Woody Plants In My Garden

In the historic district of Rhinebeck, the location of my garden, the property lines are often defined by large shade trees planted 100 years ago, limiting the amount of light coming into the garden. Mine is definitely a shade garden, penetrated by occasional shafts of light, loose in its design, softer in its effect than sunny borders, its plants spreading out and multiplying in a somewhat haphazard fashion.

The first decision in planning a garden is the amount of privacy you need.  I chose an open aspect so as to see a bit of the neighboring houses, the upper floors and rooflines, retaining the sense of a village. 

View to the West Before We Began

To the West, I kept open the pleasing view into my neighbor’s garden and beyond.  But my neighbor to the East has a large raised deck, a trampoline and a tent, so each year I increase the density of that border while trying not to appear unfriendly.  In the rear of the garden towards the North a large crabapple softens the mass of the house behind.  The Southern border is the rear wall of my house, the terrace, arbor and garden gates.

The second decision is coming to terms with your light limitations.  Shade patterns vary, and plants respond to subtle differences.  Partial shade is only two hours of mid-day sun; a few hours of early morning or late afternoon light constitutes light shade; horizontally branching trees provide filtered light while light coming through pinnate leaves of the Black walnut is best described as dappled.

The third decision is whether you plan to fight the limitations of your site, or ride with them.  My garden has significant restrictions on what survives. The West border is lined with Black walnuts, known for toxicity to a large range of plants.  If you are faced with this problem, there are a number of postings from agricultural colleges and arboretums listing plants both susceptible and resistant to Black walnut toxicity.  As limiting as it may seem to be, the beautiful dappled light cast by Black walnuts more than compensates for the toxicity limitations.

The East border is under deep shade from both Silver and Norway maples.  Their root systems are rambling and close to the surface creating a struggle for plants looking for room to expand.  My solution was to use established plants of a decent size, so at least if they did not flourish they would grow slowly and steadily.  

Across the East Border

Most of the plants you are likely to buy will come from a nursery and be ready to plant.  It’s another story if you are looking for mature or specimen plants. Then you should visit a large nursery, select your plants in the field and have them tagged for a future move.  Since I planned my garden late in life and do not expect to be around to see the woody plants reach maturity, I tend to use large plants whenever possible.

Moving a large tree is a complicated process and may take place over several growing seasons.  It is routinely root pruned to encourage the roots to grow to the center.  The crown is pruned to encourage more compact growth, making the plant easier to move through several transport stages.  If done at the right time of year (when the tree is dormant) and watered well for the first two years, the tree will hardly know it has been moved.

The Apple Tree: First Year After Installation

There were only three shrubs in my garden when I arrived in 2011 – two Forsythia and a glorious Winged euonymus. – and they are still with me.  Otherwise the backyard was a dedicated dog run, bordered by hog-wire fencing to keep the dogs in and everyone else out.  It was a blank slate.

The plant palette was the result of the close working relationship with Gail Witter-Laird, the landscape architect who was the visionary for the best of this garden. Given the constraints of deep shade and Black walnut toxicity, this is our list for woody plants:

6 Japanese maples (Acer palmatum japonica) that are (or were) cornerstones for the design

2 Shadblow (Amelanchier canadensis)

3 Bottlebrush buckeye (Aesculus parviflora)

3 Fringetree (Chionanthus virginicus)

Various hydrangea (arborescens, tardiva, petiolaris)

Black tupelo (Nyssa sylvatica)

3 Witchhazel (Hamamelis Arnold’s Promise, Jelena, virginiana)

17 Sumac (Rhus aromatica low grow), 

5 Privet (Ligustrum), languishing from lack of sun

2 Mockorange (Philadelphus), yet to bloom

1 Stewartia (S. pseudocamellia) 

1 Japanese lilac (Syringa reticulata)

1 Red-vein enkianthus (Enkianthus campanulatis) 

11 Red Chokeberry (Aronia arbutifolia brlliantissima)

7 American wintergreen (Gaultheria procumbens)

4 Siberian cypress (Macrobiota decussata)

1 Crabapple (Malus floribunda)

All the above were vetted carefully for Black walnut toxicity except a truckload of aronia that somehow slipped through the cracks.  They did not survive, and I lost some of even the carefully vetted.  The Siberian cypress did not make it through the winter. Neither did the wintergreen. Nyssa sylvatica, notoriously difficult to transplant, did not survive.  The others behaved more or less as expected.

Japanese Maple After Planting

And then we were hit with an unexpected disaster.  One by one five of the 6 key Japanese maples succumbed to verticillium wilt, a soil-borne pathogen.  The diagnosis is not difficult to make.  The tree dies back in large segments within a very short time period.  When a branch is removed and sent off to a lab for analysis the entire vascular system of the plant is observed to be clogged; no water or nutrients are able to pass up through the soil and into the plant.

The Death of the Japanese Maples

So now another constraint has been added to the plant palette.  When you vet for Black walnut toxicity, and then add a screen for verticillium wilt, you are left with only a small handful of possible choices.  Four of the Japanese maples have been replaced with Sweetgum (Liquidambar styraciflua), a totally different look.  The Japanese maples were low and full, very gardenesque.  The Sweetgums are tall and narrow, more park-like than garden. They produce prickly nuts that fall to the ground and are painful to tread on and collect, but I’m used to years of picking up after the Black walnuts. 

I’ve added a few oakleaf hydrangea, taking seriously an off-hand comment of Michael Dirr’s that the only plants you can depend on to bloom in deep shade are Bottlebrush buckeye and Oakleaf hydrangea. As to the buckeye, you could not find plants more ungainly and less interesting for much of the year, but when they bloom it is heart-stopping.  For a plant bible you cannot do better than the delightfully opinionated Michael Dirr’s Hardy Trees and Shrubs, the gold standard of amateur and professional alike for plant identification and selection.

Bottlebrush Buckeye in Bloom

While it may seem discouraging at first, recognize that if you begin with a blank slate your garden will take about 20 years to approach maturity. Give it a good start by testing your soil (a subject for a later newsletter).  Whatever you choose to plant, remember to water, water, water.  The soil must never dry out and should be slightly damp to the touch at all times.

The best advice I can give is to read as much as you can.  Garden books (and gardeners) can be divided into two categories.  The plants collectors, those who hardly met a plant they didn’t like, and the aesthetes, those who focus on design and harmony. You can learn from both.  And visit gardens, always carrying a camera and a notebook.  You will want notes on not only the plants, but on structural details, paving patterns and gardening practices.

During these formative years, a reliable contractor will be your truest garden friend.  All my initial plants came from Twin Farms in Millbrook and they did the installation as well.  Watching the several days-long preparation of the beds was a lesson in itself.  They have been utterly dependable, standing by all the fatalities and replacing plants when necessary.

Allow enough time for your plants to establish themselves.  When you think you’ve made a mistake, remember that plants don’t read the books, and they often settle down happily in locations where they were expected to sulk. Keep in mind that a garden is a process, and there is always next season.  

Garden Necessaries and Follies

I have the perfect garden shed.  I did not design it myself so I can praise its perfection; I stole the design from Fletcher Steele who gets full credit.  The design appears inside the front and back covers of the 2011 reprint of Fletcher Steele’s Design in the Little Garden (1924). A modular design, it is a mere 21” deep and can be a long as you need it to be.   In the drawing it is beautifully planned with cunning little hooks and shelves to satisfy even the most compulsively organized among us.  

Although I have a cellar for a cumbersome assortment of furniture, plant stands, pots and hoses I still need a handy place for tools.  To assess my ground-level needs I moved all my tools to the trunk of the car, and then eliminated all the non-essentials.  Once completed, you need much less than you had previously thought. 

The Fletcher Steele Drawings

My shed was built by Brian Tamm and Dan Frank, who build everything for me.  It fits flush against the side of the house, the roofline of the shed following the roofline of the house.  Its function is almost invisible.  When I asked my son to store a pot in the garden shed he walked out the door, looked around, and asked me where it was. 

The Finished Shed

Before I came across the Fletcher Steele design, I looked at shed kits in every conceivable style, from configurations for cozy cabins with window boxes, to Zen retreats, to cabanas with Palladian gables.  There were hip-roofed styles recommended for California vineyards, austere slant-roofed sheds for tool minimalists, sheds with faux-Tudor rooflines, and five-sided numbers with French doors.  

Although I was governed by the need for a shed, in my heart what I really wanted was a garden room.  Historically, there have always been structures in the garden, from the simplest arbors to the most elaborate marble sleeping platform in hot climates.  Tents with hangings, summerhouses, gazebos and trellised pavilions have all had their place in gardens.  In some regions garden rooms are linked to a greenhouse, conservatory, or solarium.  In other regions, it always means a screened porch as you couldn’t live outdoors without one.  

A Perfect Garden House

I have visited winter gardens, lathe and glass additions used primarily for the cultivation of tropical plants but with plenty of space for chairs and tables, houses with old stone barns or outbuildings turned into garden rooms, painting studios or summer dining rooms that can only be called garden rooms because they looked out on the garden.  I’ve rocked on long porches that are garden rooms because of the comfort from which you contemplate the garden. 

A passionate gardener’s garden room always has a point of view. It may be facing a fragrant evening garden rich in heliotrope, nicotiana, Casablanca lilies and daturas. It may be no more than a potting shed, with space for a table, pots, barrels of soil, and running water. Painters might arrange their studio to open on to the garden while writers may have a shed at the bottom of the garden (Virginia Wolfe here), all keeping clippers nearby for a few spare moments of deadheading. 

Some of the prettiest garden rooms may be found in garden-less apartments.  The tenants are invariably displaced gardeners forcibly removed from their gardens or relocated by circumstance to a flower-less  world.  These rooms are often filled with wicker, flowered chintzes, airy curtains and potted plants. The effect of ease and charm is not appreciably different from what you would have found in their lost gardens.

Sunroom in a New York City Apartment

At some unremembered moment I gave up the fantasy of a garden room and settled on a shed that would be no more than a repository for tools and bags of fertilizer.  All gardeners know that the accumulation of tools grows faster than the growth rate of plants, but I am practicing the moderation of which I know I am secretly capable.   Just this year alone I’ve cancelled orders for a fine left-handed knife, a hand rake, several pairs of heavy-duty gloves, an extra trowel or two, and new clippers.  

But delusions of grandeur die hard.  My perfect shed is located in the former trash yard, the home of rakes and shovels, garbage cans and trash bins.  I decided to turn it into a piazzetta, a place for tropical and tender plants unsuited to my deeply-shaded Zone 5 backyard.  Up went fences for screening the driveway.  Up went an enclosure to obscure the trash cans, now reduced in size from the largest to "single occupancy household."  Concrete was jack-hammered, removed, and replaced with pink crushed granite, located in only one quarry in Connecticut.

The Former Trash Yard

Last year on the piazetta I looked after only a few tender plants and annuals in small pots.  This year I am looking for the alamanda and adenium I saw wintering over indoors in Arizona.  You can see where this is heading. 

The Piazetta 2018

Signs Of Spring

     Although March seemed endless this year, April is here at last. There is nothing good to be said about March, other than it is over.  Daylight Savings Time arrived early this year giving us more light at the end of the day, thus more time to consider the state of the garden.  By mid-March some gardeners reported a noticeable change in their gardens, but I suspect the change was in the heart of the gardener and not the garden.  After a mild day or two we convince ourselves it is the beginning of the gardening year. 

The gardener’s year does not synchronize with the calendar year. January, February and much of March is spent hibernating and dreaming.  April 1 is the real start, and March merely the wind-up.  With all its climatic vagaries, March does manage to offer one definitive idea: Winter is over.  In my former Staten Island woodland garden I knew I would soon hear the spring peepers in the bog. The saying goes that after they have been heard three evenings, spring is here to stay.  In my Rhinebeck garden the beds are cleared of mulch and debris.  A major tree pruning has removed the dead branches of the Black walnuts and opened up the canopy of the Norway maples in the hope of bringing more light into a dark border. 

Snowdrops in a Woodland Garden

The first sign of life in Rhinebeck is the appearance of snowdrops. They are beloved of gardeners who have nothing to do in March and garden writers who have nothing to write about.  Snowdrops face downward, so to appreciate them you have to drop to your knees and peer under the blossom.  It is the only way to distinguish one variety from another, but only the most devoted gardeners do this. 

The best way to enjoy them – and most other early bulbs and spring ephemerals – is to plant hundreds at a time.  Few of us have that much space or strength, so a clump or two close to the house will have to do.  Even better, a clump or two close to the street will lift the spirits of passersby.

If you have a table outdoors pot up a handful of snowdrops and let them spend the winter there.  Start watering the pots at the same time you see them start in the garden.  This not a bad practice with other tiny bulbs and spring ephemerals.  You can place them around a terrace, outside a door, on the front steps – any place where you can watch them grow.

In Rhinebeck the daffodils are just beginning to show, while in the city they are already covering the hillsides of Riverside Park, a six-mile strip of land between Riverside Drive and the Hudson River.  The land rises and falls with paths through the hills now covered in daffodils and the beginnings of flowering cherries and magnolias.  The slopes of the park are tiered, and daffodils are best seen on hillsides like these where they can be left alone after blooming, needing no cutting back for maintenance.  Every spring I visit Muriel Peters’ daffodil garden on Staten Island, if only through old photographs and notes.  Muriel was – and I hope still is – the epitome of the single-focus gardener; daffodils are her passion and her specialty and each passing year sees the addition on new varieties.  

Muriel Peters Daffodil Garden

  

If you are still indoors and desperate to get out of the basement where you have supposedly been cleaning tools, plan an early sowing of lawn grass seed. This presupposes that your soil is prepared and ready for planting.  Seed scattered on old lawns will germinate in the first warm weather and thicken the lawn before the appearance of crab grass in the summer.  A freak spring snow is particularly effective for sowing lawn seed.  As the snow melts the seed settles into the moist earth and waits for the first mild days of spring to sprout.

Pay attention to your house plants; they will need more watering than they have all winter.  The days are lengthening and the plants readying for a growth spurt.  Last summer I invested heavily in pot plants: plumbago, mandevilla, alocacia, calocacia, a giant palm.  We brought them indoors (“we” is a euphemism; it was really Dan alone) to sunny windows where they spent a warm and quiet winter.  In early May we will bring them back outdoors, trim them back if needed, and wait impatiently for them be grateful.

Last year, for the first time, I ordered a number of plants online from specialty nurseries.  I’ve not yet seen a sign on life on those purchases, a group of plants I had only read about: darmera peltata, persicaria, patrinia, wasabi.  I am trying to be patient; only time will tell. 

A Harbinger of Spring

The Ghost in the Garden

The most that can be said for the month of February is that a few sunny days allow for some winter pruning.  Otherwise all is quiet.  Gardening friends have disappeared indoors or, if they can afford it, have escaped February altogether and left for warmer weather.  During one particularly gloomy February when I had become tired of the sound of my own voice, Henry Mitchell appeared – or should I more correctly say the ghost of Henry Mitchell appeared.  

Every garden has its ghost.  It might be the critical specter of a previous owner, or a lost loved one who once stood at your shoulder commenting with enthusiasm or bewilderment.  In my case the ghost is a writer I’d never met. Henry Mitchell.  When he was alive I hoped he would visit my garden, the same way I hoped one evening I would walk into a wonderful party and Fred Astaire would ask me to dance. 

Henry Mitchell lived down the street a block or two from my house in Washington, DC’s Georgetown neighborhood.  He wrote a weekly column for the Washington Post and was a master of the small garden.  His “Earthman” columns appeared on Sundays, and those of us with tiny gardens tried to emulate him.  Mine was the size of a postage stamp, paved in lumpy brick, with narrow borders surrounded by the fences, garages and garden walls of neighbors.  I “assembled” rather than gardened.

Pot plants were purchased anew each season with as many packed in as the tiny garden could hold.  I didn’t have a car so I would taxi to the closest nursery, Johnson’s on Wisconsin Avenue, load up the cab and run home – all in under an hour.  Diamond Cab was available by the hour, and it only took two runs to complete the garden for the season.

Mitchell wrote about his own garden, but also made sure you didn’t miss what was going on in the by-ways; he wrote about the alleys of Georgetown with as much affection as he had for his own garden.  The alleys ran between two rows of houses, and were home to both garages and trash. Garages were rare in Georgetown and alleys were few, but Mitchell found them festooned with hollyhocks in the summer and sweet autumn clematis in the fall.  It was treated as a weed, but for Mitchell it was a plant without fault, blooming with the last gasp of warm weather when everything else was spent.  

“Catherine,” he whispers, “where is your clematis?  You have these naked border fences and telephone lines.  Plant it.  Pay no attention to the invasive plant police.”

Mitchell’s garden was only 40 by 100 feet – one-sixth of an acre – but packed with plants.  Even if you were a regular reader of his weekly column it was easy to miss the astonishing number of plants he managed to shoehorn into his modest garden.  It wasn’t until the columns were collected in The Essential Earthman that I added the numbers and began to wonder how he did it.  

Handicapped by the presence of four forest trees, he nonetheless managed to greet spring with an assortment of crocus, snowdrops, a double plum, hyacinths, bleeding heart, ceanonthus, wild cyclamen and cyclamineus hybrids.  There were 21 different named daffodils.  He was also a great admirer of peonies, and managed to squeeze in ten.  As you picture this, keep in mind that peonies require three feet each, effectively using up 30 feet.   

  

He included several iris – danfordiae, reticulate, histrioides and tectorum. There were rhododendrons and azaleas, grapes, mockorange and viburnum, stachys, forget-me-nots and jasmines  (both winter and Carolina), numberless roses and chrysanthemums, white and yellow primroses, coral bells, Shasta daisies and, of course, around 100 different daylilies.  

As all passionate gardeners do, he had his biases.  He harbored an intense dislike of zinnias, marigolds, petunias, and bedding begonias. 

“Catherine,” he whispers, “I’m so happy you have inherited my biases, I could forgive you the zinnias, but fortunately you don’t have enough sun.”

To give bulk and height to his garden he planted some tall yews and junipers, and provided rounded forms with Russian sage, arborvitae and false cypress.  One of Mitchell’s rules was that small gardens require of a plant not only good-looking flowers but good-looking foliage and orderly habits, and so space and attention were given to hostas, yuccas, purple smoke bush and rudbeckia.

He seems to have had a large number of tubs and barrels, unless he was writing about the same barrels in different years.  One tub had three or four water lilies, left to fend for themselves over the winter. In a half-whiskey barrel he planted a twisted willow with pansies beneath, or forget-me-nots and one of the more beautiful sedges.  Another barrel would hold lavender, rosemary and portulaca.  Or maybe it was the same barrel recycled for the seasons. 

“Catherine,” he whispers, “I like your idea of using the trash yard as a piazetta for tropical and tender plants, but you will have to drag them all indoors for the winter.”

Mitchell provided a wealth of wise but pragmatic advice: don’t let the glories of late spring (the irises, peonies, roses, poppies, forget-me-nots and violas) occupy more than 63 percent of your space.  Or 76 percent.  Or 94 percent.  He was candid about highlighting the disasters that await all gardeners: the storms that lay waste to peonies in full bloom, the late frost that withers the magnolia buds, the dog that settles on the most tender of your emerging plants.     

Years after his death in 1993, I sat next to a gentleman at a dinner party who had lived in Washington and knew Mitchell well.  “Did he really have all those plants in his 40-by-100-foot garden?” I asked.  “And more,” the gentleman replied, “and more.”

All Of Mitchell's Books Are Available On Amazon

Shared Spaces

When you round a corner and turn down a street, it either immediately feels good, or it doesn’t.  There is a sense of “rightness” in the space between one house and the next, or there isn’t, and the absence can leave you a bit unmoored.

Harmony is most likely the missing element.  When present, you sense it as the underlying explanation for a fine street whose parts fit together in a cohesive whole.  When in harmony, no matter the style of the neighborhood, the whole works together and the individual pieces don’t fight with one another.  There is a sense of regularity and order.  

A Rhinebeck Village House

This most often occurs in historic districts, where memorable landscapes occur because multiple properties share basic guiding principles, often without conscious intent.  Buildings are about the same height, sidewalk materials start out consistently bluestone until heaved out of place and replaced with concrete. Trees are spaced regularly down the length of the street and remain there until the end of their lifespan.

I moved to Livingston Street 150 years after the village pattern was laid out; the street trees and houses were in place.  Trees were planted along both sides of the street, one for each house. There are now increasing gaps as the aging maples are taken down; on our block we have lost three just this year.

The Demise of a Street Tree

Municipal maintenance for street trees and sidewalks has disappeared from Rhinebeck.  It is a source of constant disgruntlement to residents.  The village used to maintain the trees and sidewalks which are on public property, but elected officials changed the law a few years ago and now the homeowner is solely responsible for the repair and maintenance of these village-owned assets. You can imagine the level of contention between the players – homeowners, village officials, the village’s Tree Commission and the power company.

Concrete Replacement of Bluestone Sidewalk

  

Our supplier of power, Central Hudson Gas and Electric, has its own set of concerns.  It requires a large cleared space to maintain the power lines and prunes accordingly, leaving a battlefield of mutilated trees.  Main Street is particularly grotesque.  With autumn leaves falling, the horror of injudicious pruning reappears. The Tree Commission, not unreasonably, wants to remove the aging trees and replace them with younger, newer, and much shorter trees virtually starting all over again.  Some residents have organized to stop the current pruning practices, while others are pushing for burying all powerlines underground, causing the budget watchers to shudder.

A Street Tree After Pruning

We mourn the loss of our old trees. It takes 10 years or longer to produce a reasonably mature tree, and to many of us trees are the best measure of a civilized landscape.  A community in which mature trees survive and young trees are planted regularly demonstrates a sense of time, history and continuity, absent in the usual speculative real estate scramble for higher and better use.  The streets in which fine old trees survive are the showplaces of a community.  These neighborhoods are in large part one of the economic drivers that brings visitors to Rhinebeck.  

Winter is coming, and with it everyone seems to disappear indoors. The early morning gardeners are still out in heavy jackets, but not much longer.  The first snow arrived on November 15th, and with it the last of my fall planting – a new witch hazel, climbing hydrangea along the fence, oak-leaf hydrangeas, a few fothergilla, and a flirtation with red-twigged dogwood. 

My Garden, the First Snow of the Season

A few of us with shared spaces continue to plan through the winter. On Livingston Street we have a few of these, effectively erasing property lines.  A back yard linking two families for decades is graced by an ancient oak, unfortunately in questionable health.  

I share a semi-sunny/shady property line with my neighbor and co-conspirator Marian, and we confer continually about our successes and failures.  Marian is better than I about facing up to the shortcomings of the site, and is more realistic and measured about the selection of plants.  I am unwise enough to try almost anything, believing that we have more sun than we actually do.  

Our successes have been bearded iris (Marian), coneflower (Marian), epimedium (Marian), phlox (Marian), brown eyed Susan (mine). Our failures have been peonies (mine), baptisia (mine), thalictrum (majorly mine).  We had a nice display of daffodils this spring (ours).  I tried hollyhocks against the fence this year, but I’m not optimistic about their return next spring. 

However, my optimism is not totally dead, and by next spring I should have some decent photos. This troubled zone is my favorite part of the garden; a gift to myself in the sharing of it with a friend.

The Shared Garden, at its First Expansion