Getting Through March

 

By this time of year the gardener is usually able to report a noticeable change in the garden, but often the change is in the soul of the gardener and not the garden itself.  After a mild day or two we convince ourselves that it is the beginning of the new gardening year.  In Manhattan, a few weeks earlier than in Rhinebeck, daffodils will soon be poking their noses through the soil of street-side tree pits, cozying up to the warmth coming from the pavement.  

 

If you are dreaming of a cottage in the country with a garden and you wish to be disabused of the idea, now is the time to go house hunting.  After the snow melts a March walk through a garden can be sobering.  Rhododendrons are still shrouded in burlap.  Small piles of debris are everywhere.  Anything cut and left on the ground can be cleared away, but most of the larger material is still frozen.  Water has pooled and iced in low-lying areas.  Pots the owner didn’t get around to emptying and storing in September are still there, likely frozen and cracked.  

 

April 1 is the real start of the gardening year, and March merely the wind-up.  With all its climatic vagaries, March does manage to offer one definitive idea: Winter is over.  If you walk in the woods you will soon hear the spring peepers.  Farmers say that after they have been heard three nights in a row, spring is here to stay.

 

To help you through the winter, if you have an empty corner or a small wooded swath, consider the Snowdrop, Galanthus nivalis.  Garden writers love them, because it provides material when there is nothing else to write about.  Snowdrops give you something to look for when all else is still dormant, and leaves you free of worry about late frosts.  They are among the toughest of plants and if laid low by a late winter storm, will bounce right back.  

 

If you have been wise enough to plant snowdrops, and are on your muddy knees admiring your handiwork at eye level where they can best be seen, you will be happy to know that you can expand your crop by dividing as soon as the soil warms up enough to work, even though the snowdrops are in full bloom.  The conventional wisdom is that bulbs can be transplanted only when dormant, but that is not the case here.  If you wait until autumn there will be no trace of them above ground, and you will have forgotten where they were planted.  

 

The main danger to your flower borders in the winter months is the ground’s alternate freezing and thawing.  This does not happen where there is a guaranteed blanket of snow all winter, but in our more temperate areas you will often see plants heaved out of the ground by alternate freezing and thawing.  If you see this in your garden make notes to prevent it next year by heavy winter mulching.  Almost any mulch will do – straw, salt hay, evergreen boughs, compost or buckwheat hulls are all fine.  Just make sure to wait until the ground freezes before laying mulch.

 

March is the month when I review my notes from the fall and remind myself of successes and failures.  If a new plant has not performed to my expectations, I will give it another year or two to take hold.  A poor freshman performance should not be a death sentence. I, however, find it difficult to follow my own advice, wavering between a plant that just needs a little more time, and one that never should have been acquired in the first place.

 

If spring is not coming soon enough for you, and snowdrops fail to cheer you, visit the annual New York Botanical Garden Orchid Show, blooming in the Bronx at 2900 Southern Boulevard, until April 23rd.  It will help you get through these weeks until spring really arrives.

The Late Garden

Having left Rhinebeck for New York City in mid-September, I was unable to come back until early October.  When I returned the house welcomed me as an old dog would have: “Hello.  So glad you are back.  It’s a beautiful sunny day.  Come into the garden.”

View Over The Garden Fence

The garden did not miss me.  The pots of herbs outside the kitchen door were still there, robust but hardly used.  I tend to forget about them even when I’m cooking, the very reason they were placed so close to the kitchen door.  The Sungold tomatoes, finally bearing a small crop, were not worth the real estate they occupied.  It is a dreary plant, not to be repeated next year. 

 

Our shared garden continues to look better every year, although the milkweed planted to entice the Monarchs to settle in with us, disappeared early.  One peony finally bloomed this spring after years of doing nothing. The lespedeza, always a dependable late blue, barely showed itself. It has been a stalwart of the shared garden from the beginning but is sulking this year.

 

I dipped my toe in the aster family this fall, starting with Aster x Frikarti ‘Monch’.  It was a lovely blue and will be perfect next year paired with Brown-eyed Susan and Goldenrod.  This year it was on its own; on trial as it were. Robin Lane Fox in the Financial Times (October 29-30, 2022, Got the Autumn Blues) covered several column inches with a round-up of suggestions for blues in the late summer garden, so I anticipate having more blues next year.

 

Cimicifuga

Cimicifuga is the star of my late summer garden.  The correct name these days is Actaea, but in my heart it will always be Cimicifuga.  There are two varieties – one with upright candelabra flowers, and a droopy one.  The upright (my favorite as you may have guessed) stretches out so slowly that if you sit nearby, you can almost watch it grow.  This year ‘sports’ have popped up around the garden – same foliage, different bud and flower shapes, different bloom times. An interesting puzzle. 

 

By October, Anemone Honorine Jobert is in full bloom – luminous white flowers catching the last of the light, brilliant alongside Fothergilla coloring up for Fall.  On the street, the Shantung Maples planted last year are earning their keep. They are still in full color, holding their leaves long after the other street trees have shed theirs.  The Winged euonymus, buried in the back of the garden, is a vibrant red as is the Aronia along the driveway.  

 

Shantung Maple

The lawn (a euphemism for Creeping Charlie and his cousins cut down as grass) is carpeted in yellow -- fallen leaves from the black walnuts first, then the maples.  Leaf-raking doesn’t start here till all the leaves have fallen.  Happily, what might appear messy to some is glorious to me.   Delfino Martinez and his crew have taken over leaf-raking -- what would be the householder’s task if the householder was someone other than myself.  

The Lawn Before Clearing

When the time approached to bring the potted tender plants indoor I balked; they had grown too large to winter-over in the house, and I turned the job over to Cheshire Nursery in Connecticut.  A truck picked them up and drove them down to Connecticut. The nursery will store them over the winter and return them in the spring – I hope.  One huge mandevilla, two sentimental plumbago, one tree fern, and one lemon tree.

 

Daylight Savings Time has ended and we are back to Standard.  Holiday catalogs are arriving with the anticipated selection of potted amaryllis.  If you are ambitious and have a space to store them, it is possible to coax amaryllis into a second flowering.  After they have finished blooming remove the flower stalk and fertilize monthly with Miracle-Gro or equivalent.  By mid-summer cut back on your watering schedule by one-half.  Once the foliage has yellowed cut the leaves back to an inch above the bulb and store the pots in a dark, cool location for about six weeks. Then bring them into a sunny window and start all over again.  

 

I should say that I don’t do any of this, but you might well want to.  I buy one fresh amaryllis each year and devote the rest of the winter to paperwhite narcissus planted in pebbles.  I always have a few bowls waiting in the wings, and one in a window with good light.

Paperwhite Narcissus

By the end of this month you should have completed putting the garden to bed for the winter, turned off and drained all outside water lines, coiled your hoses and brought them indoors.  Make sure your garden equipment and tools are clean; you can oil them over the winter.  When everything is cut down, put away, tidied up, mulched, wrapped and swept you can review your gardening year from a comfortable chair and plan for spring.

Covid In The Garden

In March of 2020, from my window in New York City, I watched families load up their SUVs and drive off not to return for months, if ever.  On the 16th, when rumors spread that Mayor DeBlasio would close the bridges and tunnels I too left, headed north, and remained in Rhinebeck till late Fall.  I left, feeling like a deserter.

 

The change was immediate.  First it was the quality of light.  In an apartment, even the best, there is usually only one good aspect and, maybe, a view. In a house there is light on all four sides. And I knew that within a few weeks, everything would start to grow again.

 

The garden was planned to begin in April, so I had a few quiet weeks ahead of me.  I’d planted daffodils for March in the border I share with my neighbor. Thanks to her, our shared garden is blanketed early with the most beautiful forget-me-nots.  Behind the house, the season starts with the earliest scillas planted long before I came here, surfacing every year no matter how disturbed the soil.  The scilla is followed by Phlox divaricata, mounds of blue, succeeded by amelanchier, astilbe, and by June/July the glorious Hydrangea arborescens White Dome, the anchor of the early garden.

 

Phlox divaricata

While the garden has been my joy, it is not my solace; it is too demanding for that.  Something is always saying “prune me, feed me, weed me, mulch me” and I am increasingly unable to comply.  I have helpers; gardening alone is a myth -- but that is a subject for another time.

 

The garden is in its sixth season.  We have had some losses, some surprises, and always something new.  The last surviving Japanese maples (two out of the initial six) succumbed to verticillium wilt. They have been replaced with four Sweet Gums at the north end and two Amelanchiers at the south.  

 

The Apple Tree's Final Bloom

The apple tree at the end of the long view died in its third year and has been replaced with a dogwood, Cornus florida, the least temperamental in that family.  Our losses are becoming worrisome.  There will be nothing left to try after this, only a stone monument to our failures.  We watch and wait.  

 

During 2020-21, I had visitors in the garden from earliest spring until winter set in.  Furnishings have come and gone.  I started out with six webbed folding chairs (first green and white, then a more sophisticated black), inexpensive, looking great, but too unstable for me.  After falling over the side a third time I replaced them with steel Windsor chairs that are almost impossible to dislodge.  A useful table will most likely be the next addition.

 

One of Four Sturdy Chairs

I suspect we all have a Covid misstep or two in our recent past.  My first was a longed-for equipment change.  After not writing for months, I was convinced that I was held back solely by the size of my screen and that a 21” monitor would change my life.  But what had been a merely languishing work ethic ground to a full stop in the face of a tangle of new equipment and cables.  The brains of the operation resided in my faithful laptop, which was always connected to the new equipment and thus closed, relegated so to speak to a back burner. 

 

This has proved to be too many moving parts for me, and I seem to be resistant to change. I don’t know what this means:

-       Do old habits die hard?

-       Do delusions of grandeur lead to diminishing returns?

I will not give up on this.  And my technical advisor, with the patience of a saint, continues to stand by. 

 

The second misstep was a true folly, and much more costly.  It was the dream of a Front Porch.  The huge maple street tree shading the house was so rotted it had to come down, providing the impetus for the porch.  The dream was to tie a front porch to the Livingston Streetscape, where every house has one.  The architect, much admired and deeply respectful of the historic district in which we live, drew up several possibilities.  My family was consulted.  All options were weighed, a selection made, working drawings finished.  When we realized that due to setback requirements, we would have very little usable space built at a very high cost, and that a porch would block the light into the house from the south, we went into full retreat. Instead, I replaced a hazardous sidewalk with new/old bluestone, planted two street trees, and – once again – revised the planting against the house.

 

One of Two Shantung Maples

Trish Pappendorf of The Valley Gardener transformed the bed with a silvery gray-blue palette new to me - lavender, calamintha, stachys, gaura, dwarf fothergilla - all keeping company with the existing Anemone Honorine Jobert.  The butterflies and bees form a cloud along the walk bordering this bed, too busy all summer to even notice you passing by, no less attack.

By late October it will be time to return to the city and answer the demands waiting there for me.  When a very young woman was asked why she lived in New York City, she replied “my stuff is here.”  I think it was her metaphorical stuff – her world, her dreams, who she is now and who she will become.  While I would love to stay here in Rhinebeck, my stuff is still in New York City.

Lessons From Abroad

     Although our gardens are green and lush again some of us still linger in the aftermath of the dark winter of 2021.  The months were long and bleak.  Cooped up indoors we faced unorganized boxes of old photographs, stacks of unread books, folders of letters going back to the earliest years away from home and continuing until email became the prevalent mode.  The winter days were all the same – the morning paper, placing an order with Fresh Direct, too much television news, stabilizing daily FaceTime calls with absent friends and family. 

The Pile Of Letters

My days were salvaged by a daily drop-in to BBC’s Gardener’s World, now in its 52nd season.  It is a weekly hour-long immersion in Monty Don’s garden, plus excursions to others -- a bonanza of pots, seed trays, cloches, greenhouses, cold frames.  The 2020 season was online in its entirety and each episode was redolent with the pain of last year, and how best to cope.  The film crew vanished, leaving equipment behind for Monty Don to figure out how to film himself, his garden and his dogs.  His on-camera regulars filmed themselves visiting an array of gardens tiny to grand, allotments to estates.

Monty Don In His Garden

Viewers were requested to film their own gardens and send them in.  The children were the most endearing, “making do” with whatever was at hand as supplies in England were hard to come by.

 

In England, of course “making do” means gardening with whatever fertilizer you have even if it means tomato fertilizer for roses, gardening no matter how small the space, or how little access you may have to an actual garden.  There were container gardens on tiny scraps of concrete, plants in paper cups, single species gardens of exclusively iris, the snowdrop collector; the peonies-only gardener, the citybound pavement gardener who grows only tulips between his front door and the street. This singular focus is virtually unknown in America, whose gardeners appear bloodless next to the British.

A Houseboat Garden

Single-focus gardens in the United Kingdom are the backbone of the National Collections.  The idea may appear elite to an outsider, but the process is more democratic than it seems, and anybody can start one.  Collections of specific genera can be found in allotments, small gardens, and grand gardens both public and private.     

 

The first step in the designation is the proposal form, followed by a full application.  There are conservation teams and local coordinators to help an applicant with the process. It can be a full collection, or merely a statement of intent.  A Plant Conservation Committee provides advice and guidance.

 

The Collections are part of the National Council for the Conservation of Plants and Gardens, started in 1978, and now renamed Plant Heritage.  There are 95,000 plants available to see across 650 collections.  The effort can be traced back to the National Trust’s wartime scheme to assess the 200 best country houses with the intent of saving them from neglect or disappearance.  The Gardens Committee was an offshoot of this effort.

Snowdrops in a National Collection

Several years ago I visited the national collections in the Cambridge University Botanical Garden. Opened in 1846, the idea behind the garden was shaped by John Henslow, widely remembered as the teacher of Charles Darwin.  Henslow wanted a scientific garden to facilitate the teaching and research about plants as organisms worthy of study in their own right, rather than the Garden’s earlier incarnation for the sole study of medicinal plants.    

 

Henslow’s early research on variation and hybridization in the nature of species can be seen today in the design of the garden.  The collection of Pinus nigra (Black pine) variants and all their subspecies are grouped at one end of the garden so that distinctions may be clearly seen one against the other. 

 

The plantings satisfy both science and aesthetics.  The rock garden resembles an outcrop on a hillside, using 900 tons of limestone to achieve the desired effect.  A dense planting of evergreen hedges in the garden gives the illusion of a continuing hillside slope, a triumph of design in the flat land of this garden.  

 

There are nine national collections in the Cambridge Botanical Garden.  The Alchemilla collection is fascinating for those of us in America who have only seen the mollis (Ladies mantle).  The Geranium collection is equally rich for those who know only the various sanguineum (Cranesbill).  While several geranium varieties are now available in the marketplace, we still have only the sole Alchemilla mollis.

        

Alchemilla in the Cambridge Botanical Garden
 

The National Garden Scheme (NSG), started in 1927, lists 3,600 gardens open to the public with fees collected to benefit charities in England and Wales.  The beneficiaries are NSG’s health and nursing charities, gardens in specialized hospitals and funds to support gardeners-in-training. As you can see by the numbers, the gardens are widely available and wildly democratic.  If you plan to visit pick up a copy of the Yellow Book, more formally known as The Gardens Visitors Handbook.  It will tell you what is open and when, how to get there, whether there are plant sales and/or food service.  If you want to avoid driving on the wrong side of the road, travel by rail and pick up a cab at the station stop to take you to the garden.  

      

The Yellow Book

In theory, I could happily spend the entire season in the UK, traipsing from garden to garden.  In practice, it is asking too much of me to miss a season at home in my own garden.  I tend to visit gardens in the off-season seeing only the bare bones, which is the best indicator of the underlying design.  If design and practice are not your great loves then by all means go early in the growing season – and often.  

 

Mid-May in my Garden 

The Season Opens

In mid-April, as we look to the trees for leaf buds, it is the ground layer below that comes in first.  Early each morning I pace the perimeter of the garden marking the minute daily changes. The trees and shrubs are halted, but the ground layer slowly advances day by day.  The early daffodils were first, then the phlox, bleeding heart, the sole apple tree, the amelanchiers, all seemingly at once.  Each week the hydrangeas are a little taller, the gillenia leafier, the iris and peonies beginning to stretch. Epimedium, seemingly devastated by the late frosts, bloomed as ever.  Color returned on time, blue phlox, rosy bleeding heart and the pale white of the late daffodils.

Phlox subulata

 

The kitchen table is filled with plants bought too early to set outdoors. The oxalis, all four pots wintering indoors, are flagging and desperate for division, new soil, a change of containers, fresh air.  The beefsteak begonia, started from a single rooted cutting last summer, is bursting out of its pot.

 

This year I didn’t bring the mandevilla indoors to winter over.  It is (was) the hard-to-find Alice Dupont so each year I would struggle to have its huge pot dragged into the warm house for the winter. This year I left it outdoors, wrapped it in fleece, and hoped for the best.  I tried to grow a new mandevilla from a leaf cutting of the old, and while the mandevilla did not comply a nasturtium seed traveling with it sprouted in the kitchen window, grew towards the ceiling, has flowered, and is now ready to move outdoors.  Sometimes a kitchen table and a windowsill will be enough to get you through a long winter.  

       

As for the mandevilla left outdoors, its fleece covering did not work and there is not a sign of life.  The colocasia bulbs stored in the basement were other failures of this winter’s experimentation and are shriveled beyond resuscitation. Now the hard work starts. Moving the big pots, filling them again with new plants to try out, planting morning glory and nasturtium seeds outdoors. 

Mandevilla 2020

 

I think about earlier gardens this time of year.  I have stored up all of them, able to summon them at will and imagine myself in them again.  Who was there with me?  How old was I then?  Will I be in this garden forever?  I never thought to ask if the garden would be there forever.  

 

I’ve often said that a garden dies with the death or departure of the owner, but occasionally it is a catastrophe that threatens it.  A tornado, a great Northeastern storm, or a fire. The main house in my former Catskills garden caught fire last month.  No one was there, no one was injured, only the history is gone.  Although only one end of the house is charred, the rest is no longer structurally sound and must be demolished.  Miraculously, the gardens remain relatively undisturbed. The porch garden planted in 2005, and the excavation of an old border across the way, all survived.  The long porch itself with its sweeping view of the reservoir, its roof held up by birch trunks, will remain in use propped up like a stage set while the current owners decide on its replacement.

 

A Corner of the Porch

 

The main house, 1918 shingle style, was the repository of stories and events of one extended family’s time there over the past 70 years.  No longer the home of the Laissez-faire Gardener and myself, it has been passed on to cousins with children in their early thirties, who have the strength and the vision to build for their future families.  The spirit of the place will be demanding for the new architect.  Sited amidst a stone tower with a revolving observatory on the top, a bowling alley house and a huge stone pool long a habitat only for frogs, the new house will surely reflect the context of the old.

 

My visit there was not the tragedy I expected it to be.  No longer bound to serve as keepers of the shrine they inherited, the young stewards and their partners are looking towards the next chapter.  Those who would have been devastated by the fire have long since passed.  Only the strong remain, as it should be.

Before The Fire