Garden Rant

New Garden Ready for its Debut

Readers may be remember that I recently moved and downsized, especially in the size of the garden.  Above is the "before" shot of my new front* yard - a lawn with a couple of oversized boxwoods and a few ungainly azaleas.

While indoors is still a dirty, messy construction site - kitchen and dining reno's still in progress, though at least the bathroom is completed - the completion of the new flagstone finally allowed me to start planting the garden around it.  I welcome your ideas on what's done so far and what more could be added.

This shot shows the two connected rectangles that are the patio, which a designer friend suggested be flagstone because the color complements the gray building.  besides, flagstone is beautiful!  We made it large enough to be connected to the front door and still extend out into the yard where the sun is in the morning.  Surrounded by humongous oaks in this town, I feel lucky to have almost full sun on this side of my house, which I’ll enjoy even more with the help of an easy-crank market umbrella, for when the sun is too much.

In the foreground are the three Invincibelle Spirit Hydrangeas (H. aborescens) that I’m excited about.  It's reported to have huge blooms on sturdy stems, and unlike its cousin Annabelle, those blooms are pink.  On the right is another view of the Invincibelles, shown behind the Japanese Carexes that do a great job creating filler in a new garden.  These rather dull but very useful plants are from my old garden, where they won’t be missed, as they’re just three of dozens of divisions from the original plant I bought 25 years ago.

Back to the hydrangeas – notice I bought three of them?  Despite the smallness of this garden, I’m trying my best to avoid the dreaded “onesies” – the tendency of plant-lovers like myself to buy one of everything.  You know the look – interesting, but kinda chaotic?    Even in tiny spaces, massing of plants is essential for the type of garden I seem to like best, so that’s the goal here.

Above is another example of massing – this time of the chartreuse-leaved Spirea ‘Ogon’ that you see in the foreground.  Love them!

The simple black bird bath was chosen it because it matches the black patio furniture.  Around it are other bird and butterfly-attracting features – some Agastache (the best plant I’ve ever grown for attracting hummingbirds), some ‘Red Husker’ Penstemon and a dwarf, sterile butterfly bush called ‘Blue Chip’.  I’ll be adding more plants to fill out the space and attract still more critters for me to watch from my patio and kitchen window.

From another angle you see, in the foreground right, the Fothergilla ‘Mount Airy’ that’s so new I haven’t even planted it yet, and I've already decided to replace it with some evergreens - five boxwoods along the border.  (I have a good spot for the Fothergilla in the back garden, which I can't show you until the new porch is done - and I'm still in permitting hell on that project.) 

Above are five Apricot Drift roses.  Like the extremely popular Knockouts, Drifts bloom repeatedly throughout the season and are virtually (or literally) disease-free.  These guys will spread a bit to fill in, but won’t get any taller than a foot and a half or so. 

In front of the roses are a few Lamb’s Ears that a neighbor gave me, along with the weedy-but-beautiful Rose Campion (a weed to some, a beauty to my eyes), and a bunch of annuals that I’m hoping will make a big splash here this year, making up for the newness of all the shrubs and perennials, which won’t make a big splash until their second and later years.

In the pots are more annuals – especially Salvia, Petunias and sweet potato vine.   They’re SUCH great performers, I’ll be growing them even after the rest of the garden mature.

Behind the umbrella is the stunning Japanese Snowbell that’s technically my neighbor’s but the view and the fragrance are mine to enjoy.

Above is the view as I step out the front door.

Here’s a view of the foundation plantings, with some empty spots still to be filled in; e.g., in front of the old (existing) azaleas on the left.  This is the northwest side of the house, so foundation plantings get just an hour or so of late afternoon sun.   To the right of the door are three ‘Burgundy Wine’ Nandinas I just bought, chosen because the red foliage matches the red of the large Japanese maple nearby in my neighbor’s yard.  In front of them I’ve planted some of my favorite Euphorbias – E. amygdaloides.  It prefers almost complete shade and best of all, is evergreen. 

'Goshiki' Osmanthus and 'Burgundy Wine' Nandina

On either side of the front door are two brand-new ‘Goshiki’ Osmanthus, a plant I've coveted for years now.  They're fine with no direct sun at all.

Finally, the view from a second-floor window. 
Plant list after the bump.

The Fence Line

Do gardeners want to put down deep roots, plant trees, and watch them ever so slowly become massive and still presences in the landscapes of their personalities?  

No, the people who do that are not gardeners.

Do gardeners strive to take a slice of earth stuck in this noisy contemporary moment and make it timeless, to express some eternal mystery in the relationship between humanity and nature?

Only in theory.

In my observation, the more passionate a gardener is about the series of acts called gardening, the more perverse and restless he or she is, too.  Oh my, did that plant just die?  Let me cry a crocodile tear and stick in a replacement, something exciting and weird I've never tried before!  Did the garden just get flooded out?  Did I downsize my way out of a place I've shaped for 20 years?  Did I just get fired, foreclosed on, divorced, widowed, thrown off the land I've been squatting on by the city?  

Yeah, it's terrible.  

And now let's start anew! A new plan!  More plants!  New plants!  Better design this time!  A new kind of soil! Experiments galore!

Gardeners see the yard the same way billionaires see marriage.  Life is a banquet, and if the current situation has become unsettling, there is always another lovely blonde out there to offer a fresh start.

I was thinking of the weirdness of our attitude towards change just this week because my neighbor stopped by to discuss the new fence she and I are getting on our property line.  The old wooden fence has been falling down for years, thanks to a post or two that wandered in our light, sandy soil.  She can't take it any more.  And indeed, it looks crazy from my side, but certifiable from hers.

But a new fence on our property line means dealing with the denizens of my side of the fence, particularly a ridiculously healthy 'New Dawn' rose; the accompanying large-flowered clematises, which are doing surprisingly well for large-flowered clematises, a fussy group of characters, I find; a pair of hardy kiwis that haven't yet flowered; an 'Alchymist' rose that isn't nearly as much of a feature as 'New Dawn,' but is growing pleasingly into an 'Adelaide Dunbar' lilac.  Plus the lilac, lots of lilies, an unhappy blue mist shrub or two, many undistinguished perennials and one that I happen to love--telekia--a meadowy weed with huge, coarse chartreuse leaves and yellow daisylike flowers at shoulder height.

My neighbor's yard guy Ralph, who has been engaged to put up the fence, refuses to go near the issue until I saw down 'New Dawn.'  Ralph is not foolish.

So my neighbor said to me with that saintly combination of good manners and puzzlement that characterizes most of my neighbors' interactions with me, "Are you sure you want to do this? I feel so bad for your beautiful garden."

Oh, I'm sure. And besides, why would anyone pity 'New Dawn'? Yes, I'm sorry that 'New Dawn' won't get to produce her thousand flesh-colored, hybrid tea-like perfect blooms this year.

But 'New Dawn' is a meat eater that has evolved to ensnare gardeners with its hooked thorns, wait until they expire, and then use their corpses for fertilizer. I once got a New Dawn thorn caught in my ear and would have decomposed there if my son Milo hadn't bravely wrestled the cane off and out of me.  So, it's not as if I expect to be consumed with sorrow, sawing this thing down to stump.  Instead, it will feel like an act of revenge. Besides, 'New Dawn' will surely exact its own revenge in the numerous bloody injuries it inflicts on me as I conduct this operation.  And any plant this healthy is sure to regrow alarmingly from its scaffold anyway.  I think that if I really wanted to kill it, some kind of accelerant would be required.

When I was 20 years old, I got to hear Martin Scorcese speak at UCLA.  He took questions from the audience, one of which was along the lines of, "Why aren't your movies nicer?"

He said a great thing: "If you don't like violence, you don't like the movies."

Well, if you don't like death and destruction, a least a little, you don't like gardening.

Yes, what's happening on the fence now is pretty.  But it is not nearly as interesting as taking my accumulated wisdom and sharklike character and starting anew there.

What I Learned from Margaret Roach's Garden

These days most of my blog reading is off-topic to gardening (sites like Apartment Therapy and Houzz) but I do listen to gardening podcasts and wish there were more good ones, like Margaret Roach's - she's the author of the excellent blog A Way to Garden and former garden writer/editor for newspapers and Martha Stewart.  So when she spoke in Baltimore recently to the Maryland Horticultural Society, I was there, and nabbed a dinner invitation, too.

Here you see Margaret ready to sign copies of her memoir about retiring to "Nowheresville".

More later about that memoir, but here's what I learned from her thoroughly entertaining talk and gorgeous photos.

The title of Margaret's talk was "At Home in the 365-Day Garden" and this first scene reminds us that with the right plants, there's lots to see even in winter, something she knows a bit about there in Upstate New York, Zone 5.  Her comment on this photo was "This is a beautiful day in the garden."

In the spring, when the photo below was taken, sure, there are flowers but what makes this garden beautiful to me is all the structure - those evergreen bones, the pond, and fieldstone patio.

Again in this next shot we see another 365-day-a-year feature that I love - the house itself, painted olive with orange trim.  (Margaret said she "has a high tolerance for color".)  And of course the narrow turfgrass paths through really deep borders crammed with shrubs and perennials.

Because my new garden is mostly shade, I'm hungry for scenes like the next one of shade-loving plants that are stunning all season long, thanks to their foliage.  The Hakonechloa 'Aureola' grass even looks good in the winter; the hand-out cited it as a "durable, unfussy plants with a long season of interest."  Conifers fit that bill, too.

This autumn scene below demonstrates another garden principle I used in my former garden, large and woodland-edged - the layering of plants from tall trees down to understory trees and large shrubs (like the brilliant Spicebush here), to shorter shrubs and perennials and then to groundcover.  Copying but improving on how it works in nature.  Then adding an interesting focal point - the plant-filled birdbath.

Readers of Margaret's blog know that her garden is well populated by frogs, like this one she introduced as "my ex-husband".  This and other wildlife photos reminded me that my point-and-shoot camera is crap when it comes to close-ups and it's high time I did something about that.  The message I was supposed to get from this photo is that developing a relationship with wildlife in the garden is a big part of enjoying it year-round.

More good pointers include:

• In designing the garden, use the views from indoors as guides for siting major plants, especially the ones that look good in the winter.
• There's much to be appreciated in plants NOT at their peak - whether the "life force" in newly emerging hosta leaves or the senescence of perennials in late fall.  
• "Portable color", like the red of her Adirondack chairs, is an easy way to add what designers are always calling "pop".
• It's important to have "true powerhouse plants" like Viburnums, ornamental grasses and crabapples.
• Ditto "imperfect but irresistible types" with short peaks that you can't live without.  For her that includes lilacs and Martagon lilies.
• Then ya gotta have some "late-show stars" like Lespedeza thumbergii and Ilex verticillata.
• "You have to grow it to know it."  Ain't that the truth, and possibly why her blog (and first gardening book) are named A Way to Garden.  Just one way, not the only way.

Gardens of the Candidates

Didja see this slide show of the homes of Republican presidential candidates?  Check them all out - for their sheer size, if not any landscaping of note.  Only Newt Gingrich's landscaping stands out - and not in a good way, to my taste.  If our homes say anything about us, doesn't this one scream "tightly wound"?

Also, 5,200 square feet for two people?

From Compost to Compost

I've always taken a very relaxed approach to composting. If it's organic and it's not something the chickens find delectable, it goes in the pile.

Ten years ago, a friend gave me a copy of Joan Dye Gussow's lovely garden memoir This Organic LIfe.  Gussow is a longtime professor of nutrition at Columbia and a heroine to the sustainable food movement.  I admired many things about the book, mainly her love of good food and desire to be self-sufficient in her garden...but what delighted me most was her admission that she should have put a dead rat into the compost and not the garbage.

Seriously, isn't unsqueamish thriftiness what sustainability is all about?

 

Personally, I have composted neither rats nor relatives.  But I have composted an oriental rug that my puppy peed on one too many times to be salvageable qua rug.

I was very pleased to remove the composter a few days ago and find...compost, with just a few tufts of maroon wool.

What's the weirdest thing you've ever composted?

Nashville's Cheekwood is good to the last drop

I recently visited Nashville for the first time and, like any avid gardener, made sure I saw its premier public garden while I was there. Without a doubt, that's Cheekwood Garden and Museum, a grand place that exists thanks to Maxwell House coffee money.  My regular brand.

On a glorious October day there was still plenty to see plant-wise and even flower-wise, but the fun was in watching kids enjoy this family-friendly place, complete with supersized train set and scarecrows on display (part of a school contest).

Overlooking the Japanese Garden.

Whatever this is, it's fun to play in.

No signs keeping people off the waterfall - lawsuits be damned!

Now for some eye candy, a/k/a garden porn - the best I can do with my $200 camera.

 

One of the best dwarf conifer collections I've ever seen.

Sometimes formality really hits the spot.

Ken Druse's Underwater Garden

 
Ken's garden before Hurricane Irene

 
Ken's garden during the Irene-caused flood

Gardening on an island in a river in Northwestern New Jersey, Ken Druse is used to floods, which he stopped counting after the 12th.  But Hurricane Irene was different.  As Ken recently told the Annapolis Horticulture Society, Irene left his garden under water for FIVE DAYS.  And deposited as much as TWO FEET OF SAND in some parts of his garden.  Sorry for the all-caps but seeing his photos and videos of all the destruction left me traumatized!  

I asked Ken if he plans to restore his garden or was he considering moving on, and he answered, "I'm going to take it slowly. I have to make repairs to the infrastructure -- wall, bridge, deer fence, etc.  Then I will continue to clean up.  I suppose that does mean I will be trying to get a garden going, but I think it is an opportunity to figure out a new strategy."  While some might think of destruction like this as an "opportunity" to buy lots of new plants, Ken knows that there's no way to replace plants you've nurtured for 15 years - without the huge budget required to buy full-grown plants.

Readers, what would YOU do if you gardened here?

Drusian Plant Wisdom - Highlights from his Talk

• He's "almost desperate" to get more people to grow plants and urged us to plant tree with kids, or just show them what's under a rock, but do it before they turn three or it may be too late.
• To help "Stop plant blindness", learn plant names!
• Boy, does he hate mulch volcanoes, dyed mulch, and the instant gardens on TV.
• But guess what! In stark contrast to the Michael Dirr, he actually LIKES the Beauty Bush (a favorite of mine) and recommends it and other large, old-fashioned, flowering shrubs, like Weigela and Mock Orange.  He loves how effective they are at "shinking his property," which I agree is the fastest and cheapest way to create a lush but low-maintenance garden.
• Though he's authored 16 books, it's taken a whole lot of years to do that - an average of four years per book. So, he doesn't just pop 'em out.
• Ken's a geek for plant propagation (and has Making More Plants to show for it) and shared a cool trick for giving Arisaema ringens seeds the six-times-a-day water changing they need - hanging them in a toilet tank.  (Oh, yes he did!)
• He's "really into oaks" because they provide more value to wildlife than any other plant.
• His garden doesn't have just floods, but bears, too!  (Visions of Stephen Colbert's bear hysteria come to mind.)

A gardener's tour of the U.S. Capitol Grounds

I recently attended the annual conference of America in Bloom, where I got to hang out with such long-distance gardening buddies as Joe Lamp'l and Paul Tukey - more about them coming soon.  But a special treat for this local was my first-ever tour of the U.S.Capitol Grounds with Ted Bechtol, superintendent of the grounds and related parks - 274 acres in all.  Here he is showing us a newly planted American chestnut, a cross with the disease-resistant Chinese species.

Designed by Frederick Law Olmsted in the 1870s, the Capitol Grounds includes 4,200 trees (187 species of them) and 85 beds filled with annuals and tulips.  Olmsted's primary here was to complement the building, so trees are sited so as to not block views of it.  The photo below illustrates a departure from that original intent - the tall shrubs hiding the foundation of the building on the Senate side.  Bechtol plans to remove them, which will make the building look more massive and imposing, as Olmsted intended.

Curiously, only 5 percent of the trees are evergreens - Olmsted just wasn't that into them.  And historians will be happy to know that the the original landscape is remarkably intact, still geometrically laid-out paths and informally arrayed plants, almost exclusively trees. (Olmsted wasn't that into flowers, either. Some congresspeople, however, ARE, and request more of them. It's Bechtol's job to satisfy them and history both.)

Unlike so many other properties in post-9/11 Washington, there's no fence around this one, thankfully, so acccess and openness reign. In addition to the occasional demonstrations, there are performances - by high-school and armed forces bands, as well the National Symphony Orchestra and the televised July 4th show.  Not to mention the Inauguration.  As a consequence of all that public access, the lawn here is good enough but can never be perfect.

Speaking of lawn, I asked Bechtol how this one is cared for and I was glad to hear that only organic fertilizers are used on the 90 acres of turf under his care, plus top dressings of compost and leafmold.  He's reduced the use of weedkillers since he became superintendent four years ago, thanks in part to simply raising the mowing height.

Olmsted's design included not just paths and plants but all the infrastructure here, both above- and below-ground, and lots of hardscape features, like the red granite lamp piers, one of which is shown with the Library of Congress in the background.

Olmsted also designed the little out-building that's missed by most visitors - the little Victorian Summerhouse.  Notice the single-seating of the benches - designed to prevent sleep-overs.  There's an attached grotto, and a carillon that was put in storage years ago and then lost.  (Bechtol's looking for one to replace that original one; if you know of one, let him know.)

For landscape history buffs, see the history of the grounds, from which I love this detail:

Work accelerated in 1877. By this time, according to Olmsted's report, "altogether 7,837 plants and trees [had] been set out." However, not all had survived: hundreds were stolen or destroyed by vandals, and, as Olmsted explained, "a large number of cattle [had] been caught trespassing."

IF YOU GO

Here's my take-away from the tour:  If you're a landscape historian or tree-buff, you'll love  the place and appreciate Bechtol's efforts to replicate Olmsted's original collection of trees.  But otherwise, the U.S. Capitol isn't a spot I recommend for garden-seekers. If you don't believe me, notice in this slide show about the horticulture of the Capitol that there isn't much there.

For visitors of all sorts, gardener or not, there ARE some highlights of the U.S. Capitol that I've come to love in my 30+ years of working there: the Old Supreme Court Chambers and the Brumidi Corridors.  And though I haven't visited yet myself, I hear great things about the new Visitor's Center. 

For the garden-seeker I recommend these gems that are close to the Capitol building: the U.S. Botanic Garden and Bartholdi Park across the street from it.  Then venturing into nearby Smithsonian territory, the grounds of the American Indian Museum grounds are terrific and my favorite garden in all of D.C. is the Ripley Garden, tucked into a passageway next to the Smithsonian Castle. 

Gratuitous extra photo:  Bo Obama posing in front of the Washington Monument.  Looks like him, right?

Who will buy my lawnless garden?

Breaking news - to anyone who knows me and assumed I'd never, ever leave my garden - I'm selling it and the house it surrounds.  Time to move on.

Selling the Complicated Garden

Any realtor will tell you that nice gardens may or may not be advantages in selling a house - because most buyers just want what's easy.  So I'm prepared to hear that, and I'm ready with some assurances that mostly-shrub gardens are really easy, and I'll even teach the buyer how to prune and otherwise take care of this low-maintenance garden (really it is, I promise). 

But then there's the problem/advantage of the totally lawnless state of the garden, front and back.  Above you see what it looks like today, a two-species combo of Sedum sarmentosum (sometimes identified as Sedum acre) and Liriope spicata. Neither needs any maintenance except a bit of edging to keep these vigorous spreaders within bounds.  No mowing, feeding, or even weeding required.

(I recently posted photos of what this looked like a mere month ago when it was mostly bare soil - scroll down to the second photo.  Since  the heat wave has ended, the Sedum has filled in vigorously, and for the bare middle section I've filled in with Liriope for instant erosion protection.)

But if the buyers have kids, we all know what they'll do, right?  Rip out all these groundcovers and replace them with conventional turfgrass.  Oh, well.

Click here for more photos of my garden. The house, on a great street in Takoma Park, MD, is a 1925 Sears kit home, the "Conway" model.

Downsizing for the Aging Gardener

Like Sydney Eddison, I've been feeling the aches and pains of taking care of a large garden for too many years - 26 years on this lot.  But unlike Sydney, who's converted her perennial beds into shrub beds and plans to age in place, I've decided to downsize both house and garden to a manageable townhouse-sized garden (end unit, of course).

So I'll be moving to Historic Greenbelt, Maryland, a planned community built in the '30s as part of FDR's New Deal. (Lots more about it here and here.)  I haven't found my new home yet but I already know I'll be paying about a third the price of the house I'm selling.  I'm cashing out!

I hope to be settled and unpacked by spring, in time to start my new garden.  It'll be both smaller and more visible to the public, owing to foot paths running between all the backyards, and its location on the corner.  So now I'll confess that as much as I looooove my back garden and the woods beyond, it's a lonely place to spend so much of my time. 

The Ornamental Gardens of Monticello

Here's something you've all seen a million times -  the view of Thomas Jefferson's Monticello shown on the American nickel - and it's been preserved and/or restored to its condition at the time of Jefferson's death.  What's changed are some of the plants, and even more so, how they're arranged.

Above, what the heck is this plant?  My notes fail me. 

On my recent visit I learned that though Jefferson did indeed design this West Lawn with a flower border along the winding walkway at its edge, divided into 10-foot sections, his instructions specified that each section would contain just one species.  Since then they've been redesigned by the Garden Club of Virginia in the current mixed-border style that you see here, though many of the popular plants from Jefferson's day were used.

 

 Foliage from this Joseph’s Coat was used in salads. 


The excellent garden tour guide, with cockscomb in foreground.
 
Plants that were grown here in Jefferson's day are identified with a "TJ" or "LC" at the top of the marker, denoting whether it was chosen by Jefferson himself or brought here by Lewis and Clark.  I found that little detail pretty exciting, historically. On the right is one of four cisterns installed by Jefferson, each holding 3,830 gallons.

Meet Peter Hatch, who's held the job of director of gardens at Monticello since 1977.  He remembers the groundkeeping staff assigned to him then as mountain men from nearby Bacon Holler.  Scenes from the movie "Deliverance" come to mind.

 

Above, some of the gardens at the recently completed Visitors Center, which is LEED-certified.

Green roofs at the Visitor’s Center are covered not with the Sedums typically seen on roofs but with Buffalo grass because Peter decided it would look more appropriate here on this historic spot - which it certainly does. The vertical tufts are groom broom sedge, and the two species were planted in gravel with very little soil.

    

Peter gave my friend and me a rare tour of the parking lot because that's where he's used some rarely seen plants - like the Little Bluestem you see on the right.  It not only looks gorgeous but is preventing erosion while trees are becoming established on a slope.  He has it weed-whacked once a year, in December.   

On the left you see the hard fescues Peter planted in this low-visibility spot because it looks good enough, and only needs to be cut once a year.  He does remember that it needed a whole lotta weeding during its first two years on this site.

Next - the Kitchen Gardens of Monticello.

What's up with the watering and mow/blow practices at Bloedel?

Okay, this will be a test of what happens when someone (me, the guinea pig) criticizes a garden - a beloved public one, at that.  But come ON, all the gardenbloggers visiting the Bloedel Reserve during the recent Fling noticed the sprinklers going off while it was raining, and SURELY in that ultra-green haven with heavy rainfall even in July, the sprinklers weren't really needed!

Just in case I got up the nerve to write about this, I asked Susie McCoy to pose with the offending sprinkler, and trust me, the umbrella wasn't just a prop for effect.

And I'm hoping someone can explain for me why anyone would power-blow a just-mown lawn.  Again, in the rain, mind you. Notice that the worker is NOT blowing the driveway but the turfgrass itself. 

 

Google-mapping front-yard gardens

What did we DO before Google Maps and Mapquest?  I have only vague memories of trying to read folding maps while driving, a chore that's now almost unthinkable (good thing, too - drivers are way too busy texting and calling to fuss with maps).  But there's something I hadn't done until recently - checked Google's street view of my destination. 

Before heading off to a party over the July 4th weekend I did just that to case out the joint - was it an apartment building or a detached home where the party might be outdoors?  And here's what I found:

They're gardeners!  Suddenly my interest in the party spiked; I could hardly wait to check out the back yard. 

Also upon arrival I learned that Google may warn that their addresses are approximate, but they got this one right - shown above on Google Maps and below in person, with holiday decorations.

Now the last time I'd checked, Google Maps' street view of my own home was indeed approximate - and off by eight houses.  They'd also captured a male friend getting out of his car in my driveway, a detail that fortunately caused no marital discord for me but sure could for someone else.  (Privacy is something else I have only vague memories of.)

But this time Google got my address exactly right, and after toggling up a bit I could even see over the fence into the garden.  And the incriminating shot of my mystery visitor was gone.

What does Google's street view of YOUR address show?  The right house, your garden, evidence of an afternoon liaison?

Front Yards are for Partying!

Especially front yards along July 4th Parade routes.  Here's a sampling of people-filled front yards in Takoma Park, Maryland yesterday morning.  The weather was perfect.

Note the swimming pools.

Okay, this one is actually a front porch and balcony party.

Even in a nonelection year, residents show their support for a local pol.

Now what's terrible for partying is the type of front yard I like best - all-garden with no lawn.  These people have even turned their hell strip into a perennial garden, shown here in the foreground. Lovely.

Ball vs. Bob

Under some of the most rigorous testing conditions possible, I have decided to try the mettle of some Ball FloraPlant starts against basement-grown seedlings provided by my neighbor Bob. Most of the Allentown street planters have been filled with Bob’s seedlings. I usually add in some storebought plants just to let people know the containers have been planted—Bob’s seedlings are very small. I filled one planter (seen above) with only the Ball starts, which include petunias, marigolds, calibrachoa, and verbena.

Here are Bob's seedlings, planted at the same time (about 6 weeks ago). He's been sticking to the Tidal Wave petunias for the most part, in silver and purple varieties. He also gives me a couple flats of Blue Horizon ageratum (not used in this one) and some marigolds.

I know that many tend to turn up their noses at bedding annuals. I don’t. They provide cheerful, summer-long color for public beautification projects, like the ones in which I am involved, and I’m not ashamed to say that I really like a lot of these plants.  They’re beautiful and many have fragrance.

Not only that, but free is important. Bob donated his plants and Ball sent 2 boxes out of similar kindly impulses. Without free, beautification doesn’t happen—not these days.

The race is on.

A green roof with a view

I spotted this in Lake Placid last week. It's prominently placed on a building owned by the Golden Arrow hotel and there's a sign installed near the sidewalk that explains it to visitors. Keep in mind that it is relatively early in the season this far north, so the plantings are not quite filled out. It overlooks Mirror Lake. (Oddly enough, the village of Lake Placid is not built around the actual Lake Placid.)

Just one of many examples of smart gardening I saw in this lovely town.

The experiment

Over the past week, Ball FloraPlant has sent me* 4 big boxes of annuals, most of them brightly colored petunias, osteospermum, verbena, calibrachoa, and other sun-loving container plants. To test, I guess—but both the amount and (to some degree) the type of plants are inappropriate for my small, mostly shaded courtyard space. I’ve used what I could, and, fortunately, I have at my disposal 11 large concrete planters that are all in fairly sunny positions. These are designed for the beautification of our neighborhood’s commercial district, and since I am the beautification chair, I am in charge of filling them. We use a professional service for our hanging baskets, but there’s not enough left in the budget to do that for the planters.

For most of them, I used a mix of homegrown seedlings raised by an Allentown resident in his basement, and they all have cannas that have been overwintered for the past ten years by another neighbor. But for one, I planted it (shown almost filled above) with the Ball offerings. There was no regard for color clashes or harmony of form. There are red petunias, fuschia petunias, bright orange marigolds, maroon verbena, bright red verbena, and pink calibrachoa. And some other stuff. I thought  a multi-colored burst would be fun; the others are more conservative.

Sorry, earth, I did not use the plantable pots—any sign that something is already in a pot could say “steal me.” Some of these planters are filled with invisible weeds that will materialize in abundance in about a month. Passers-by invariably mistake them—even when they’re filled with flowers—for  seating or garbage bins, and sometimes people just pull the plants out for fun.  They’re watered by volunteers—most of the time. I pulled a full bag of disposable needles out of this one once.

All reasons why I saw this as the ideal testing situation—thanks, Ball Floraplant!—and I’ll be reporting on their progress. Are any of you participating in public beautification projects? Frustrating, rewarding, or both?

*F.T.C.-required gift disclosure

The title says it all

Here’s a column in the Minneapolic Star-Tribute called Winter Interest, Yeah, Right.

Interesting

And I couldn’t agree more. There are many magnificent winter sights throughout Western New York, but my garden isn’t one of them. If I want winter interest, I’ll drive up to Niagara Falls to check out the rapids  or the gorge, which are beautiful almost all the time, though not quite so much during early spring and late fall. Or I could go in the other direction; the three domes of the botanical gardens are perfect surrounded by white. Winter is a good time for Victorian architecture of all types to shine; at other times, the buildings are obscured by leafed-out trees.

Not

I do have some shrubs that seem to be able to poke up above the snow cover, but I hope they’re not doing it because they expect me to look at them. Your mileage may vary and probably does, but I like the big landscapes in winter. Not so much the small domestic ones. 

I do hope we can keep this cover through February though.

Tropically speaking

Sometimes I carelessly throw around the word tropical where it doesn’t apply—referring to plants that merely require warmer temps than I’ve got. But when you’re as far south in the Caribbean as Barbados, you can use the word tropical with a fair amount of confidence.

I saw plants here that I would only see this close to the equator, but I also saw plenty of familiar plants—in unfamiliar contexts. Poinsettias look pretty good growing as tall woody shrubs outside small Bajan homes, along with hedges of croton, and—everywhere—red cordyline, which I use as a container accent every summer, but which here is growing 9-feet and higher.

Then there are plants familiar only as exotic choices at the florists or as tropical houseplants: heliconia (a native), anthurium, and orchids. Finally, there are the truly exotic plants (to northern eyes): plumeria, ixora, and all the different palms and tropical fruit trees like calabash and mammea.

This was not really a garden sight-seeing trip, but I did see Welchman’s Gulch (on the way to the caves) and the Andromeda Gardens, which were left to the Barbados trust by British horticulturalist Iris Bannochie.  Most of the plants were familiar or labeled, except this shrub/small tree. It looks like a double white poinsettia. Sort of. The petals look like bracts, in any case.

Was I envious? Did I wish I could live among these orange and red plants and take advantage of the cheap rum? Not really. A croton hedge might be cool, but I would definitely lose my love for colocasia/alocasia if I had to see it as often as it appears here.

UPDATE: Anne asked that I share more sensory experiences from Barbados. Here you go, Anne: the whistling frog (Eleutherodactylus johnstonei—present everywhere by the thousands) and the sound it makes:

Download sound.

A Question

Why is shovelling snow so much less enjoyable than shovelling dirt?

The book that launched a vacation

As soon as I saw the cover of this book, I knew where we had to go for our annual winter break. Such a thing is necessary when you live in Western New York—at least I find it so. Nothing says you’re really away from it all like a radical shift 60 degrees upward. A few days is enough.

But the normal hot spots palled. We were on a cruise last year—a gift— and I didn’t find what I needed. Too much boat.  Mexico wouldn’t work for various reasons, and none of the other islands seemed to click. Then this book hit my desk. I had been thinking beaches, not gardens, but here were the kind of gardens into which you plunge rather than walk. And most of them are in Barbados. Which also happens to be the home of rum.

Exotic Gardens of the Eastern Caribbean (Margaret Gajek, writer, and Derek Galon, photographer, Ozone, 2010) includes many private gardens as well as various official botanic gardens and such well-known attractions as the Andromeda and Orchid gardens, and Welchman’s Gully (top), a National Trust site. There is also an open garden program and of course, Barbados sends its best to Chelsea every year.

Paradoxically, in spite of the “exoticism” of it all, many of the plants are so familiar. Some are year-round residents of my home or office; others I see at the florists regularly. But not like this.

I’ll tell you if the gardens lived up to the photographs.