Spring walkabout

Til now, posts on these garden walkabouts have only appeared in summer and fall. Spring just wasn't a good time in the garden on Federal Twist. The site is cold and wet, and most of the perennials that thrive in these conditions get a late start. Only this year is the garden beginning to show significant early season interest.

A part of the change is simply maturity. The communities of plants have had a few years to grow together, forming large masses varying subtly in height, texture and color. I've also added shrubs and small trees--while keeping the largest areas open for perennials only, essential for easy planting management--which provide a sense of scale, and a few evergreens, whose dark silhouettes contrast dramatically with the lighter spring greens and golds of the herbaceous perennials.

Right now the morning sun backlights much of the foliage, looking for all the world like fractured stained glass, and the broken light filtering through the partially leafed trees imbues the space with a sense of peace and optimism. The wind gently whispers; humming birds alight in the aged dogwoods that screen the garden view from the house. It's a most pleasant, but of course, transient scene, a momentary Eden which passes quickly enough ...

... passes, for me that is, to the "mechanics" of the garden, for example, structure, contrast in color and form, garden management practices ...

The graveled paths encircling the planted areas, like the dark evergreens, give a visual weight to the garden ... the stone walls, a hard mineral background contrasting with the soft vegetable tissues ...

It's far too early for the pond to be overgrown with vegetation. For a while, the there's a clean edge and the water surface reflects the sky, a distant dogwood (below), or serves as a simple foil for Camassias planted around the pond's perimeter. It's taken three years for these to settle in and get going. Now I see I should plant more, and in other parts of the garden, especially since they echo the form of the hybrid Petasites flower spikes, which are blooming at the same time.

Less photogenic, but essential to understanding another aspect of garden mechanics--the maintenance or management process--are the spreading mats of perennials. Here, an example of matrix planting, Symphyotrichum puniceum (formerly Aster puniceus or Swamp aster) has formed a wide circular mat that out competes many of the less desirable grasses.

And here, large masses of Filipendula rubra 'Venusta', which have been a strong and stable presence for several years now, even though the soil is crowded with a variety of competing plants. If you want to manage large areas rather than "garden" individual plants, you'll have to learn what plants are appropriate to your conditions. That knowledge isn't always easily available, so a willingness to experiment, and to fail, is necessary. I used to have a community of Liatris pyncnostachia mixed in with the Filipendula. It was a stunning combination, but the Liatris gradually succumbed to competitive pressure and has all but disappeared.

"Nature's first green is gold," Robert Frost, that great and cynical observer of Nature, wrote. To build on that golden theme of early spring, I added three Sunburst Honey Locusts (Gleditsia triacanthos 'Sunburst) in the early days of the garden. They've not grown much, but each spring their brilliant foliage beckons like finely hammered artifacts of gold. I don't want them to become large trees; these golden poles are fine.

Then I discovered the wonderful non-native Euphorbia palustris, which I've scattered around to create more pools of golden color, and I may add more. Note here too (below)  the thickly growing mass of violets--functioning here as another important garden management tool--ground cover (matrix planting again).

The more distant view from the raised terrace outside the house shows fine detail to the naked eye but not to the camera. What you do see is the void in the forest in which the garden exists, and that void is a defining characteristic of this garden:  a clearing in the woods, a safe place, though a tentative safety that might vanish in the blink of an eye.

Gardens are like that, constantly changing, threatening loss of control, running away from you if you aren't paying attention.

Spring meadow evolving

The garden on Federal Twist has always been a summer and fall garden--until the last couple of years. I've been making an effort to extend its interest into spring. There will always be a quiet, empty time from the cutting down and burning in early March until the first week of May, but this year, for the first time, I see real potential for developing spring interest too.

One of the signs of this is the evolving shady meadow in the wettest part of my woodland garden at the end of the house. From this distance, you can't tell much is going on, but a closer view reveals an emerging community of plants, some indigenous to this area, some not. I can see the need for stepping stone paths through here for close-up viewing.

Senecio aureus (Golden ragwort) has been on the property since we moved here, so I added more last year. Though it's not a refined plant, it does spread and self-seed, and it adds bright spots of color at this time of year. Later, if the grasses get too high, it takes a high cutting with ease. The yellow also blends well with the dandelion flowers, which I've decided to adopt as wildflowers.

Blue Ajuga is rather prominent at this time of year. It's a legacy of the Howeth's, who built this house in 1965, and had been its only residents until we moved in in early 2005.  It too has spread far and wide, and adds to the weed-suppressing matrix of plants so I'm encouraging it to spread. The white flower appears to be a native wildflower. At first it was to be found only in the wettest areas, but now it too is spreading. It's graceful and quite delicate, easily crushed by wayward steps (thus the need for stepping stones). I wish I could identify it, but I haven't yet discovered its name.

That large plant in the photo above (and larger below) is an Arisaema triphyllum (Jack in the Pulpit), a common wildflower here. It seems to pop up everywhere.

The Galium odoratum (Sweet woodruff) is another legacy plant from the Howeth's. I forms attractive colonies but, considering it has been here for 45 years, it shows no sign of becoming an excessively rampant grower. I added the Pulmonaria 'Samouri' three years ago. It's done so well, I'm adding several new Pulmonarias this year.

Ferns, too, are a natural for this shady, very moist area.

Another view of Ajuga reptans, both blue and white, and a few Tiarella cordifolia. The Ajuga is really only noticeable when in flower in early spring, but the small spires of color are a pleasant addition at this time of year. Here, with Mattuecia struthiopteris.

On the other side of the path through the woodland garden, I apply leaf litter every year. This is a much more "natural" area where, to the present, Podophyllum peltatum thrives. I collected seed of the grass Hystrix patula (Bottlebrush grass) from the roadside, and it's successfully growing here now.

I'm also adding plantings of Helleborus foetidus, Carex appalachica, Epimedium, and Athyrium niponicum 'Pictum' to try to achieve a tapestry groundcover I saw several years ago in a woodland garden across the river in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

Of course, this area needs plants for the summer too. The ethereals pass, but some plants last through the summer. Symphyotrichum cordifolium (known as Aster cordifolium when I planted it) has taken up vigorous residence in the drier areas around tree trunks, and is also seeding about, adding to the late season interest in this area.

Last weekend, I bought ramps from the Union Square Greenmarket in Manhattan. I've seen photos of wild garlic in British gardens. I don't know if our ramp is the same plant, but its foliage looks the same, so I'm giving it a try in the wetter parts of the woodland area. Perhaps it will reward me with white blossoms next summer.

I haven't mentioned bulbs. Daffodils do well here. At the front, near the entrance gate, is an area of several hundred unnamed Daffodils left by Edith Howeth. They're in sore need of dividing, and I hope to get to them this summer, and replant them throughout the garden. Perhaps I'll also add Leucojum aestivum "Gravetye Giant', perhaps Camassia and other bulbs that can adapt to the conditions here.

I suppose I'll mention a major change I still have in mind--building a raised, rocky berm, over near the right hand path, planted with a few sculptural Japanese maples. (I have to credit this idea to Peter Holt, a garden designer in Nova Scotia.) We'll see.

For maintenance, this area will get a selective early summer cut, leaving the plants with late season interest, then a final cut at the end of the summer. It's important to use perennials that can compete with the very vigorous grasses. So far, most of these can do that. Some, like the Ajuga, virtually disappear into the undergrowth for most of the summer, but they retain their strength and are ready to go again come next spring.

This area is the entrance to the garden, so it's really a prelude to the larger wet prairie at the back of the house.

See the garden?

I’ve always found reading a book to be a much richer, more multi-layered experience than seeing a movie of the same book. The inner vision of the mind’s eye is an altogether different thing. So the following text from Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition by Robert Pogue Harrison struck a familiar cord. At the least, it’s food for thought. Maybe you’ll agree there’s more to it than “meets the eye.” (Yes, this is my second post quoting from this book.)

My Rosemont garden on a foggy morning

… a garden is a place where appearances draw attention to themselves, but that doesn’t mean they necessarily get noticed, no matter how much they may radiate or beckon the eye. Where appearances recede into the depths of space and time even as they come forward to stake their claim in the phenomenal realm, they make special demands on our powers of observation. That is bad news for gardens, for nothing is less cultivated these days in Western societies than the art of seeing. It is fair to say that there exists in our era a tragic discrepancy between the staggering richness of the visible world and the extreme poverty of our capacity to perceive it. Thus even though there are plenty of gardens in the world, we live in an essentially gardenless era.

I don’t know how to phrase this without sounding curmudgeonly, so I will simply assert as a matter of fact that among the young people I encounter on a daily basis—and I encounter quite a few, given my profession—most are much more at home in their computers, or in the fictions and skits that reach them on a screen, than they are in the three-dimensional world. In fact I have the impression that a great many of them no longer see the visible world at all, except peripherally and crudely … 

[However] … it is not a question of generational deficiency but of epochal transformations in the framework in and through which the world reveals itself. The basic inability to see a garden in its full-bodied presence is the consequence of a historical metamorphosis of our mode of vision, which is bound up with our mode of being. For as our mode of being changes, so too does our way of seeing. The faculty of human vision is not neutral. It is as subject to the laws of historicity as are our life-worlds, our institutions, and our mentality…


In human beings the loss of eyesight does not necessarily entail a loss of vision. Vision sees cognitively and synthetically; it apprehends things in organized dispositions and meaningful totalities. This is another way of saying that human vision is above all a way of seeing ... 

… we live in an age, then, whose dominant perceptual framework makes it increasingly difficult to see what is right in front of us, leaving a great portion of the visible world out of the picture, as it were, even as it draws the eye to a plethora of pulsing images.

Reprise - the weeping cherry tree

 

Again, the old weeping cherry - the tree I say doesn't belong in my garden - began another brief, and highly theatrical, annual show last week, just before we left on an unexpected trip to the deep south, to Mississippi where, as my Yankee friend Addie says, "the boats go push."

I think this tree was planted in 1965. It's showing signs of senescence, and a groundhog has taken up residence in a den directly under the trunk, which can't be helping it one bit. Who knows? It may outlive me.

Place

This is the flood plain of the Delaware River. This small bluff is the first of several as the land rises abruptly to an elevation of about 200 feet above the river. This is where we live, in these heavily wooded hills, in a land of many intermittent streams where water rushes downhill to the river with every rain, every snow.

Turning onto Federal Twist Road from River Road at sunset, I took these shots with my phone camera, as a reminder, imprecise evidence of the landscape in which my garden exists, a part of the natural landscape and yet something entirely artificial and different.

But only artificial in the sense of using artifice to create something new.

And what does natural mean? This landscape isn't natural in any sense of the word. It's a cultural landscape subject to the actions of humankind for centuries. The native Americans may have had a gentler tread, but they used the land and left an imprint too, however light. Colonial agriculture and its successors cleared these woods many times, changing forest to farm and pasture and orchard, building grist mills and saw mills, then the woods returned again, and again. And the river itself was one of the birthplaces of the industrial revolution. Today, the heavy deer population is destroying the forest, preventing growth of new forest trees.

So what is natural and what is artificial? We need enlightened management of the land, something we're far from achieving. My artificial garden isn't natural, any more than the wooded landscape is natural, but it's certainly more intentionally managed. So what is natural, and what artificial? The words need to be redefined, and used more mindfully.

Gardens and Stories

I'm reading Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition by Robert Pogue Harrison. In the chapter on Boccaccio's Decameron, he has this to say:

"The stories ... like the garden settings in which they are told, have intervened in reality … if only by testifying to the transfiguring power of form. By recasting reality in narrative modes, they allow what is otherwise hidden by reality’s amorphous flow of moments to appear in formal relief, just as a garden draws attention to the aesthetically determined relations of things in its midst. That is the magic of both gardens and stories."

April's progress

After appreciating my bare garden's structural bones--if one can speak of circles and curves as "bones"--for the past several weeks, a few minor entertainments are starting. Today, I spied this Epimedium x warleyense (cultivar name lost) as the sun progressed to the front side of the house. The close-up above shows its intense oranges and yellows, the tiny hairs on its stems.

 This colony is one of two along the front entrance walk where other plants are just beginning to stir. 

Of course, you have to view these flowers with your face two inches above the pathway. That's not a problem now that I've started yoga lessons!

Opening

Think of a flower opening. You walk through the narrow, restricted space of the woodland garden, looking ahead to the open prairie garden and the open sky.

Then you're there. A short journey to be sure, but once the plants push through and fill the surface with a fair chaos, the journey slows.

Community in clay

After a day and night of heavy rain, the hybrid Petasites (Petasites hybridus) is making its weird emergence from the mud, accompanied by bits of Lysicachia nummularia and Equisetum arvense. This, along with its cousin Petasites japonica, is repeated in various areas of the garden, and is a major theme plant in several communities of competitive plants. The fallen leaves remain in place because these plants are not daunted by a matted leaf cover. And eventually, the leaves will decay and add organic matter to the heavy clay soil.

This is not a particularly appealing time of year, especially after heavy rain, but in a few weeks the foliage cover will form contrasting bands of shape, texture, and color with the adjacent Darmera peltata, Sagittaria latifolia, and Carex muskengumensis. Actually, the word "shape" doesn't describe the visual effect well, which is more one of contrasting, three-dimensional, geometric forms, not exactly "sculptural" in a traditional sense, but metaphorically so.

I know Petasites is considered a radically invasive plant, but not in my garden. The clay appears to put the brakes on; it actually spreads quite slowly. In a conventional garden, I'd avoid it, but at Federal Twist, I need its aggressive, competitive character. Okay, you're hearing it again ... right plant, right place.