Planting the wet prairie

Freeze and thaw, freeze and thaw. I'm thinking about what to do with all those plants arriving in April and May. With very wet clay in the back - wetland, really - I'm aiming for a wet prairie, and I'm using what I can learn from Perennials and their Garden Habitats by Hansen and Stahl (I finally found a used copy discarded by the Iowa City Public Library), and the little Noel Kingsbury has written on the subject. My plant list (partial):

Panicum virgatum 'Rotstrahlbusch' - 30
Spartina pectinata 'Aureomarginata' - 6
Molinia caerulea 'Strahlenquelle' - 25
Molinia litoralis 'Transparent' - 6
Eupatorium purpureum 'Coelestinum' - 10
Calamagrostis brachytricha - 15
Sesleria autumnalis - 12
Carex muskingumensis - 12
Darmera peltata - 15
Euphorbia palustris - 4
Matteucia pennsylvanica - 12
Kniphofia caulescens - 9

Eupatorium fistulosum, other panicums, a start of a hedgerow of Magnolia grandiflora, viburnums, ilex verticillata and other plants are already in the ground. I can't wait to see what thrives, what just survives, and what is dead.

This is an experimental garden and I'm looking for every source of information I can lay my hands on. If I could read German, I'd be talking to the folks at Hermannshof (see the link below for an automatic translation into English).

Hermannshof Garden

Are we gardening yet?

After an extraordinarily mild winter, we had a whopping snow storm last weekend. New York City, about 65 miles to the east, had the most snow ever recorded in a 24 hour period. Here's how it looked at Federal Twist.
Warm weather - again - the following week quickly melted most of the snow. The Lockatong Creek is running overfull, as are the little unnamed tributaries around us. I continue reading gardening books - now Dan Pearson's The Garden: A Year at Hope Farm - and ordering plants. As usual, I've reached the surfeit point and am feeling I'll never have time to build the stone walls I want to build, expand the front planting area, cut down the worst of the ragged cedars blocking the view of the sky, build the pond, and plant 30 Panicum virgatum 'Rotstrahlbusch', 25 Molinia caerulea 'Strahlenquelle', 15 Darmera peltata, and all the many, many other plants that will arrive, probably bare root, when I have only one rainy day left for gardening before leaving to get back to the City for work on Monday. Why do I do this?

As spring arrives, I'll remember, as in the past, all this will not get done in one year. And the better for it.

Christopher Lloyd

My March copy of Gardens Illustrated arrived today. The cover features Christopher Lloyd as a new columnist, and inside is a continuation of an interview with him. Ironic timing and unfortunate since he died a few days ago. I remember when Phil and I visited Great Dixter in 1985. We passed him standing in the rose garden, talking to a young man. I was too shy to acknowledge him, much less try to start a conversation, but I'd been a reader of his books for a few years, and liked his prickly, opinionated style. He wrote about many plants I had no knowledge of, and that challenged me.

He changed the Great Dixter garden in many ways since I visited. Pulled up the rose garden and planted a tropical garden, I understand. And continued to make waves in the world of horticulture. In his first, and last, column in Gardens Illustrated, he writes of his interest in learning about the native flora in the places he visited - for example, learning that opuntias grow on the southern shores of Lake Michigan. "Nothing extraordinary about that you'll say, and possibly also add that many opuntias are extremely hardy," he writes. "But I wasn't born with that knowledge. The whole of life is a process of learning, which will only end with my death."

Great Dixter will continue through the efforts of The Great Dixter Charitable Trust.

Friends of Great Dixter
Great Dixter House and Gardens

Complaint Department

Our mass market-oriented nurseries offer gardeners in the U.S. a far more limited choice of plants than our friends in the U.K. I'm looking for sanguisorba tenuifolia Alba - have been, on and off, for several years. Just try a Google search and see how many hits you get in Europe and the U.K. Either I can't find it offered on this continent, or no stock is available.

Garden Plans

I sometimes think garden plans should only be quick sketches - pencil lines and a few abbreviations on a scrap of paper. Once the actual garden-making starts, the plan is subject to change, for change it will. Landscape architecture, with its emphasis on built structures, rather than plantings or plant knowledge, seems to have a big financial impetus to promote elaborate, colorful, detailed plans - and a beautiful garden does not always result. But the plan itself may be pretty, or intriguing. The design drawing takes on a life of its own, and may hinder exploration of new ideas that arise in the process of making the garden. This is especially true when the client is paying many thousands of dollars for a design/build project. I once heard Rick Darke say he never drew a garden plan. He always works directly with the landscape and plants.

Heronswood Nursery's New Catalogue

The new Heronswood catalogue came in today's mail. Glossy paper. Lots of color photos. Accurate, informative, descriptive text. All good in the usual nursery catalogue. But the sense of relationship with a unique person is gone, replaced by the anonymous voice of commerce. I'll miss Dan Hinkley's (or his helpers') wry, humorous stories of plant exploration in far-off parts of the world. The old catalogue left a lot to the reader's imagination. Browsing through it was a joy and a mystery. I'll miss that experience. It was a part of gardening for me.

Planting Design: Gardens in Time and Space by Piet Oudolf and Noel Kingsbury

About time for someone to take perennials so seriously they write a manifesto.

I've read all the books by Oudolf, Kingsbury (and occasionally others in changing combination with one or the other). I have to fess up to ordering this book several months before it was published by Timber Press (bless Timber Press for their wonderful selections). I'm a fan of these guys.

At first I found this book off-putting, distubing. It seemed to be trying too hard to make a point - or several points. Now that I've read it three times, I realize it simply contains so much information it's almost bursting out of its covers. Gardening is getting political. If you remember an article by Michael Pollan in the New York Times magazine several years ago, in which he ripped such authors as Ken Druse for promoting "natural gardening," a term which he and others have claimed as virtually meaningless, you know how political it can get.

If Planting the Natural Garden was poetry, this book is, indeed, a manifesto, but it is much more. Its focus is herbaceous perennials, and the art of designing with plants to make gardens, as opposed to landscape architecture, which is usually practiced with minimal use of plants and minimal knowledge of how they grow.

Look Back: Simplifying Plantings

Looking back from this first day of the new year, I'm thinking about changes I would have made to the Rosemont garden if I'd been there another year.

Simplification of the planting would have been at the top of the list. The initial planting was partly an experiment to see what plants would thrive in the rather difficult conditions my little plot of land offered, and what plants could survive deer browsing. Because of our large deer population - they are literally destroying the forests in our area by preventing new growth - selection of plants unpalatable to deer had to be among my top priorities. Ornamental grasses, highly fragrant plants, plants usually found to be deer resistant (see link) made up most of the garden. I did take some risks. Lavatera thuringiaca 'Barnsley', for example, grew into a six-foot shrub, with profuse bloom, in the first year-and-a-half, and though in an exposed position, suffered no deer damage.

Now that I've observed the garden as an outsider, I see more clearly the need to create greater simplicity with larger groupings of similar plants, balanced by sufficient variety to provide interest throughout the seasons. I did plant rather large groupings of Echinacea purpurea 'Magnus' (not the first preference, but the only one available), Filipendula rubra 'Venusta', Eupatorium fistulosum and 'Purple Bush', Persicaria amplexicaulis 'Firetail', and Nepeta sibirica 'Souvenir D'Andre Chaudron', which were all quite effective in their season, but fewer species of grasses would have created greater impact and less fussiness at the height of summer.

Far Garden in Rosemont: Almost Instant Gratification

The Far Garden at Rosemont - "far garden" because it was relatively far from the house - shows how quickly a herbaceous perennial garden can reach maturity. In only 18 months from installation of the first plants, I had a new garden that was entirely satisfying aesthetically and visually. Not really mature, because plant communities undergo a continuous process of succession, but certainly giving the appearance of a fully grown garden. The first photo shows the garden in early summer of 2004, one year from the start of planting.



I started this garden to block the view of a neighboring house. (Okay, if you're a passionate gardener, you know I really started it simply because space for another garden was available.) A wet drainage swale provided the opportunity; the contour of the land, which dipped and rose moving away from the house, brought to mind a pleasing arrangement of plants at varying elevations. I had the area dug out with a backhoe, and built two parallel stone walls about 30 feet apart, suggesting an old barn foundation. This gave me a sunken garden surrounded by stone, and two raised planting areas on each side. The next photo shows the initial excavation in the fall of 2002, with the dry-laid stone wall finished on one side.


Planting started in the spring of 2003 and continued through that summer and fall. The next photo shows an initial rather random layout of the first plants. Doesn't look like an auspicious beginning, does it? In fact, the garden presented a bleak picture for the first few months.


The plant selections weren't all my own: I had a lot of help. While browsing in Barnes and Noble, the cover of Designing with Plants by Piet Oudolf and Noel Kingsbury caught my eye. I was powerfully moved by the book: its photographic details of plant shape, texture, color, structure, and the rampant, almost tactile, beauty of the Oudolf garden photos. The big plantings recalled an Alice in Wonderland world. Huge plants, many towering well above human height, brawny Joe Pye Weed topped by looming purple flower heads, broad mounds of persicaria polymorpha crowned in foamy white, strict verticals of calamagrostis acutiflora 'Karl Foerester', grasses bending and sighing in the wind. The planting images, and the appreciation for all stages of a plant's life - even death in winter - hit my bullseye. This was my "wish book."

As I began the Far Garden, I was discovering a theoretical approach and practical direction for my efforts. I read more about European research matching plants to existing conditions - really just selecting plants appropriate to the local ecology. In Noel Kingsbury's stimulating, well informed writings, in particular, I learned of work done at the Weihenstephan Institute in Germany that resulted in a seminal work, Perennials and their Garden Habitats by Richard Hansen and Friedrich Stahl, which rigorously associated plants with their natural habitats, based on field trials carried out over many years. Stephen Lacy's "The New German Style" on the Horticulture website (see links) captures very well the essence of the New Perennial movement, tells the role of Hansen and Stahl in the movement, and offers a fascinating update, and stunning photos, on current German practices in such places as Munich's Westpark.

I gained the confidence to try gardening on my unimproved soil, for the most part heavy clay, very wet through winter and well into spring - selecting plants that by virtue of their natural habitats, would probably thrive in this environment. Instead of trying to recreate my soil by adding tons of compost and manure, improving drainage, building fences to break the wind, I decided to try a new approach - tilling the soil surface two times to turn under the grass, followed by close planting and weed suppression. I had learned from earlier experience that newly tilled ground in my area would quickly sprout millions of crab grass seedlings come hot weather. So I was forced to use a pre-emergent herbicide until the newly planted perennials covered sufficiently well to do their own weed suppressing. (Okay, we don't approve of chemicals, but I used them judiciously, only a couple of times.)

By the summer of 2004, I had a new garden that looked quite respectable, even under attack by an army of Japanese beetles.

Morning Sun Through Woodland - Forest Succession

Now that the leaves have fallen and the sun is rising from a more southerly direction, it lights up the surrounding woodland each morning with slim rays streaming across the ground. The beeches are more visible now since they retain most of their orange-tinged leaves. In contrast, the woods behind the house are in a much earlier stage of succession and have few beeches, but the surrounding preserved land, which has remained undisturbed for a much longer time, has less undergrowth - and far more beeches, some approaching middle age. (I still have to deal with that woody tangle of cedars, scrub and vines that will be my garden.)

I hope to imitate the process of succession in my new garden, establishing a community of plants that adapts to conditions here, and develops through its own process of (controlled) succession. Echos of Planting Design: Gardens in Time and Space by Noel Kingsbury and Piet Oudolf, which I've been reading.