Garden Diary: Slow Gardening

This garden is slow to take shape. I have to compare photos from 2006 and 2007 to realize the progress. The first photo from late June last year shows a rather desolate area, with the spot where I burned debris from tree felling clearly visible at back.



This year, with a deer fence up, another year's growth, and another long season of planting, the picture is dramatically different.



Closer views show the plant matrix clearly emerging and, for the first time, giving a substantial show of texture and color. (Click on the photo above to see the detail.) The Joe Pye Weed, Rudbeckia maxima, water irises, and Lysimachia ciliata 'Firecracker' have come through two seasons with great tenacity in this difficult environment...




while the monardas (Blaustrumpf and Jacob Cline) and Liatris pycnostachya are new and only next spring will tell how they survive or thrive.



Think of the garden as the bottom of a bowl, with surrounding dark forest - a darkness that seems to "swallow" color. Brightness is needed to stand out against the dark trees, and the monarda do that well, especially the red Jacob Cline.



Even better for contrast against the dark are Rudbeckia maxima, with bright yellow blossoms on 6-foot stalks. And their large glaucous blue leaves are a plus. I added 14 more this fall. If the Silphium terebinthinaceum, planted as plugs 18 months ago, flower next year, they should add to the mid-summer brightness.



The lysimachia 'Firecracker' thrives, and I believe can outcompete the most aggressive weeds (not the rushes!) so I plan to add a substantial new planting next spring.



Here it contrasts with rudbeckia stems in the foreground and various panicums further back. All of this in heavy clay, wet for 10 months out of the year.

Saco Heath

On a two week trip to Maine, we visited the Saco Heath. It's the southernmost raised peat bog in North America. According to the guidebooks this is the only place where Atlantic cedar is known to grow in a domed heath. More later.

Here are some photos.

Making a new garden - year 3

Making a garden in the woods requires a lot of commentary. Visitors can't see a garden yet, so we have to explain.

Year one, we looked out at crowds of cedars marching up to the house. What was an open field forty years ago was well along on its transformation into a forest.

We had to cut down about 60, several next to the house, for safety and more light, and many more to make a rough open circle for planting in the sun. The house's back side (really its front) is a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows opening onto this view. We put in a few perennials just to get some growth started, mostly ornamental grasses the deer wouldn't deign to touch.

Year two, we used our little mountain of cedar chips to make a circular path for perambulating "that patch in the back," as my brother-in-law calls it, appropriately I think. We linked the circular path to the front of the house with a gently curving walk through trees on the west end - a future woodland garden - and a straighter, more direct route on the east end. Here's a view of the woodland path.



The path serves as a reference point, making it possible to easily see the rises and dips in what before looked like a flat, featureless plate of land, and making the "rooms" of the garden visible for the first time - at least conceptually.

Year three, in mid-winter, we finally hired a contractor to build a deer exclusion. It was absolutely clear we'd never have anything more than a grass garden without it. I love grasses, and thought of going that route, but the uncontrollable desire to grown some other favorites, and to experiment, won out. Of course, we now have the added task, and cost, of screening the new 8-foot-tall fence though, as you can see, it's not highly obtrusive.


The grasses, planted across the field in lines, curves and masses, provided visual interest through the fall and winter. It's a shame to have to cut them in the spring. I read that Henk Gerritsen is experimenting with leaving them up, but until I see he's had success with that, I'll continue to remove the top growth in early March. Here is a photo taken on New Years Day - a memory of what is gone.



Now that I've cut the grasses down, the garden is a wasteland. The cold, wet clay takes a long time to warm up, so spring is, let's say, not its best time. Better look the other way.

This year - year 3 - I'll start adding plants for early spring - Lindera benzoin, which grows in the woods all around us, salix, alnus, anything with early catkins, and bulbs, of course. And I'm working on creating layers with small trees and shrubs adaptable to the wet. Magnolia 'Little Gem' is doing extremely well. On this rare sunny day in April 2007, its leaves are glistening like little mirrors. (A noreaster is supposed to arrive tonight.) I hope three new Sunburst honey locusts will be bright lights against the dark woods later in the season.

Hey, with the deer exclusion, maybe I can even grow hostas.

The Dynamic Landscape: Design, Ecology and Management of Naturalistic Urban Planting, edited by Nigel Dunnett and James Hitchmough

This is definitely an academic book, but you’ll find rare subject matter on current and past European research in planting design techniques available virtually no where else in the English language. Much this book has to offer is presented more attractively, and in much better prose, in Noel Kingsbury’s and Piet Oudolf’s Planting Design: Gardens in Time and Space, but the latter book has a much narrower focus on perennials and their horticultural use.

There are treasures here. One example is Hein Koningen’s stimulating article on maintenance of the naturalistic parks, called heemparks, that have been thriving in Amstelveen, a small city in The Netherlands, since the 1930s. The city, through highly knowledgeable park management and a locally trained staff of residents - many teenagers - has established a series of gardens, all planted appropriately to varying local ecologies, throughout the city. They are allowed to change over time, according to natural forces, unlike most “designed” gardens, where the plants are intended to stay put. But the heemparks are also managed, though infrequently and very carefully, by knowledgeable staff, who attempt to guide development, not make it fit a preconceived design.

Another is Anna Jorgensen’s chapter on the social and cultural context of ecological plantings, which reports on research into how different people respond to nature and to various types of park design, how different cultures and nationalities view nature, and how these views have changed over time. She quotes Daniel Defoe’s description of the Yorkshire Dales as “having a kind of an unhospitable Terror in them … all barren and wild, of no use or advantage either to man or beast,” and contrasts his view with “the fact that many millions of people now visit the Yorkshire Dales National Park for pleasure and recreation, attracted by the same landscape that Defoe found so repugnant.” Her piece is about where and how we draw the line between pretty and ugly, safe and threatening, designed and totally wild landscapes, and how that line moves over time and culture.

This book focuses on public gardens and plantings, and is the result of many years of research carried out at the University of Sheffield to develop low maintenance gardening and land management techniques for parks and other public places, with attention even to waste places, traffic islands, and roadsides. While much of the results of this research is applicable primarily in England and continental climates—because the local grasses and weeds are different from those in North America—and competition among plants can have different results in the differing locations—much of it is relevant to our growing conditions, climate, and native plant stock. Dunnett’s and Hitchmough’s research certainly provides stimulus to those of us willing to experiment with “naturalistic” planting.

For those of you who don’t live in a city, don’t be put off by the word “urban” in the subtitle. This book still offers much of interest. I garden in the woods in New Jersey, on a slope above a frequently raging creek a short distance before it plunges to the Delaware River. Dunnett’s and Hitchmough’s book contains a tremendous amount of information on naturalistic planting techniques and landscape management that I find of great use in my struggle with a wild landscape. I hope it will help me manage, not tame, my landscape. I recommend it as a book to read again and again, over several years.

The cost is daunting. I paid about $100 for my copy on Amazon.com.

Time, mystery and the gardener

The passage of time transforms a garden. We all know that. Plants grow larger, change shape. Spatial relationships change. Light usually diminishes as plants mature. Colors change with the seasons. While these changes can be observed with all plants, they are perhaps most visible with herbaceous perennials, which display all their changes in a single season, emerging from the earth in spring, maturing, flowering, then dying in fall.

But more subtle alterations occur in the appearance of plantings during the growing season. The crystal clear light of spring and early summer morphs into a moving spotlight of sun by high summer, bleaching colors at mid-day, lessening contrasts of shape and form, generally blurring differences in the character of plants.

Weather conditions too make for quite dramatic changes in appearance. The photo above was made in my Rosemont garden on a hot, very humid, windy day in late July 2003. You can see drama in the wind buffeting the Calamagrostis acutiflora 'Karl Foerester', introducing an element of chaos and excitment, the haze of humidity in the air, especially in the background, tinting the trees slightly grey-blue, the foreshadowing of autumn in the fading blossom of the Persicaria polymorpha as the cloud-white plumes become spotty with brown of early decay, in contrast with the vitality of Joe Pye Weed (Eupatorium maculatum 'Gateway') in full bloom - shades of those hot scirocco winds in Italy (but this is in the Delaware River Valley).

The tranquillity of the second photo, of the same scene, taken almost a year later in 2004, but in early summer, serves to emphasize the dramatic nature of the first, and clearly demonstrates how local climatic conditions can change the nature of your garden.


In the second image, the cool temperature, still air, low humidity, freshness of foliage, and the vitality and unblemished colors of newly grown cells - in contrast to the fading white bloom of the persicaria in the first photo - lend a peacefulness and clarity totally different from the first. I'd even go so far as to say the weather, light, wind, humidity, and time of year are as much a part of the garden scene as the plants. They're all part of a whole, but you have to look at the whole, not just the parts, to see it.

More obviously, the tree (Robinia pseudoacacia 'Freesia'), has grown taller over the intervening year, the Joe Pye Weed, so prominent in the first image, hasn't yet attained height and is totally invisible behind the persicaria, as is the calamagrostis, yet the catmint (Nepeta 'Walker's Low') has fattened into glorious clumps of gray with dozens of ascending purple spires.

All of this is obvious to anyone who looks, possibly even banal. But for me it's emblamatic of the mystery of the interrelatedness of everything living. Starting with energy from sunlight, water, earth, the human eye and hand, life in all its varied forms.

The last photo, taken later in the summer of 2004, shows the same scene in larger context. Here the rapidity of growth is even more evident. The catmint is spreading like a sea, the Sedum 'Herbstfreude' is in bloom, and a new area of the garden has been planted in the distance to the left. The changes that have taken place in just over one year are striking, perhaps even threatening a return to total wildness, and demonstrate just how precarious is the order of a garden, calling out for the gardener, who, of course, is part of all this too.

Moss-covered wall

We visited Iceland in early August. Reykjavik has many gardens, even a quite interesting botanical garden, but the highlight of the trip, floristically speaking, may have been a moss-covered wall fronting the city hall.

But that description of this unique "vertical garden" is far too bland. It's much more than that - visually, it's an arresting structure, long and green, at least in summer, full of texture and color, both a beautiful object and a powerful symbol. It is a wall of allusion, with symbolic references to multiple aspects of Icelandic ecology, culture and history, evoking the moss-covered lava fields surrounding the city, the old turf houses with "green" roofs the rural Icelanders lived in for centuries (consider the similarities to the turf-roofed house below). It pays tribute to the maritime heritage of the country, which depends for most of its wealth on the sea (reflected in the portholes in the wall), and is a fitting reminder of the location of the city hall at one end of the Tornin, a small jewel-like lake in the center of the city. Possibly other references beyond my knowledge are present there.



The wall is long, fronting the entire length of the building, with a large pool at its foot. It appeared to be kept moist by a spray of water from along the top (though Iceland's climate is so damp, it seems unlikely the mechanical watering feature would be needed all the time).



This looks like an exemplary model of sustainable design, using a monoculture of native mosses, as well as what appear to be a few self-seeded grasses and forbs, growing in a matrix of natural lava rock. I haven't been able to find any reliable documentation on the design of the wall, its maintenance or its history. If you know anything about it, please post a comment or send me an email.



The portholes are a nice feature of the design, adding considerable visual interest, especially from a distance. They serve as focal points, drawing your attention toward the wall, where you can appreciate the mosses and other flora close up.



The last photo shows one end of the city hall opening over the lake. You can see the building structure is made of two similar halves with arched roofs. In the center, between the two halves, you can make out the end of the moss-covered wall. It looks very dark because the day was rainy, and the building casts the wall into shadow.

Sounds of the Creek

Lokatong Creek is about a quarter mile behind the house. You can hear its soft, muffled roar through the trees almost any time of year, except when it's frozen or in drought. The rain is starting now, after several days of warm weather - so warm I've seen forsythia and rhododendron starting to bloom. Here is a view of the creek from early November, as its flow began to slaken after heavy rains.

Rosemont Valley

These photos of the Rosemont Valley show an almost idyllic landscape rooted in two centuries of agricultural history. My Rosemont Garden was designed, not to duplicate the look of the valley, but to complement its aesthetic and emotional character - to suit the "genius of the place" in Alexander Pope's words.

The Garden at Federal Twist is only four miles away as the crow flies, but it's a world apart, a closed setting in the woods, with a tree-ringed circle of sky, protected by the surrounding forest, not open, windy and bright like the Valley. I'm slowly working out the nature of the new garden, but I'll remember it's still only four miles from Rosemont, and try to preserve something of that memory.


(Click on the photos to get a better sense of the scale of the landscape.)

Seedheads in the garden

Noel Kingsbury's Seedheads in the garden is written for gardeners who haven't yet become converts to the beauty of plants in the fullness of autumn, or the opportunities they provide for continuing interest - and moments of wonder - during their death and decay in winter. The new book lacks the poetry of Designing with Plants (written with Piet Oudolf) and the erudition of Planting Design: Gardens in Time and Space (also with Oudolf), but it carries forward a useful idea. I hope it will reach a wider audience interested in sustainable garden design.

I'm still in the early stages of planting the new garden on Federal Twist Road, but patterns are beginning to emerge, and a collection of seedheads is in the future. Rudbeckia maxima has proven to be deer resistant through the green season, and its large dark brown seedheads (above and right) contrast well with grasses. The grasses, too, offer an even longer lasting, though smaller and more delicate tracery. Miscanthus purpurescens, leaning in the wind in the photo below, is full of drama, while Panicum virgatum 'Cloud Nine' emulates its tranquil cloud-like name. It too can be blown wildly about and lean to the ground in the wind - though the lower photo was taken on a still day - and surprisingly returns upright when the weather settles.

Miscanthus purpurescens











Panicum virgatum 'Cloud Nine'

I intended to collect teasel (Dipsacus fullonum) seed in the wild this fall, but never got around to it. I planted it in my garden in Rosemont, where it was especially beautiful in summer, and added interesting structure in winter. Note that it requires careful control, seeding with wild abandon. The last photo shows it in mid-summer.

Dipsacus fullonum

The Vermont Gardener

Being a fan of slow gardening and fuzzy gardening (gardening in the context of the wider landscape and, well, the universe, I guess), I recommend The Vermont Gardener.