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 10th 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 |
