The Late Garden

If I could select one hour of one day as the perfect time to be in a garden it would be a Sunday afternoon at 4 o’clock.  A comfortable chair, the Sunday papers, a glass of something iced, the shadows lengthening across the lawn. All work is done, the tools are put way, older children are off doing whatever it is they do, young children are exhausted and deep into a book or device.  If they are still standing pull out a blanket, ask them to lie on their backs and tell you what they see in the trees and sky.  Dinner is under control, having been collected at a Farmer’s Market earlier in the day.  Monday morning is still far away.  The return to the office, lab, hospital, school, construction yard, or the desk in a room just indoors – all are a way off.  The present is this perfect moment – a Sunday afternoon at 4 o’clock.

         

The late garden is at its best now.  Brown-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia triloba) is holding its own. It’s a friendly plant, nicely shrubby, self-seeding, doesn’t overpower its neighbors, and is less attention-grabbing than Rudbeckia fulgida Goldsturm, the more popular garden variety.  The fall asters, the last blues of the season are a fine companion to the brown-eyed Susan.  I have planted Aster x frikarti ‘Monch’ although I can’t remember why this particular one.  There are many to choose from, and I suspect this was a catalog selection and not one that looked brilliant in someone else’s garden.  No matter what variety you order, if you remember to pinch them back in midsummer you will have a fuller bloom than if you left them alone.  

Crane’s bill (Geranium sanguinium Rozanne), which I seem to remember seeing in flower in the spring, is blooming in the shade of the Brown-eyed Susan.  Actea, formerly cimicifuga (and still cimicifuga to me) has passed, but the white Anemone Honorine Jobert is luminous.  Fall color is still a few weeks away, but the Black Walnuts’ yellowing leaves are drifting down – always the first harbinger of the coming cold.

         

It’s time to bring the pot plants indoors so they can acclimate before the house heat goes on.  The plumbago and mandevilla are enjoying their last burst before they go into the greenhouse at Cheshire Gardens in Connecticut for the winter.  The Australian tree fern and the aging lemon tree will go along with them.  I cut the beefsteak begonias back to nubs in the early spring to see how they would do and they did just fine.  Only a fraction of their former girth and now indoors, they should be happy in the warm light of a southwest window and grow to their former size by spring.  The red oxalis are back in their usual winter corners and in need of a shearing.  The small-leaved green oxalis has also made the move indoors, and it seems fine as it is.  The gift of jatropha podagrica, a stunning oddity, is in a corner with dim light and strictly minimal watering as per instructions from the giver of the gift.

         

Another few weeks and it will be time to put the garden to bed for the winter.  I’m planning on a heavy, compost-rich mulch which will start to break down come spring and should be enough to feed the garden. It’s been years since I laid a deep mulch so it’s long overdue.  It’s also been years since I fertilized every spring and rigorously divided and replanted perennials every three years.  Lately I’ve let them putter along on their own.  This coming year I may go back to my early practice on a few test plants and see what happens.  Fortunately for us, the plants don’t read the books.  Soon it will be time to deal with the perennials in the shared garden.  My gardening partner likes the dead flower heads left for the winter; too sad a sight for me, so I cut everything back on my side and will mulch heavily this winter. 

When the umbrellas come down and the plant stands go back to the cellar it will be time to turn off the water, drain the hoses and bring them to the cellar too.  Friends are travelling again, to Spain for a holiday or to Italy for the opera. I’m restless enough to want to join them, but Israel, where I want to be and where my daughter’s ever-growing family lives, is out of the question at the moment.  More fraught with peril than ever, that trip is on hold for the foreseeable future.  That leaves me here in this peaceful village with the coming election on the horizon, all the drama that it implies, and the world on fire.

Scilla Siberica

       When I first came to 71 Livingston Street there was no garden to speak of; the backyard was a dog run.  But there were signs of an earlier garden, shadows of beds and borders that had once been part of all houses that are this old.  When it was built in 1865 the only plantings were the trees that defined the property lines: Black walnuts on the west, Silver and Norway maples on the east, all now grown to majestic heights.   There were traces of a few half-hearted attempts at borders set as far from the house as possible, but no sign of what must have been a vegetable garden and certainly a drying yard to hang washing.  

Nonetheless, every spring since I’ve been here (and long before I’m sure), a clump of scilla appears at the back of the garden.  No matter how often their location is disturbed by new plantings they return, rather modest, but determined to show their faces.  This year they exploded, and without warning colonized the entire back of the garden.  Have they been moving slowly underground this last decade, just gathering steam? Or is this a characteristic of certain persistent plants?

Native to Southeast Russia, the Caucuses and Turkey, Scilla siberica were brought to the East by plant hunters.  They were supposedly introduced to North America from Eurasia in 1796 but it has been rumored to have been in America in the 1600’s.  It has continuously been in cultivation ever since.  

It is a bulbous perennial so it has some of the storage capacity of bulbs combined with the multiplying habit of perennials.  Scillas will naturalize in shady to semi-shady areas, but they are also suitable for planting in grass, growing dormant by the time your lawn needs mowing.  But please be wary of too-early mowing; the foliage will need an extra week or more to ripen.

Scillas follow the earliest snowdrops and chionodoxa, and bloom before the forget-me-nots and daffodils.  They are a brilliant deep blue, unlike the soft and gentle blue of the forget-me-nots and the slightly deeper blue creeping phlox, which both appear soon after.  Somewhere between the two the daffodils have come and gone, always welcome and then barely missed in the profusion that follows. The variations among the blues parallel the variations among the daffodils blooming at the same time – palest white to deepest yellow.

In my garden the scillas march from east to west while the yellow Celandine poppy, brought here as a sprig from the Catskills garden, marches from west to east – both across the same border.  Star of Bethlehem follows swiftly on the heels of the scillas. The first time it shows up in your garden it is as though you have found a new friend.  But by the 10^th anniversary of its first appearance it will have become the enemy, leaving swaths of bare soil as it vanishes for the rest of the year.  If you are vigilant about early identification and eradication it will eventually disappear. 

       In the rear of the garden, when the scillas and poppies finish their spring burst, Ostrich fern takes over almost burying two Hosta Krossa regal who don’t seem to mind struggling through.  Cimicifuga (a favorite carryover from the Catskills) is already starting its inexorable march onward and upward.  It’s the early native variety; the upright blooms are candelabra-shaped, not the droopy kind.  It will move aggressively against anything in its way, beautifully blanketing the garden.

       I owe the forget-me-nots to my neighbor and partner in the shared garden, Marian Faux.  As they begin to wane her Bearded iris appear.  Marian has a long and knowledgeable history with these as well.  Both the forget-me-nots and the Iris are stars of our shared garden.  In our village, property lines are close and there are often narrow neglected strips of land between houses.  Rather than treating ours as separate open patches Marian and I combined them into a single garden which grows a little wider and more robust each year.  

It is a gift to be able to share a garden with a like-minded friend.

Forget-me-not