade trees. They have very stiff branches. Very stiff --- I have tried to turn a small branch upward to train it into a different position and you can't do it. The branches are completely unbendable.

Black gums have small leaves, so the wet heavy snow did not have as much surface to weigh down, and the stiff branches held. I had no damage on any of the three small Nyssa sylvaticas in my garden.

I took this picture of the larger of my black gums on 10/25, just 4 days before a freak snowstorm dumped 18 inches of cement on everything. It looked just as good, well shaped, and intact after the storm.

Blackhaw viburnum (Viburnum prunifolium) is another modest grower that also has rigid branches and small leaves, and mine had no breakage. I like this plant --- it's more of a small tree than other viburnums, but its twigginess is dense and confused looking and I do wish it was a little more elegant. But that stiff twigginess served it well under the snow load. Strong bones.

A chaotic, twiggy little tree, the Blackhaw Viburnum lost no branches and looked fine after the snow melted

The spruces did well, again because they have stiff structure and narrow leaves (needles). Oaks, known for their strong wood, also did okay, even my very small pin oak saplings. Spruces and oaks are known for being slow growers.

Both of my small stewartias (Stewartia pseudocamellia and Stewartia monadelpha) were untouched by the snow. Again, they gain height slowly, and they have small leaves.

After the storm the Stewartia showed no ill effects a week later, and even managed to color up like it is supposed to, snow be damned.

Sourwood (Oxydendrum arboreum) is a rigid little tree. It did lose a major branch, which was upsetting because it is such an extremely slow grower it only puts on one small branch a year. But overall it came through fine. If only it would get bigger than 5 foot 4. I want to sit under trees that are taller than I am.

The little sourwood was ok. The big weeping mound on the left in back is a 20 foot tall red maple, or it was. The double arching branches next to it belong to a 25 foot high river birch, headed off in two directions. In the foreground on the left is a tall magnolia lying down in the snow.

The real disasters during the storm were the trees that shoot up rapidly, with weak, brittle wood. The worst: the Bradford pears, which I wrote about already, and almost everyone's ornamental cherries broke apart. My redbuds went completely kaput and snapped off. Poplars, including a big thriving tuliptree that fell over, were weak performers.

The slow growers were the survivors. There's a metaphor for life here, I think, but it's so obvious I'm not going to pursue it. They're just trees, you know.

A Farewell to Pears

2011-11-07T08:21:00.002-05:00

Thank you to all my blog readers and commenters who expressed concern this past week. You are all such great support. Lights and heat and hot water are back on for us here, but fully one third of our town is still without power 9 days after the storm that flattened north central Connecticut. School is still out, the stores are unstocked, the temperatures still cold.

Jim and I have cleared the branches we could reach, dragged the top half of my prized young trees away, leaving naked stumps, and I am busy cleaning things up around the yard.

Before I head back outside and get things to a point where I can show you nice pictures of my garden again, I have to show you this. It is what was left of a Bradford pear on our street. All the pears fell apart, every last one in town, but most cracked up in ungainly, awkward ways, with dangling limbs and split branches, looking like something violent had happened.

This one just gave up, laid down and surrendered.

Really, I had to laugh. This was one of the more mature pears, and it had been 30 feet tall before the storm.

Another silly sight is the mile and a half of road median planted with nothing but pears in a long line along a street that serves an industrial park in town. There are hundreds of pears and every one is a pile of debris. Because it is an industrial area, there are few other trees around; it is all very open. So the mile-plus of shattered lumber looks like the trees were machine gunned in place.

At least this one, lying down so gracefully, looks like it went quietly.

Rest in peace, Bradford Pear.

I hope the industrial park, the malls and shopping centers, and all my neighbors choose another tree to replant.

I'm sorry, but I have to update this post. The neighbors (very nice people) have tried to save the pear tree pictured above. Today, 11/8, they cut up all the fallen branches and carted them away. They took the one remaining spindly branch that you can just see arching out of the collapsed trunk . . . and tied it to a large stake. They put a mesh cylinder around the spindle, to protect it from, what? Or to support it further I guess, in case the little branch gives up too.

I could not take a picture of this embarrassing development. These are good people but they shouldn't be doing this to plants.

Update

2011-11-03T16:41:00.000-04:00

It snowed here last Saturday. A lot.

No power yet, we have been out since Saturday's storm but we are told we will get power by Sunday at midnight. The library is in business so I am charging up, and I am way warmer here than at home! Night time temps in the 20s and 30s make for cozy evenings in an unheated house.

I am cold but okay.

The garden -- not. I lost many young trees, and the mini forest I created on the back hill to screen us from the road has been mostly topped, no longer screening anything. Woody debris is scattered everywhere.

Large limbs came off the specimen maple trees in our yard and the trees will look deformed for a while but will surely live. Not so the doublefile viburnum, split smack down the middle, or the witch hazels, or redbuds or a lovely ornamental cherry --- they were all split or snapped off at the trunk.

This redbud had gotten 15 feet tall and so leafy!

The 'Okame' cherry snapped off

All the witch hazels fell apart. This was 'Diane'

The flowering dogwood had gotten to be a lovely shape and size. It will live and eventually re-branch its missing limbs, but what a goofy look for a tree, certainly for a while to come.

My Bradford pear imploded, as did all the pear trees in town, every last one! Horrid tree, no good in any kind of weather. I won't replant it.

I'll stop here. My garden as I designed it is gone and I need to start over, but some plants will regrow in different shapes and many things survived and will look no worse.

The river birches made it with only a few branches dropped. The magnolia will look lopsided but will gain more leaves in a season or two. The katsura tree is iffy, but we'll see. The evergreens are good and I'll start there with design changes.

Nature can be forgiving. Stuff that wasn't snapped in two will regrow, fill in again, and I will replant what I need to. I will still have a nice garden.

Not the one I envisioned, but it's her show, not mine.

Fall Funnies

2011-10-27T00:57:00.001-04:00

This young sassafras wants to be noticed. Bright orange, tiered like a wedding cake, framed between the spruce and holly, it catches my eye whenever I look out the window.

It is right next to another sassafras. These were planted at the same time in the woods along the edge of the road. The one on the left has grown much larger and fuller, but it has no fall color. The smaller one is strongly tiered, still a bendy whip, and colors spectacularly.

Does the smaller one color so brightly because it is stressed? It looks healthy enough all year, but isn't growing like its sister just five feet away. And the green one should be coloring up --- sassafras here are among the most brilliant fall foliage sights. It's funny, and I'm not sure which tree is the oddity.

Another strange thing is the doublefile viburnum 'Shasta' that has been two-toned for weeks now. Half red, half green. In other years it has turned deep mahogany all over, but this year it can't get there. It's stuck halfway.

There it sits, with some tall orangey sugar maples towering behind it on the hill. The red half and the green half of the viburnum are distinctly split right down the middle. Kind of funny.

Irises in late October? Iris 'Immortality' is advertised as a reblooming iris. I planted it, thinking I would see the pretty white blooms in spring and then a few sporadic reblooms later in the year. It is actually blooming stronger now than it does earlier in the season. It goes into October and November with lots of crystalline sugary white petals, all frilly and silly, looking confused about the season.

A visitor who saw them along my front walk this week asked "are those real?" Funny!

Another strange fall duo: two river birches planted in the same raised berm at the same time five years ago, and the one on the left is yellow, dropping leaves, the other to the right is still green and leafy. They are only ten feet apart. Why so different, I wonder. It's just funny.

It's almost Halloween and we haven't had a frost yet. That's unusual here. And so I get the odd combination of fiery foliage on the trees with blue flowering plumbago. The plumbago isn't even close to being hardy here, and should be gone by now.

It's odd to see the combination of summery blue flowers, deep garnet Itea in the garden behind it, and orange fall foliage in the distance, lit by the rising sun at dawn.

It's funny but I like it!

A Reminder

2011-10-25T06:38:00.000-04:00

Sometimes I think I am getting a message from my garden.

A Crocus, A Chicken, and Kinnikinnik

2011-10-21T22:15:00.000-04:00

The autumn crocuses have emerged from their summer naps. I have one that is simply called Colchicm speciosum 'Album', or 'White' fall crocus. It is a pure white, and I love how the tiny blooms pop up from under the deep green mat of kinnikinnik (Arctostaphylos uva-ursi).

That was something of an inspiration on my part. I tucked the bulbs in under the woody stems of the groundcover kinnnikinnik and it works to hide the wimpy crocus foliage, especially as it fades. The tangle of woody stems holds the nodding crocus blooms more upright; on their own the weak stemmed crocuses tend to swoon and fall over.

The contrast of the white crocus bloom and glossy green kinnikinnik foliage is the perfect combination. Someone will surely ask me how I get my kinnikinnik to flower in the fall, since it looks like it is the groundcover that is blooming.

I need to move some of the crocuses to spread out more in the green mat. Here a lone crocus chases a fleeing chicken.

(They are the easiest chickens to care for, but they are afraid of their own shadows most of the time, and bugs and flowers terrorize them. I move them about the garden frequently to ease their anxiety.)

Here a bee tumbles upside down inside a crocus to get at what he wants.

Colchicums only last a short time. They are nowhere to be seen all spring or summer, and when they come up in the fall, it's just for a brief show, easy to miss.

But with their pure white faces looking up from their bed of green kinnikinnik I notice them as soon as they open.

Nice.

I just wish the chickens appreciated them.

Some Simple Changes

2011-10-18T00:20:00.001-04:00

Some simple changes have occurred in my garden. First of all, it finally stopped raining. That's a change.

Fall colors are emerging which is always a transformation. And the mums have burst open. They are 'Sheffield Pink', which are so common and everyone has them, but their salmon - pink - apricot colors make me happy, so I put them everywhere. It's the only hardy mum I have.

And there's a change here that was simple, but dramatic --- I took up some lawn and filled the space with pea gravel. That's all. So simple, so effective.

It made the space along the side of my house go from this isolated grass - island - border tableau . . . . .

Before (this summer)

. . . . . to this:

AFTER

From this . . . . .

Before --- mid summer

. . . . . to this:

AFTER

It's just gravel. It's just some stone spread around, and two plastic chairs from Lowe's. So simple I'm embarrassed I didn't do this earlier.

For you blog readers who suffered my ditherings about the bright red knockout roses --- should I keep them or not --- they are gone.

Before. Last summer the roses filled the top of the drive, crowded by yellow daylilies

The blank space where the roses were will be filled with something else.

AFTER -- no roses, and only a few daylilies left (I kept three fragrant yellow ones)

The grass strip bounded by shrub and perennial borders was nice enough, but it really had no interest.

Before. An empty space, not used for anything except walking through.

AFTER. A place to stop. The edges of the gravel will be softened with spiller plants next spring.

Did I tell you I really like Sheffield Pink mums? Now, with new confidence resulting from the success of this gravel garden, I'm thinking I could try other varieties.

Let me know your favorite hardy mums, I'm feeling like I could pull off some more colors now and make a few more simple changes.

Disclosure:

it took 6 cubic yards of pea stone, a swath of landscape fabric under it, and steel retaining edges installed to keep the gravel from washing away. It also took sod cutters to rip up the lawn and trucks to haul the sod and the doomed rosebushes away. I did not do this myself.

Designs of Mann installed this new garden. They made the result look simple, but it was a lot of work. I knew what I wanted but they made it happen.

Thanks, David and Sharon!

A Provocative Garden

2011-10-14T18:57:00.000-04:00

At first it looked like a traditional Connecticut garden tour. The quiet Colonial house sits in the woods, down a country lane in a rural area. Oh so New England. All surrounded by stone walls, of course. I expected a flowery cottage garden edged by a pretty lawn, herbs outside the kitchen door, more stone walls, that kind of thing.

But once we got into the garden, the sense of place shifted. There was something more exotic and much more artistic and definitely provocative.

This is Lee May's garden. Lee is a retired journalist, with an impressive career over the years at the LA Times and the Atlanta Journal Constitution, and you can read about him on his blog Lee May's Gardening Life. How a man who grew up in the deep south landed in the woods in Connecticut in his retirement is puzzling, but what a garden he has made here.

There are almost no flowers. Bloom interest comes from hydrangeas and lilacs and rare variegated dogwoods and woodland shrubs, even some groundcovers, but there are few perennials. There was absolutely no lawn. None.

The entire garden was rocks. Not a cute rock garden, but big chunking rocks throughout. There were streams of rocks tumbling down slopes, a whole bed of large gravel, seemingly random (but carefully placed) rocks everywhere.

If you garden in New England you fight the rocks. Lee doesn't fight them. He uses them. Since there is no lawn to mow, he could get creative with scattering rocks all around in the thick carpet of moss.

I mean, really. Even a pile of them as a deliberate focal point. Provocative.

Check out the flickr photo stream on his blog to see the creative ways he uses stone accents.

His plants tend toward an Asian feel, with severely pruned, almost bonsai Japanese maples growing in the entry bed. A little eerie, but dramatic and deliberate.

Even the woods are heavily pruned, and the effect is startling. Would you think you could prune a large forest tree so artistically?

Tree trunks in the forest are pruned up to make woodland rooms. This is not a naturalistic woodland walk, it's truly a tearoom under a leafy canopy held up by narrow limbed up pillars.

And you must have carpets in your rooms, it's just civilized.

Everything in this garden is artificial, every tree pruned, every space constructed. There are baubles and sculptures and silly whimsy. But it had an amazingly calm, serene, shady, restful feel.

I did not like all the severe shaping or all the goofy artifacts in the garden, but I loved the overall effect it gave. I did not like the spare, trimmed Asian style in the Connecticut woods, but I loved how provocative it was. I expected flowers, but really enjoyed how a garden can be so much more with only rocks, tree trunks and carefully chosen greenery.

And I loved Lee's obvious delight in what he has created.

He started with a run down house and flat boring lawn in 2001. He ripped out all the lawn and started planting, moving rocks, and pruning, pruning, pruning. He is happy to share it all with visitors, and with audiences at his gardening speaking events. His talk (and book) about reconnecting with a long absent father through gardening is touching.

I was about ready to haul up on his shady porch, grab a lemonade and talk gardening with him all afternoon.

A true Southern gentleman and a plant lover in all zones, he would have indulged me, I'm sure.

By the way, if you visit Lee May's garden and you are no longer a young man, do not wear cargo shorts. Do not. He'll tell you why.

Why So Tentative?

2011-10-11T12:54:00.000-04:00

It's Columbus Day. Where are the colors?

It feels like spring here in my part of the world, even though I am in the northern hemisphere and it is mid October.

It feels that way because I am waiting, waiting, for something to happen, just the way I anxiously monitor emerging shoots and tiny leaves in early spring.

I am waiting for fall to emerge.

Autumn here is not an ending, it's the start of a glorious season in my garden. But this year it is tentative and halting.

Garden club speculation lays the blame on our very wet September and early October. Too much rain has delayed the fall color.

I do have proof. I keep another blog which is unpublished. It is a private daily journal of the tasks and minutiae that occupy me outside. And it gives me a photographic record year by year, dated and preserved.

Last year we had fall color by Columbus Day. It peaked in late October, but it exploded around this time and then deepened as the month ended. This year, compared to prior years, it is tentative and developing slowly.

A tiny new whip of a black gum tree is the only color out in the woods. None of the more mature black gums have started to put on their red dresses yet.

The little forest of growing maples on the back hill is just thinking about coloring. Very softly tinged right now, it is slowly turning. It should be ablaze.

The Virginia sweetspire shrub, itea, has begun to turn a deep color, and it is kind of nice, but last year it was a shocking garnet red that shimmered.

The only real red color on the back hill comes from staghorn sumacs. The line of shaggy buckeyes, aesculus parviflora, are only starting to turn gold in front of the browning meadow. They should be bright neon yellow all over at this time. The doublefile viburnum on the right here has been half green and half rusty red now for a week. Get your act together!

A brand new pagoda dogwood, cornus alternifolia, looks like Raggedy Ann. It hasn't grown into its elegant shape yet. At all. But it is one of the few spots of color right now.

The hillside is nice, but not what it has been in prior years.

My sourwood, oxydendrum arboreum, was deep crimson last year on October 12, and I have pictures from prior years that show it was a beautiful color even in late September. This year it is still green.

The 'Sheffield Pink' mums want to bloom, but they are still just a sea of buds with only a few brave flowers.

All will be right by the end of October when the colors emerge in their glory. But why so tentative? Why so delayed? Just to drive me crazy this year?

But What Do You Blog About in Winter?

2011-10-09T08:51:00.000-04:00

The featured speaker at the Connecticut Horticultural Society's September meeting was Margaret Roach. You all know her from her blog A Way To Garden, and from her Martha Stewart editing days.

I went to hear her speak and to see slides of her beautiful garden in upstate New York.

She was a delightfully entertaining speaker. The slides were familiar to me --- I have followed her blog since she began it, and have seen many of the plants and views featured in her posts over the years. But it was her message that caught my attention: the 365 day garden is a joy all year.

She launched her talk by saying that autumn causes many people to lament the "end of the season" or to regret that it's time to "close the garden". But to her a garden shines every single day of the year. You just have to go beyond perennials.

Fall and winter are as beautiful as other seasons and something is always, always going on out there if you look and if you design for it. Even dreary late spring is enjoyable when her beloved frog boys emerge from under the mud and come back to entertain her with their antics.

I really related to her talk. In my own garden the most glorious season is fall, and it doesn't feel like the end of anything. It feels like a continuation, only more colorful than the summer bloom period.

last November

Winter is cold here, and long, and damn poor for napping in the hammock. But it is a wonderful season in the garden, with woody plants and dried seedheads taking the stage, and evergreens for color, and interesting sights in every landscape. If you garden with more than perennials and flowering annuals, you have a 365 day garden.

A new acquaintance once learned about my blog, and asked me "but what do you blog about in the winter?" I was a little stunned. I blog about my garden in the winter. I didn't know what else to say. Then it dawned on me that to her a garden was a flowerbed or vegetable patch. When it was done blooming or producing, you closed the garden and the season was over.

Not in my garden. I was so glad to hear Margaret Roach articulate what I feel. My garden is a great place to visit and see and even blog about all year long*.

* Except for three weeks at the end of March when icy mud oozes everywhere and vole tunnels snake through every bed and an unrelenting brown color won't quit. I try, but those three weeks simply do not fit into the 365 day garden.

They don't. What I have here is really a 344 day garden.

Just being honest.

More Work

2011-10-06T00:52:00.000-04:00

It's never finished.

You never get to the point where the garden is done and you move on to other things.

But I had gotten to the point where at least all the major planting areas in my yard were settled. I have several large beds, a lot of trees, stuff planted around the foundation and patio --- it is all I can handle. I was pretty much done with creating new garden spaces.

But this area along the side of the drive didn't look right. The separate beds and plants were too isolated.

So I had the sod removed and linked the separate areas into one big bed that follows the curve of the driveway as it draws you up toward the gardens in back.

The beginning of the area is shaded by a Norway Maple 'Crimson King' at the foot of the bed near the driveway entrance. That may be a problem some day, with its size and dense shade.

Despite a lot of rain in early October, the overturned black plastic pots never grew, so I had to plant some other stuff there.

I moved three panicle hydrangeas to the spots where the overturned pots were. They will get large and elegant and make a hedge lining the driveway.

The young rounded tree in the middle, which formerly sat in its own mulch circle, is now incorporated into this long border. It is a magnolia 'Elizabeth', with giant creamy yellow magnolia blossoms in earliest spring.

At the far end of this sweep are two witch hazels, the hybrid hamamelis 'Diane' and an unnamed hamamelis vernalis.

It's a very big space to plant up. I put a doublefile viburnum 'Mariesii' in there behind the hydrangeas. It will eventually be a huge twelve foot high wedding cake of horizontal branches, anchoring the left side of this long stretch, but it is just a twig right now. It was a tiny rooting from Cyndy's former CT garden at Gardening Asylum.

And there is a Serbian spruce at the left edge too. Still little, but it will make a fine green wall behind the magnolia and hydrangeas. This type of spruce, Picea omorika, gets hugely tall, but stays narrow, which will fit within the border. I hope. Probably not.

I dug up some delicate white wood asters from the meadow and scattered them around. I also put in several plugs of a woody groundcover sumac, rhus aromatica 'Gro Low', which will spread out and cover all that bare mulch.

But it still needs more. More tending while the plants fill in. More plants period. Weeding. More mulch to cover all the bare ground while waiting for the plants to get some size. More pruning and moving things about as they grow.

More work. And I thought I was done.

Look!

2011-10-03T00:07:00.000-04:00

Lookit the great things going on in the garden.

All summer long these blue plumbago plants bloomed and bloomed. They are tied to bamboo tepees to keep them upright, and they have made a semi-arch to walk through. They just never quit all season, and are flowering into fall.

And look, isn't the miscanthus at its best in fall? Those silky tassels reach out and tickle my knees every time I walk by them.

Tight round buds of Montauk daisies are just waiting for fall. Their white daisy flowers open when the leaves of trees are coloring up and other perennials start to fade, and just as the nicotiana nearby closes up for the season. Bright white blooms are welcome when everything else is red and gold and bronze.

Look -- the tight buds of the mums are also just waiting for the perfect time. These are 'Sheffield Pink' and they will open a light apricot shade, very delicately hued, when everything around them is a riot of blazing autumn colors.

What?

Do we look like we care?

We don't.

I Made A Mistake

2011-10-01T07:53:00.000-04:00

Every month Joene sponsors GOOPS, or Gardening Oops --- those mistakes we make in our gardens and need to confess. You can read more on her blog.

Last month I made a mistake, not in my own garden, but when I went to visit a friend's place. The error?

I didn't bring my camera.

My sister's friend Julie invited us to lunch at her house. I knew she lived in a wooded area, in a lovely house with a dog kennel (she breeds Labradors) and acreage for horses.

But I didn't bring my camera.

What a mistake. The house was right out of the 1770s, with every detail reproduced in exquisite detail to evoke the Revolutionary period in Connecticut. Period-specific but warmly livable and homey. A cottage garden inside a picket fence. A sweep of lawn embraced all around by beech woods.

And I was there without my camera.

The barns were a treasure too, one big weathered gray one nestled into the hillside like it had been there forever, with a spotlessly clean dog kennel, and a six stall horse barn up the slope where hilltop breezes blow through open doors end to end, keeping it cool all summer. Sugar, an old white pony, living out her quiet life in the paddock. A big vegetable patch producing exuberantly by the compost pile.

Why didn't I bring my camera?

And then Julie took us down the shady lane to her neighbor's house, where we wandered through a beautifully built Japanese garden in the woods. A pond, a teahouse, a burbling stream, shade loving plants spilling everywhere. A deep ravine, with dappled sunlight pouring through the tree trunks like liquid light.

I did have my iPhone with me, but. . . .

It was lunch and a visit and a lovely afternoon, not a photo shoot. I had a great time and enjoyed the company and the tour without being distracted trying to capture everything I saw on film. You miss a lot looking through a lens.

But you can't show your blog readers what was so enchanting if you don't bring a camera to a house and garden tour of one of the prettiest places I have seen.

My mistake.

Speechless

2011-09-28T15:36:00.000-04:00

I know it is supposed to be Wordless Wednesday, but this scene left me not just without descriptive words, but entirely and totally speechless when I wandered out to the meadow today. I didn't plant any of this. It is the unmowed, untended, wild area that abuts my yard. We don't even own this strip of meadow.

Nature made this sunny garden of white wood asters and purple New England wild asters, goldenrod, and a short orange sunflower that looks like a zinnia.

It is not just a single clump out back. We are surrounded by this show. Here's what I see standing in the backyard looking west --- you can just see the mowed edge of the tended yard on the left.

Here's what I see looking east where the meadow spills out to the road. Grasses and asters and goldenrod spread all along the back of the yard in all directions.

I plant and tend and fuss, and Jim mows and clips and edges in the "garden" part of our outdoor world. And then, all around the perimeter of our lot nature wordlessly and effortlessly shows us what a real garden looks like.

I am speechless.

We Are Still Pleased

2011-09-27T07:10:00.000-04:00

I can't believe I can still be delighted by a walk around my house on a morning at the very beginning of fall.

I've seen this garden over and over this season, weeded it endlessly, walked it repeatedly, fussed over it and spent far too much time looking at and critiquing it.

And then a foggy September morning lights up the sweetbay magnolia (Magnolia virginiana) outside my bedroom window and I see it anew.

Then I noticed the three Japanese forest grasses, Hakonechloa macra 'Beni Kaze', that I originally planted into the ground beneath a Japanese maple last year.

But rabbits kept eating them to the ground, so in frustration, I yanked out the stubby remains, plunked them into three separate plastic pots and left them on the front porch. The rabbits gave up and I forgot about them.

But when I finally noticed them this year, I was pleased. They looked nice and full enough to stage going up the front steps, and they are now ridiculously funny mopheaded greeters at the front door.

I love the pipecleaner spires of Persicaria affinis 'Dimity', or Himalayan fleeceflower. It's a low groundcover and well behaved. It's always there, carpeting the lowest level of my garden, intimidating weeds and spreading itself about a bit. I like it all summer. I still like it.

I planted a new clematis that will provide some vertical activity on an empty brick wall. The clematis needs something to climb on, so I stuck a flimsy metal trellis in the ground to wait for next season's foliage to claim it and tear it down. It surprised me how much I like the bare trellis by itself. The copper sun, blending into the brick, is a pleasant little touch, and I almost don't want the vine to cover it. Should I leave it as a bare trellis and put the clematis somewhere else?

Even the hints that my summer garden is going by are pleasing. There is soft pink sedum 'Autumn Joy' blooming and flopping at the front of this fading garden. There is a frosty colored purple sage nestling next to the sedum. Blowsy nepeta lazes on the right, too big and loose to look perky any more. The itea virginica in the middle is turning slightly reddish, and will be on fire in a few weeks.

Even after a long summer, even when things are fading, I must say:
. . . . .we are still pleased.

This is the Time

2011-09-22T17:17:00.000-04:00

This is the time of year when the hummingbirds drink the feeder dry in three days.

This is the time of year my butterfly bush is alive with orange and black visitors.

My butterfly bush is an unusual yellow one. It is Buddleia weyeriana 'Honeycomb' and the panicles are clear yellow with orange throats, creating a sunny, warm, golden effect. Like all butterfly bushes it is rangy, but it doesn't seem to want to get as big as some of the old garden standbys. And it isn't as wildly flowery as the old varieties, but I like its delicate color and more refined flowering a bit better.

I have a magenta purple butterfly bush too. It is the new dwarf one, 'Blue Chip', that really stays low and tidy. The butterflies visit, but not in the major swarms that make the air above 'Honeycomb' electric. It truly grows no more than two feet high and barely three feet wide.

This is the time of year when the winterberry hollies, Ilex verticillata 'Red Sprite', announce they are open for business. I've always wanted to see these red berries against white snow, but they never last that long. They are gone before the first snowfall.

This is the time of year when my weeds become very sorry and promise not to do any of those things again.

Soon the butterflies will go and the hummers will depart. The foliage in this garden will turn vivid colors before it too disappears. Even the regretful weeds will go away.

And I am taking off as well, headed out to Denver to see my son. But I'll be back very soon, it's just a short visit. When I get back the butterflies and hummers may already be gone.

It's time.

What Does It Really Look Like?

2011-09-20T08:10:00.000-04:00

Look at the complex mix of pinks and purples and creams in this hydrangea bud. Wouldn't you like to know what emerges when this opens up?

It's Hydrangea serrata 'Bluebird'. The lacecap bloom of this mountain hydrangea could be a beautifully mixed cocktail of color just as the tight buds are. Or it could open all pinky rose and mauve. Maybe it will be more blue as the name suggests, perhaps with a ring of clear white flowers surrounding the center.

I wouldn't know. The deer get here before the buds open and decapitate the shrub. The whole thing.

Would you know where in my garden to find this delightful pea-like flower? Isn't that a classy combination of rich magenta and white?

This color combination robes every inch of a bush clover. It's Lespedeza 'Edo-Shibori', and unlike other big rangy bush clovers, this cultivar stays a manageable size overall.

But from a distance you wouldn't know what these flowers really look like. They are so tiny, covering the shrub profusely in September, but the magenta and white flowers are invisible. The shrub has its charms, arching and waving in the breeze rather beautifully, but the blooms are itty bitty and washed out. I just don't know what the flowers look like until I get up very close.

The deer leave this lespedeza alone. A friend says his bush clover is eaten to the ground --- twigs, branches, flowers and leaves, the whole thing.

But not in my garden. The deer here are too busy with my hydrangeas to bother with the bush clover. I guess I should be thankful for that.

And here is a little surprise: a delicate autumn crocus has popped up under a caryopteris shrub.

Cyndy from Gardening Asylum dug some from her old garden before she moved her whole asylum south this summer, and I stuck them in the ground in my garden. Talk about wondering what it looks like! Autumn crocus disappears all summer. There is no foliage, nothing to let you know you planted anything. Then, just when you are wondering if it's there and what it might ever look like, it pops up as sweet as can be.

September Charmers

2011-09-16T14:59:00.000-04:00

September brings some very pretty plants into bloom. We wait all summer for these charmers, and then suddenly they're here and summer is over.

I love caryopteris, or Blue Mist shrub. It is incredibly easy to grow, takes no care, and brings out its jewel toned fuzzy blooms in early fall. The whole plant swarms with drunken bees the size of small mammals all day long.

this whole plant was from a single stem cutting I took from another plant last year

the color is truly gem-like, a clear amethyst

It is very easy to propagate. You just take a stem off and stick it in the ground, basically.
So I did that, and now I have Blue Mist shrubs in several spots around the garden.

another stem cutting, and I got this entire plant in one season

I also planted a gold leaved variety called 'Worcester's Gold'. The foliage is quite yellow all summer, but when the light amethyst blooms come out in September, the leaves are more light green than gold, thankfully. Even so, it's a combination that is a little bright.

'Worcester's Gold' is bright --- great from a far, a little jarring up close

Another fall charmer is chelone obliqua, or turtlehead. It is supposed to bloom much earlier in the summer, in July and August, but the deer strip the buds and the poor plant doesn't bloom.

at long last, delayed blooms in fall

Finally, in September, when the deer have moved on to other snacks (their dining schedules are a mystery to me), turtlehead gets to show off its delicate pink furled flowers.

sweet

My turtlehead plants are at the back of the garden and are hidden. Taller plants in front block any view of them from the patio, and I have to go around to the back of the garden to see them. I'll move them this fall to a spot where I can actually see these charmers.

Perhaps if they are closer to the house the deer will leave them alone in early summer and they will bloom earlier (yeah, right, the deer would come up the stairs and into my kitchen if the door was open).

Then there are all the frothy tall sedums and the pretty pink fall anemones, and dusty rose hydrangeas that open in September and look so soft.

truly immortal, a re-blooming iris

And here's a return visit from spring --- iris 'Immortality'.

What a nice surprise to see this pristine white iris rebloom in the fall garden. The buds are a strange powdery steel blue color, but the iris opens clear white. 'Immortality' will bloom well into October.

This month is bittersweet, knowing that summer has ended, school is back in session and winter is coming.

But I am charmed by the plants that shine in September to keep the end of the season at bay for just a while longer.

Project Completed

2011-09-14T00:58:00.001-04:00

A grandchild's hand prints found a home

Here's an update on the project at my sister's condo. It's done.

In my prior post here you saw the design challenge that she gave me:

Plant two small shady strips of garden beds along the fences, do something with bare dirt in the dark corners under a deck, and dress the whole patio up.

Here's what I did.

Under the deck:
Lots of rocks and some steppers are the base for a fountain urn. The water in the urn is hard to photograph, but it is bubbling up from the center and smoothly sliding back down the outside of the urn. It has a very quiet burble.

It turns out bubbling water is fun for a 3 year old to play in, and it's just the right height.

In the photo the area looks a little spare. But I have to say it seems fuller when you are there. There is the sound of the water, the intensity of the blue ceramic container, the Zen-like vibe under the twisted old rhododendron, and clinking windchimes that her older granddaughters made years ago --- it works and fills the space.

On the other side, this corner under the deck is where the meters, the A/C and the littlest grandkid's toys live. We called it a day and just put some rocks down to cover bare dirt.

Not much to be done here.

The A/C unit will be replaced soon, so we decided not to fence it in or hide it behind a tall trellis screen. It just is.

The long narrow bed along the fence:
I dug up yellowroot -- Xanthorhiza simplicissima -- from my garden and it will colonize to make a leafy groundcover that completely covers this narrow strip. It digs up and divides easily; any clump of roots will take.

The yellowroot looks scraggly now but will fill in to make a mounding shrubby carpet

My sister found a hollow stump in a firewood pile nearby, and decided it would make an ideal planter.

The hollow core was perfectly sized for a pot

At the end of the row of yellowroot I put in a clematis. It is the old purple standby, Jackmanii Superba, and next year there will be flowers. Abundant and vivid. That is, if it can take as much shade as this side of the fence gets. It's supposed to do okay in some shade, and this spot only gets an hour or two of sun at the height of mid-day, and bright shade the rest of the day.

Clematis Jackmaii Superba will outgrow this trellis

So I strung wire on supports to help it crawl along the top of the fence

And this is what it will look like along the fence. I can't wait. (Image from Brushwood Nursery)

I found a big heavy rock nearby and schlepped it to the corner, where I draped a Japanese Forest Grass over it, Hakonechloa macra. It's the gold leaved one and it pops as you approach the patio.

Why are rocks so heavy? This one doesn't look big, but it was. And heavy.

Between the exuberant purple clematis climbing up, the quiet green groundcover spreading below, the rustic stump, and the cascade of bright fountain grass, I think we got a nice thing going in this skinny strip of garden.

The raised bed:
On the other side two shrubs will add structure and heft in this slightly wider bed --- a Hinoki falsecypress (Chamaecyparis obtusa 'Draht') and a dense pyramid of a boxwood (Buxus 'Green Mountain'). When they get larger they will add height and fill the blank fence wall. Both can take shade. They don't do much to hide the A/C unit, but a hanging plant tower helps with that.

The falsecypress and boxwood will grow to provide screening and substance here.

And didn't we find another hollow stump to use as a second planter for this bed.

I think my sister is most pleased with her idea to use these found stumps. They're perfect.

The falsecypress and boxwood are underplanted with salvaged hostas and heucheras that were in this garden to begin with. They'll fill in. Already they look a little happier to have so much compost and such nice companions in their bed. They'll plump up by next year.

50 crocuses are sleeping in the soil waiting for spring. A fall anemone called 'September Charm' fills the corner near the hostas and will have delicate pink blooms. It will eventually overtake the hollow log planter, so we will move the stump when it does.

I added astilbes and glossy bergenias from my garden, and my sister added the cherished round plaster casts of her grandchildrens' handprints.

I love the fat glossy leaves of bergenia, called Pigsqueak.

Some more golden Hakone grass at the corner of the raised bed, and we have a garden.

The fountainy grass will soften the corner and flow over the slope

I know this doesn't look like much to you professional landscapers, but it was hard work for this aging 60 something gardener. The rocks. The rocks. Who knew it would take so many bags of pond pebbles from Home Depot? We made four trips after I woefully underestimated the quantity needed for those small spaces under the deck.

Grass seed in front will soon sprout, and so will furniture, and granddaughters playing on the patio

Jim was a tremendous help, he wrecked his back assisting with this installation, and did much of the heavy work. My sister? I think she is pleased with the whole design.

And me? I had so much fun. Call me if you want your garden revamped. I know how many rocks it will take now.

They're Not Cooperating

2011-09-11T09:55:00.001-04:00

Some plants in my garden are just not cooperating with my vision for them. I have such plans. But they don't do what I want.

Despite the fact that everything I have planted is getting way too big and engulfing the house and neighboring plants, my beautiful Rose of Sharon is not reaching upward to grace the window of my dining room. Instead, she is getting wider and fuller. Just not taller.

Hibiscus syriacus 'White Chiffon' blooms and grows fuller

But after 3 years she still barely reaches the window

I dream of a vase shaped, tall Rose of Sharon filling half the view here. I got a shrubby round ball instead that lurks just under the window.

Then there's the trio of paper birch trees (Betula papyrifera) that define our property. They have never looked good. In the wild they are iconic New England woodland trees, graceful, glowing yellow in fall, and startling in their white barked nakedness in winter.

But in my yard they don't cooperate. Because they are growing in nice garden soil and not rocky woodlands, mine put on too much foliage in spring. They leaf out, look good, and then when warm summer temps hit, they can't support all those leaves.

In spring they grow too many leaves to support in summer

So they self prune to conserve water. They are also getting a leaf spot problem that is browning the leaves and making them drop prematurely in August.

By Labor Day they become denuded without coloring up for fall. Not at all what I was planning for the fall garden.

This is how sad they looked in August

The birches at Labor Day. This is not what I want to see for fall color

I wish I had planted a trio of river birches (Betula nigra) instead of the paper birches. I do have several river birches in other spots, and they are just as beautiful --- the bark is shaggy and peeling, not white. They grow fast, stay lovely all summer and cooperate so much better than the paper birches do. A very accommodating tree.

One of the thriving river birches. Much better choice.

My black and blue sage (Salvia guaranitica) was completely uncooperative, in fact stubborn to a fault this year. Drove me batty. It wintered over in a pot on my unheated porch, and this spring it leafed back out and grew beautifully, but completely refused to bloom all summer. Refused. Just didn't put out a single bud, just lots and lots of green foliage.

Do you see any buds?

Last week I ditched it and bought a great big blooming new one at Lowe's.

New Salvia guaranitica. Blooming. So there.

There's a clematis that flowered very sparsely this year and didn't even bother to put out much foliage and never clothed the black steel pyramid next to the sages. That was not my plan, why did the clematis think it was? So all summer I simply had an empty metal pyramid by the patio wall. Structural interest, okay, but not my original design.

Really, the entire garden in early September is looking great. I shouldn't complain. In fact, I'm pleased overall. But I had plans for a couple of these trees and shrubs and perennials that they just didn't seem to understand.

There's always one or two in every group I guess.

A Wish Come True

2011-09-06T06:44:00.001-04:00

the High Line in the 1930s

Over Labor Day weekend my son and his girlfriend indulged a wish of mine --- they took me to the High Line Park in Manhattan. I have long wanted to see this park which was restored along 2 miles of an abandoned elevated railroad track that used to bring freight and animals to the meat packing district of New York 75 years ago.

looking out from the High Line today

First, let me say that I cannot adequately describe its design and the mysterious pull it has on the walker. James Golden has done that so much better than I ever could. His long and thoughtful blog post is worth reading to really get the High Line's fascinating features. Click on the link, you might like his detailed review as much as I enjoy poring over it.

I can just offer some random personal observations, which is all my blog has ever been about anyway.

Random observation number one: this park is all about the garden in time, evolving and changed. That experience of transformation is what fascinates me about any garden, including my own.

Before it was a park, before it was designed and planted by Piet Oudolf and well known landscape designers, before there were elegant sweeps of grasses, copses of small trees and benches and paths and a bricked stream to wade in, it was a wasteland.

this is what nature planted, as seen in the 1990s

But what an interesting wasteland. The tracks had been unused and were slated to be torn down, but over the years seeds blew onto the empty gravel and a wild meadow had fully established itself. It's amazing to think of plant seeds whirling around in the air in the concrete, asphalt, stone and brick of New York City. Where did they come from? How did they get there?

These photos from Joel Sternfeld are on the High Line Park's website, and they show what it looked like in the 1990s.

There are many wonderful galleries on the web site that show historical photos of the railroad when it was in use, then in its abandoned disrepair as the wild meadow took over, the planting and revival, and what it looks like now.

grasses and wildflowers are planted in the park now

This was not an open field, or an abandoned dirt lot that sprouted and grew. It was all hardscape and gravel beds, iron rails and debris. And it was all growing 30 feet in the sky, snaking above noisy streets, transforming itself without help from humans or New Yorkers.

Random observation number two: before the park restoration, it was an eyesore. It was beautiful. It was both.

That's the essence of gardens: your weedy mess is another's lovely natural space. Converting the meadowy abandoned tracks into a public park with sculptures, walkways, artificial plantings and seating was not without controversy.

But having seen it myself, I can now say they did it well. The Oudoulf aesthetic of grasses and prairie flowers, motion and soft colors makes it look only a step or two modified from the remarkable natural system that had established itself. This is not a flowery cottage garden and it is certainly not a formal clipped hedge park. It's sort of the same weedy natural space that was there, but now walkable and easily viewed.

The tracks were preserved and they are embedded in the wooden walkways and stone paths, or simply left among low ornamental grasses.

the tracks are preserved throughout

asters nestle in the grasses

from some angles it's not so different from the wild meadow that was there

Random observation number three: strolling around in the park is relaxing and disorienting at the same time. You're up high, surrounded by even higher buildings, looking down on lower buildings and cars. It's all wild, but it's all man made. The exquisite tension of a really interesting garden is in full display here--- it is wildly natural and extremely artificial at the same time.

from High Line web site

There are trees up there, 30 feet above the street. Sassafras trees, birches, magnolias. They even planted oak trees. This is on a railroad track in the air --- the soil depth is only 36 inches where they brought it in for the forest plantings, and only 18 inches where the grasses grow. How is this going to work over time?

birch plantings

magnolias and shrubs

oak trees up here. Really?

Some disorientation is deliberate, like the viewing area suspended over 10th Avenue, where you can sit on wooden benches in a tiered amphitheater and do a very New York thing: watch traffic through plate glass windows. And traffic can watch you.

from NYU.edu

Or the end of the line at the Gansevoort Street entry --- it's very disorienting but oddly exciting where it just stops in mid air.

from High Line web site

Random observation number four: it doesn't get any better than being squired about the big city by your amazingly competent adult children. When did they grow up to be such interesting people?

You know, that is the real wish come true.

Garden Consult

2011-09-02T17:19:00.000-04:00

After several years of making design and installation mistakes in my landscape, I have been asked to make them in someone else's garden.

I have been hired to design and plant the space around a new patio at a condo complex.

The dirt in front is a newly seeded grassy slope, or it was until storm Irene passed through and washed away all the seed and some of the mud. But that is condo common lawn that borders each unit's back patio, so it's not part of my design assignment.

The area I have been asked to plant is the narrow strip on the left, the slightly wider boxed garden on the right, and the areas deep under the overhanging deck.

The strip on the left is 2 feet wide and 11 feet long bordering the fence. The boxed garden is 3 1/2 feet wide. There is a lovely old rhododendron in the corner that is thankfully an architectural anchor plant to work with. The plastic kids toys decorating the A/C unit. . . well. Large blue tarps, maybe.

It's shady, both from the building itself and from tall pines overhanging the area. The area under the deck is deep shade.

The patio will be used as a play area for a toddler, an alternate entrance for coming and going through the lower level, and as something nice to look at from inside the condo. It's not really a sitting or barbequeing area, that's done on the deck above.

So, designers . . . what are the possibilities for shade plants in narrow strips? Fence hiders? A/C unit blockers? I think the client wants flowering things, but they have to be no-care, low care.

Under the deck where it is too deeply shady and dry, I am thinking river rocks and decorative hardscaping.

And what to plant here? There are struggling hostas and heucheras already, but they will perk up when I amend the soil. The deadish shrubs will come out. I can add astilbes and bergenia. But what for height? To hide the A/C?

And here? The fence needs something on it.

Just to be clear, the client who hired me is my sister, and my entire fees will amount to lunches served when I am over there. She promised me some excellent fish tacos.

This may be the start of a design and consulting career that will take off and make me reknowned and revered in the garden landscaping industry. Or not.

But I am loving the new (to me) challenge of gardening in shade, in a tiny space, with fence and hardscape all around. And I am flattered to be asked to do it.

Snap Trap

2011-09-01T05:40:00.001-04:00

If you are going to put out those hard plastic spring-loaded snap traps to capture root eating, plant destroying voles in your garden . . . . .

. . . . . do not pick up the trap by the front edge while it is open. Don't.

I know this from personal experience.

Joene from Joene's Garden sponsors gardening mistakes, those "oops" we commit and are willing to admit to. You can read other gardening oops (GOOPs) on her blog on the first of every month.

That's mine for this month. Sheesh. It really hurt.

An update as of Friday, Sept. 2: I think Joene must be without power, as there is no GOOPs on her blog this month. A lot of Connecticut is still without electricity even now, six days after tropical storm Irene.

Stillness

2011-08-29T09:40:00.000-04:00

The quiet this morning after the storm is complete. Tropical storm Irene roared directly over us here in west central Connecticut, dumped oceans of rain on us, blew about, and departed.

This morning the sun came out, a few birds chirped tentatively, and the hummingbirds buzzed me gratefully when I re-hung the feeders.

There has been much flooding in the state, there are downed trees, and my relatives a few towns over have no power. But all are safe, and here in my garden there is no damage.

I have soggy ground, splayed annuals, and the silver maple on the back hill fell apart as silver maples do in any kind of weather, but the fallen limbs did no real harm. I'll have to clean it up, though.

It has certainly been a few weeks of natural oddities. The earthquake in the east was one. The tropical storm here was another.

And while I was away in New Mexico it was stormy and wet there, a real oddity for the dry southwest.

We had rumbly thunderstorms that got snagged in the mountains of Santa Fe and gave us a couple evening's entertainment watching the lightning from safe inside. The rain was steady and heavy, and out there that means flash floods. We could not get to dinner one night as downtown Santa Fe was flooded.

But after the storms, all was stillness and quiet, and our trip was a delight. Six of us in a beautiful house in the mountains. Six of us shopping Indian Market, eating our way through New Mexico, attending an opera (a first for me, I'm such a rube), and cruising the art galleries of Santa Fe as if we could afford anything in them.

Most of Indian Market featured the work of southwest native craftsmen and artists.

Antique, vintage, or newly fashioned, the turquoise was exquisite

But I was pleased to see that Best of Show in the juried artwork was from an eastern craftsman, a member of Maine's Passamaquoddy.

Best of show basketry was Passamaquoddy

Photos are from Examiner.com
Santa Fe Indian Market 2011 - Photo Memories

Teri Greeves, Kiowa artist, was a highlight. Her beaded wall hangings, immense and engrossing, each with a fully developed story behind them, were featured at the Shiprock gallery. A flat photo of the hangings, as I've posted here, does not begin to show you the intensity of the light-catching beads, satiny fabric and textile richness of this art. The hangings were nine feet long, huge and vivid. Mrs. Obama is a fan of her work, and has gifted Teri's beaded handbags to heads of state.

Her beaded cuffs wound up on the wrists of two of our party. Alas, my wrist went home naked.

The market was immense, the exhibitors were friendly and chatty, the wares were beautifully made and expensive (I mean really pricey) and the artwork could take you weeks to appreciate. We just sampled.

We wandered, we ogled, we bought some stuff for our families back home, we went back to our mountain house and drank wine while looking at the mountains. Half of our group did not know the other half before we arrived, and it was so pleasant to learn about each other and make new friends in this beautiful setting.

Thunder and flash floods, earthquakes, tropical storms, even Faust at the opera. All manner of strange experiences for me.

I pray for those that were badly affected in the storms. I know I am lucky to be so unscathed, my garden intact, and everyone I love safe in the stillness after the storm.

Off For A While

2011-08-18T06:33:00.000-04:00

Gone for a little while.

Off to visit New Mexico.

Back at the end of August.

See you then . . .

Cardinal Flower

2011-08-15T11:58:00.000-04:00

This is one of my favorite summer perennials, and our resident hummingbirds agree.

It is Lobelia cardinalis. Cardinal flower. You can see why it is called that --- the red is intense. The hummingbirds exhaust themselves zipping from stem to stem to feed, over and over.

There is a cultivar called 'Ruby Slippers' that is a deep wine color.

The color was too dark and saturated to be seen from far away, it just disappeared. So I moved it to the patio wall where I see it up close and can marvel at the velvety rich hue.

But the cardinal red species is an eye popper even from far away in my back garden. I need more of these to make a bigger impact, but they are hard to locate at local garden centers. No one carries them, although the center I went to last week will order them for me. My small stand isn't big enough to divide yet.

They want full sun and very moist, wet soil. Mine get some late shade under a large maple, but they do see the sun most of the day. The area of the back garden where I have them planted is damp, but when hot dry summer bakes the soil, I water the cardinal flowers frequently.

I don't know why local centers don't have them in stock routinely. Lobelia cardinalis is the kind of plant that would tempt anyone shopping for color, tall structure and hummingbird magnets in their gardens.

Afternoon on the River

2011-08-14T07:55:00.000-04:00

An August afternoon on the Connecticut River:

Do any local readers know where on the river this is?

Becky's Cup Plant

2011-08-10T10:13:00.000-04:00

Dug out of the ground in Kentucky.

Transported to Missouri in a plastic shopping bag.

Zapped by TSA x-rays and carried on the airplane. Stuffed under the seat for the flight to New England.

Planted in the ground in Connecticut.

A little bit of the midwest prairie blooming in my garden.

It is a cup plant, Silphium perfoliatum. I tried to grow them from seeds that we collected on a visit to a restored prairie in Wisconsin a few summers ago, but they didn't take. Then Becky dug one up from her garden in Kentucky and brought it to me when we met in St. Louis in May. A bumpy journey by car and plane for the sad little seedling, and I wasn't sure it would take. But it did.

Not the 8 foot tall tower that the prairie produces, this cup plant is about 5 feet tall in my New England garden. It rises tall and straight above the blooming clethra, kind of an odd combination from vastly different native habitats, but it's my garden and I can plant things that don't go together.

You can see why it is called cup plant: rain collects in the stem joints and makes a pool. A little cup of refreshment for the bees that swarm around the yellow blooms. Birds will drink from it too.

It's a fun plant: oddly out of place, sunnily happy, a drinking fountain of a plant, and it came from a friend's garden far away. I wonder if it tells the nearby clethra tales about the long car ride and plane trip it took to get here, and the sights it saw along the way?

A Visit With The Shy Ones

2011-08-07T13:10:00.000-04:00

It's high summer, August. Humid, noisy with cicadas and birds. I had a little visit a few days ago, before today's heavy rain, with the quieter plants that are spending the summer in my garden. The shy ones.

Such as the candy lilies. I had no success with them for the first few years, and thought I had lost them all. Well, hello!

They are popping up everywhere this year. The seedpods that formed in the first few years quietly settled into the soil, and these tiny little lily flowers on flat green scapes have established in places I did not plant them. The twisty wrapped petals you see above turn into the most interesting seedpods with glistening black berries in late summer.

They are shy, awkward plants, too tall, with flowers that are too small at the top. They must be staked, which I never get around to, so they get gawky and flop. But when I notice, as I did on this visit, I tie them upright and see their funny leopard spotted faces.

Candy lilies are X Pardancanda norrisii (X means two genera mixed: Belamcanda chinensis, which is blackberry lily, crossed with Pardanthopsis dichotoma, a kind of iris). I also planted a wine tipped gold color candy lily called 'Sangria', but it disappeared after the first winter and never came back.

But wait. Look. It's 'Sangria', returned this year to my garden all on its own. Where was this reclusive one for the past two years?

Coleus 'Chocolate Drop' quietly spreads under a Japanese maple. I took cuttings of this coleus and wintered them in pots in my living room all last season, pinching off the leggy tops. Pinch pinch pinch, all winter long. I put the scraggly cuttings under the maple in the very back of the garden in spring, and then forgot about them while I tended to spring bloomers and flashy flowers in the summer garden. Well, look at the coleus now. It has formed a wide patch of spreading foliage.

'Chocolate Drop' is a lacy, speckled coleus with small leaves, not so gaudy and bold as the big red cousins I recently plopped in among them. It plays well with others, spreading out rather than shooting up. I like the reserved shape and the coloration a lot; it is redder in a bit of shade, greener where there is more dappled sunlight.

Here's a shy, demure one: Anemone 'Robustissima'. I like the silvery fat buds almost better than the rose-like blush pink bloom. The bee disagrees with that opinion, however.

This whole plant is unassuming, just growing in a nice mound of grape-leaved green foliage at the corner of the patio as I pass it on the way to water the big summer bloomers and thirsty annuals. Then one day there she was, whispering a delicate sliver and pink "hi there".

And the small grasses want to say hello. Not the big tall panicums and miscanthus that have shouted and waved most of the summer, but the little ones like Feather Reed Grass 'Karl Foerster' with its sunlit reedy plumes, and a fuzzy headed pennisetum tucked under other plants along the walk (it's 'Little Bunny' I think). The small grasses aren't showy, but they add shine to things around them.

I enjoyed visiting with the shy ones, and taking notice of them among all the other rampant activity going on in the summer garden.

500 Days of Blueberries

2011-08-04T05:38:00.000-04:00

Debbie at A Garden of Possibilities ran a drawing recently on her blog, and I won.

She wrote a great profile of Vaccinium corymbosum, the blueberry bush. The giveaway was a copy of A Gardener's Guide to Blueberries from Fall Creek Nursery.

This is so perfect. The guide is in the mail, on its way to save the faltering relationship between a gardener and her blueberries.

My relationship with four 'Northblue' vaccinium corymbosum plants has been up and down. This may help me save it.

Did you see the movie 500 Days of Summer? It's not about gardening in the heat and sun. It's a gimmicky boy meets girl romance with a girl named Summer and at the end after the sad breakup he meets another girl named Autumn. Intensely gimmicky. Cute. The whole film is full of visual tricks and ploys, but the movie is actually entertaining.

One film stunt is several minutes of split screen running two narratives side by side. One side is titled "Expectation" and the other is "Reality". Same scenes, different takes.

Well, I have 500 Days of Blueberries running in my garden. Expectation and Reality are at odds. Here is the split screen tale of my troubled relationship with the blueberries I am growing:

Expectation: 

Luscious fruit. Abundant berries. Deep blue round treasures dusted in a soft blush. If you net them against the critters, you can have blueberries on your cereal each morning in July.

Reality:

I did, I did. . . . I got blueberries the first three years, and the picture below proves it. But this year, despite lots of flowers, I did not get any fruits. None. They simply flowered this spring, and then the flowers fell off.

My harvest, July 2009

The best explanation is a cold snap and wet period right at the time of pollination, followed by very hot and dry conditions. Just the wrong timing for the pollinators. You think? Could that be? Will they fruit next year?

Expectation:

Brilliant fall color. Red, eye popping autumn foliage.

Reality:

Nah. Each year the foliage got a leaf spot problem and dropped early. I never got any fall color. Last year I sprayed with Neem, and did get some rusty red action going, but the leaves dropped off before the feathery amsonias behind them turned their lovely yellow color.

Not much color, and no contrast with the amsonias

I try to limit overhead watering, which could cause leaf spot. I'm not sure what else to do. I've seen the colors that vaccinium plants can achieve, and mine is not there.

Expectation and reality. Unrequited love. All playing out in a garden plot next to the house.

My plants are in acid soil, a must for blueberries. My soil is naturally slightly acid, and when these were planted I added a ton of peat moss. 'Northblue' is fully self fertile, so they do not need other blueberry plants around to flower and fruit. They are well watered, which their shallow roots need. They do bloom, they grow, and during the early summer the plants look good, a nice clean green filler in between the taller amsonias and some groundcover geraniums.

But the late season leaf problems and the lack of any fruit this year eliminate two of the reasons for growing blueberries. Such expectations. Such disappointment.

The guide I won in the drawing is therefore timely for me. I need to see if I can save this fractured relationship with a plant I really want to love but can't seem to be happy with.

Thanks, Debbie.

Is This a Mistake?

2011-08-01T00:10:00.000-04:00

On the first of each month Joene sponsors GOOPs --- gardening oops, where we can share mistakes in design and plant stewardship. I have posted my blunders, and freely admitted in each one that I have erred.

But this time I am not sure if I have made a gardening oops or not. Have I?

These are knockout roses. Rosa 'Radrazz'. Not the fine specimens that rose connoisseurs value, but easy care, garden staples. The foliage is disease free with an interesting shiny maroon tint when it first emerges.

They bloom all summer, although this year mine took a month off between the end of June and the end of July. They are reblooming again now, though.

Planting knockout roses is not necessarily an "oops" --- I am fine with common, workhorse plants in my garden.

But I can't decide if I like these or not. Too bright. Not a good deep red, not a cheerful cherry, just an indeterminate mid red color and gaudy. The masses of blooms cover these plants so profusely they look artificial, steroidal.

I planted three and they have grown into a big stand at the top of the driveway. Noticeable from the street, a good screen from behind, and a color statement.

But. I think they are a mistake.

The foliage of the smokebush planted next to them is a subtle purple in spring, and becomes a mixed gray-blue / rust-red color in summer. It has a translucent blush on the leaves that doesn't go with the saturated high color of the roses. The medicine red of the roses simply makes the smokebush look brown.

On the other side is a dwarf globe blue spruce. The powdery silver of the spruce next to the glare of the roses is off as well.

Isolated blooms, with soft white creeping thyme below, can be nice enough.

But the whole effect is too much. Even the camera thinks so, and burps loudly when trying to capture this pepto shade.

What do you think? A garden oops?

Margaret Roach's rose from A Way to Garden

I want to take them out (gasp). Replace them with a softer tinted Rosa glauca that has blue-gray foliage to complement the globe blue spruce, and subtler pink single roses that won't scream at the smokebush nearby. Margaret Roach has a nice profile of rosa glauca in her garden. They only bloom once, briefly, in June, but the foliage is soft and subtly complex, with reddish tones early in the season.

Would you do it? Would you call my stand of knockout roses a design mistake and take out healthy robust plants just because they're too extroverted and they don't match anything?

A Letter to the Future

2011-07-28T06:27:00.000-04:00

July 28, 2040

Dear New Homeowners,

Congratulations on your new home.  I lived in this house for many decades and loved it.  I know you will too.

I am writing to you now, after the closing, to say one thing that I was not able to say during the sale negotiations.  Now that the house is yours, I need you to know:

           I am so sorry.

                 About the garden.  

It is so crammed and overgrown and impossible to navigate because I could not imagine, back in 2011, that stuff would grow so big.  I had no idea.  Well, of course I read the plant descriptions, but what help is that?   12' by 12'?  That's not so big for a viburnum, is it?

The magnolia that prohibits cars from using the driveway and blocks your access to the yard --- that was a foot high once, not even the height of a rabbit standing upright to nibble it.  The tag said "smaller than other magnolias".  Smaller, okay?  I'm sorry.  I guess it all looks too closely planted even in 2011, but who knew?  Each tree and shrub looked like a chess piece on a small game board:

That giant sassafras tree that towers over the evergreens, deforms them as it encroaches in their sunshine space, and suckers all over the berm?  I'm so sorry.  It looked like this once.  It was incredibly cute:

I know I planted trees and shrubs way too close to the house.  I'm sorry about that.  I left loppers in the garage. You could prune them back maybe.  You won't believe it, but the stewartia and redtwig dogwoods did not completely block the front door in 2011.  They seemed so right-sized then.  I did not expect them to wrap around the front porch and lift the siding panels at maturity:

See the red painted hatchway door to the basement?  You didn't know there was a door there, and I'm sorry about that.  It got covered up when the amsonias leapt their bounds and spread across, and the hydrangea 'Tardiva' ("smaller than other hydrangeas") grew to be 12' by 12' as all the shrubs did.  But there is a door there, you can see it here in 2011:

The golden hops vine that is now taking down the roof shingles on that side of the house was so small and unassuming when I put it in, back in 2011:

As was the kiwi vine that has now ripped down the deck railing.  It was dainty and so pretty when I planted it.  Sorry about the vines.  Sorry abut the deck railing.

And everything else.  When I toured botanical gardens I saw how they crammed specimens together and one plant grew into another and it all worked so well.  But maybe they pruned a lot, or replaced a lot of too-close plants as they matured and put in others that were newer.  I didn't.  I planted and let it go.

When visitors came to my garden years ago when it all was brand new, the only comment I ever heard was: "do you know how BIG that's going to get??"

I now know that 5 Colorado blue spruces and 3 birch trees and 4 hollies and a spreading biomass of clethra and spicebush and a raft of woody ground covers need more than a five foot wide strip to grow in.  But for a while, in the beginning, it looked tidy.  It all fit:

I am sure you will enjoy your new home.  And I think you can enjoy the garden if you don't go outside.  Actually, you can't get outside; the plants have blocked all the doorways.  Fortunately you can't see out the windows to observe the mess.  All the foundation shrubs are 12' by 12' now.

My apologies.

Sincerely,

  the former homeowner

What's Not to Love?

2011-07-25T20:43:00.000-04:00

What a kick to see what the flowers finally look like on a shrub I planted years before. I knew bottlebrush buckeyes (Aesculus parviflora) had white flowers that look like . . . . no kidding, bottlebrushes, but I had never seen them on my new plants.

I put a row of very small mail order plants in the ground in late fall, 2007. They grew like gangbusters over the next three years, and had a few brown spiky attempts at flowers last summer. They even produced a couple chestnut shaped buckeye nuts from those immature flowers.

But this year, for the first time, the flowers are bursting into giant white fluffy candles that look like someone lit them on fire in the evening light. They really are impressive, and they are starting to shoot up all over.

Now don't laugh at this gangly row of buckeyes. As young plants these are the most ungainly, floppy, unshapely shrubs I've ever seen. The leaves are great big droopy palmate paddles, the branching is what I can only call exuberant, and now the spiky tall bottlebrushes exploding out everywhere add even more awkwardness. I love it.

This row will mature into a massive, dense 10 to 12 foot high hedge over time that will stop the meadow from coming into the yard. Specimens I have seen in public gardens are awesome. They lose their youthful ungainliness and become stately.

Can you imagine a row of giant, fully mature bottlebrush buckeyes covered in zooming, lit up flower spikes in July? I can, now that I am seeing what these gawky adolescent plants can do.

Aesculus parviflora has been amazingly forgiving in my garden. They are understory woodland plants that like shade, and of course I have them lined up at the edge of a meadow in full sun. They need a lot of water to fund all that growth, and we have had hot dry summers last year and this year so far.

Voles nest in the dense suckering branches at the base and strip the bark mericlessly, but the shrubs survive and just make more suckers. Bottlebrush buckeyes are one of the very few plants in my garden that deer do not nibble or even sample.

To all the deer reading this blog: please, please, do not let that be an invitation. Now that I have mentioned how resistant they are, I do not want to see any bucks eyeing these plants. *

Unlike buckeye trees, called horse chestnuts, the leaves do not get that terrible scorch problem late in the season that make the Aesculus trees planted all over European cities look brown and tired, although mine do singe and crinkle a little at the edges all summer because I have them in too much sun.

In fall the big leaves turn a neon yellow, mixed with lingering green, that makes them look like they dressed up for a Halloween party in clown costumes.

I ask you, what is not to love about such a funny, tolerant, enthusiastic, entertaining personality in the garden.

* you got it, right?

Just so you know, Aesculus is called buckeye because the nuts are brown and somewhat crescent shaped and look like the big brown eyes of a deer. Sort of, I guess.

Adam and the Apple

2011-07-22T07:17:00.000-04:00

I have discovered an interesting blog that is completely and totally dedicated to apples. Actually he discovered me and left a comment on my post about heirloom apples at Tower Hill Botanical Garden. That's how I found the link to his blog, and when I went over to check it out, I was delighted.

Adam's Apples is not about recipes, autumn crafts or the health benefits of eating apples. It is totally focused on the growing of apple trees and reviewing apple fruit varieties. It really caught my fancy.

First, there is the fact that his name is Adam (that made me smile).

Second, I grew up in an apple orchard and have such nostalgia for the beautiful clouds of May blooms, the twisty scrabbled trunks, the heavy fruit dropping into messy piles in the lawn (okay that part was annoying, as it was my job to rake them up) . The farmer sold off the property after World War II and a builder put up houses among the gnarled old trees and that's where I grew up, living in an orchard.

1956 - that's me in front of the apple trees in our yard

in winter the contorted branches stood against the sky

Third, Adam's blog is an incredibly comprehensive catalog of varieties most of us have never seen. And I know that the look and taste of some of the old cultivars is nothing like the waxy globe you buy at the supermarket.

And fourth, his blog is so focused. I love the fact that it is all about apples. Just apples. The genus malus. There are clear pictures of each kind, and a quirky catalog. His enthusiasm for this remarkable, productive fruit is infectious.

I don't grow apples in my garden, and I can't even grow ornamental crabapples since our area is prone to cedar apple rust from nearby junipers. While rust can be controlled somewhat and probably won't kill the trees, I just don't want the maintenance and the defoliation problems in my small garden.

from Adam's blog, check it out

But oh, how I miss the apple trees I grew up with. And how I am longing for a tart, crisp, juicy eating apple right now.

I will have to go cruise Adam's catalog of opinionated reviews to find one that would be just right.

By the way, if you really want to appreciate the remarkable attributes of the humble apple, read Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan. He profiles the evolution of four plants that humans have domesticated, one of which is the apple. It's an amazing story.