House and Garden in Delta

Making a garden "in tune with nature" means simply planting appropriate to place. But place can mean more than the physical environment. Consideration of metaphorical associations with history, geology, and culture add depth and richness to the experience of the garden. Place can be much broader than immediate physical surrounding; it can encompass a whole geographic region - even the entire earth - or the universe. Only consider the importance of astronomical observation among various cultures throughout history, or the many connections between gardens, theology, and spirituality.

This is my garden viewed from the narrow area at the side of the house where overland flow of storm water builds into a flood before opening into what I call the "delta." It's a metaphorical delta. The river of water flows down from above, gains speed and deepens as it rounds the house, then breaks out into the wide area of the garden, very much like a physical model of a river delta. Perhaps I push the metaphor a little too far, but there are physical similarities between the hydrology of my garden and a river delta.

Phil and I just returned from visiting my sister and her family in Mississippi for the Thanksgiving holidays. One day, we drove into the Mississippi Delta, a unique physiographic province of extraordinarily flat land that used to be annually flooded by Old Man River. The satellite photo below shows just how distinctive the Delta is from the surrounding land. Starting at the Mississippi River, the tangle of curves and curlicues on the left, the Mississippi Delta is clearly demarked by the light shade of green, which ends abruptly at the darker green mass on the right where the hills begin. In many areas, this change is quite abrupt and dramatic. As you move from the hills into the Delta, the roads drop quickly down sixty or seventy feet, into absolutely flat land for as far as the eye can see. This land was flooded annually for thousands of years, and that ancient sign is still easy to see from above.


Since the 1930s the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has decided it can control nature and hold the river in with levees. Everyone now knows that this process is doing irreparable environmental damage, causing the southern coast of Louisiana to disappear under the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, and eliminating the wetlands that could help protect such cities as New Orleans from future weather-borne disasters. The river rises higher each year, the levees are built higher to contain it, and eventually the process will become unmanageable. The river will break through and all will be changed, at great cost - environmental, human, and financial.

Unlike the Mississippi Delta, my garden delta has no such grand implications for the future. Or does it? Water defines both, and its use or misuse is a subject of some interest, at least to me.

In my simulacrum of a delta, I garden in tune with nature. The plants that grow in the garden are well adapted to the saturated, heavy clay soil, frequent inundations during heavy rains, and standing water. Normally such conditions would create perfect breeding ground for mosquitoes, but the huge frog population eliminates that nuisance. There simply are no mosquitoes. Going with the flow, accepting existing environmental conditions, keeps nature in balance.

On a less practical, more aesthetic level, the garden complements the natural woodland environment surrounding it as well as the understated design of the house - its low profile, gray-brown tones, wooden construction, transparent glass, and massive native stone chimney towering into the trees. The house has low visual impact because the architect, William Hunt, designed his houses to blend into their environments, using natural materials and minimal ornament, and lots of glass to bring nature inside.

Out here, the sky is an important part of nature, and of the garden. Designed to complement its surroundings, the house is situated high, on a small man-made hill, where it is protected from the water and damp below, all the better to catch the light from the sky. In mornings and early evenings, it's flooded with natural light, as well as warmth from the direct rays of the sun.


Above, a piece of sky, with a Red Maple, and giant miscanthus (Miscanthus giganteus) in plumy splendor. Who is to say my garden ends at its physical borders or in this time? In my mind, it encompasses the distant Mississippi Delta, the farmers and millers who lived and worked these hills in the 18th century, the native Americans who looked up into this sky over thousands of years, the inexorable geological processes that formed these hills, these rocks, this clay.

(Delta photo courtesy Google Earth)

Garden Diary: Reading the Landscape

Faced with a blank slate (in my case a ragged woodland), how do you make a garden?

I didn't know I was doing this when I started the garden at Federal Twist, but my first task was to observe the landscape - in Dan Pearson's words (listen to his Vista podcast), to learn to read the landscape - the feelings evoked by the site, the physical characteristics of the site, and the culture and history of the landscape.

Feeling
This is a humble landscape: woods on a slope, no distant views, no big sky, a pocket of cedars within an older forest of beeches, hickory, maple, ash, ironwood and tulip poplars - a small, quiet place with no notable distinction other than long rows of stone running throughout the woods, physical reminders of past lives here.

The house, encircled by woods on all sides, was elevated about 10 feet above the surrounding land on a man-made mound. The emotional tone of the landscape was one, not so much of peace as isolation. The surrounding woodland, mainly cedar (Juniperus virginiana), came right up to the house. Though the space was open to the woods all around, there was a sense of enclosure, with little sky visible, and of neglect, perhaps dereliction, lent by fallen, unkempt cedars and, immediately next to the house, several dying cherry trees that were obviously inappropriate to the place. There was a lonely feel about the landscape, no other houses to be seen, no views out.


The Physical Landscape
The house had been built on a gentle slope in the first ridge of hills above the Delaware River, a gentle but steep enough slope to be easily visible and to promote rapid storm water runoff. The water treatment (septic) system was in a highly visible location, but fortunately most of it was underground.

It was clear this was not a promising place for a garden. I was determined to find a way to make one, though I wasn't sure how. Long stone rows, probably made by farmers in the 18th century, lined the property on three sides. I liked the historical reference they provided and their visual effect, separating us from the surrounding woods. I would later come to appreciate a ready source of native stone for making dry laid stone walls.

The house was also an important component of the landscape. Elevated as it was, to give a view long ago obscured by tree growth, it was visible from all points, at least in partial view.



A mid-century house (see before and after above), with a low, simple profile, and a wall of windows facing the area to become the main garden, it had wide eaves suggestive of Japanese architecture and a modernist look that I knew would dictate stylistic choices when I began planning what kind of garden I would have. Fortunately the architect, William Hunt, had given consideration to the location, and designed a structure that had minimal visual impact on the surroundings.

The Cultural and Historical Landscape
When Dan Pearson talks of reading the landscape, he describes it as something he does quickly, in an hour or a day. I took much longer. Over time I began to speculate on the lives of the former inhabitants of the land, the early European settlers, the native Americans, the lives of the owners and operators of the 18th and 19th century mills that took their power for grinding grain and cutting timber from the Lockatong Creek a quarter mile below the house.


These imagined memories of the past came to posses their own power and to influence my understanding of the landscape. Some of that uneasiness, that derelict quality I felt on my first visits to Federal Twist, something unfinished or unknown about the place, became part of those thoughts about the past, and remained a background to the garden as it developed, always there though quietly and invisibly.

Making Changes
I understood we would have to clear a large area of the cedars to have any open space for a garden. This was appropriate because cedars are not typical of the surrounding forest. They are a part of the early forest succession, one of the first tree species to move in as open field begins the process of changing into forest. I would simply be returning a part of the land to an earlier state. Below is a photo of a corner of the garden following tree removal. Dogwoods near the house are just coming into bloom, and a stone row is visible at the edge of the property.


Early photographs of the house left by the original owners confirmed this fact, and showed me the importance of historical documentation. Their view in the mid-1960s was of an open field dotted with pretty, very small cedar "shrubs."

Misreading the Landscape
At the time we first saw the house and decided to buy it, we were having a very wet autumn. Of special concern to us was the water treatment system, particularly the drainage field where waste water seeps out through an underground network of pipes into the earth. At that time, the drainage field appeared to be totally saturated with water.

I initially assumed this drainage field, which had to be incorporated into the garden area, would be the wettest part of the garden. That turned out to be entirely wrong. My initial observations occurred during a period of unusually heavy rains, so the very wet conditions were, in fact, transient. This is actually the driest part of the garden because it is underlain with stone and rock placed there as part of the drainage system design. Below is an autumn photo of a planting over the drainage field.


In fact, the land there is so dry, compared to the rest of the garden, I intend to plant colonies of Rattlesnake Master (Eryngium yuccafolium) this spring - a plant I've wanted to grow for its visual structure and texture but have feared to try since I may lose it. I'm taking a risk, because the area is totally saturated during periods of heavy rain. But isn't gardening about hope?

Moving from Hydrology to Metaphor and Design
The thought of drainage isn't one that warms most gardeners' hearts. It's a utilitarian issue that must be dealt with only when there's trouble. But for me it turned out to be the heart of the garden. It was immediately apparent to me that our land was, by legal definition a wetland, but at first I didn't understand that the flow of water over the land had in fact been a principal factor in creating the landscape as I saw it, and would define the landscape of the garden as it evolved.

Building the house on what in effect is a large earthen dam was a dramatic environmental intervention in the mid-60s. Now, over 40 years later, it is clear the wetland areas at the sides of the house and behind it were created by this intervention. Water, no longer able to flow directly down the slope to the creek at the bottom of our little valley, is diverted around the house and accumulates at the back. The house and its earth pedestal, being at higher elevation, quickly shed rain water, which joins the flow coming around the house to "supercharge" the back area - in fact, the site of the garden. Impermeable stone layers under the soil surface prevent percolation of water into the ground, leading to total saturation of the soil for long periods.

Observing the flow of water over time, I came to understand the entire garden would be shaped by it, that the garden was essentially becoming a metaphor for the flow of water over the land.

Other features of the garden followed from this reading of the landscape. I placed the canal-like pond to emulate a natural depression that might have been eroded by water flowing in a curve around the end of the house.


The curves of nearby stone walls repeat the curve of the water flow and outline the garden area as it opens out behind the house.



The garden proper is like a miniature river delta (made of plants instead of water) across which the water spreads out on its way down the slope to the Lockatong Creek, thence into the Delaware River.

This metaphor of the river delta - less grandly, this motif of water flowing over land - is now guiding the decisions I make about the garden. But the early felt emotions associated with the landscape and the lives lived there are present too, in the stone walls, in my consciousness, and in parts of the garden yet to be.

Statement of Principle

Late October 2008

What? With the world in virtual financial collapse, wars and cultural conflicts threatening the lives of millions, perhaps billions, I'm making a statement of principle about gardening? What sort of silliness is this?

I avoid using the words 'green', 'sustainable', 'sustainability'. They've already been appropriated by the world of business and capitalism, and are well along the way to becoming meaningless. Perhaps I should use 'stewardship' because this is about keeping the earth and enjoying the earth. Perhaps it's best not to use labels, keep quite, and just try to take care of my own bit of the land. I can do without labels, but I can't keep entirely quiet. So herewith, a statement of gardening principles, and a little of my local history.

The Future Garden in Late 2004

A Time for Taking Stock

As the end of the gardening year approaches, refocusing seems in order. Time for a gardening life checkup.

My garden on Federal Twist Road is an experiment.

Apart from clearing the land of close-packed weedy cedars to make space for a garden, I take the land as given - no soil improvement, no measures to change the heavy, wet clay, no mass extermination of existing plant life, no change in natural drainage patterns, no fertilizers. My goal is to make the most of what I have - to create an artificial wet prairie with a self-sustaining community of plants appropriate to this place and its environment, and a habitat for wildlife. Most of the plants are native, but there are also many exotics - because they will grow here, because they are appropriate for this environment, and for aesthetic reasons (and to satisfy the desires of a plant mad gardener).

The constraints of the site - very wet, saturated clay particularly in winter, surrounding woods that reduce direct sunlight, a cold microclimate that retards plant growth in spring - limit plant choices and force a lot of trial planting just to see what will thrive.

I don’t fool myself into thinking this experiment is a wholly idealistic, or scientific, endeavor. It’s a practical matter of time and money. I can garden only on weekends, and money to purchase plants and pay for labor is limited. My ultimate goal is a garden that is relatively self-sufficient.

Why Here?

We fell in love with the house and its location. A 1965 mid-century reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright in his Usonian phase, the house and its secluded location amid 19 acres of preserved woodland are what originally attracted us. Designed by a notable local architect, William Hunt, the house has a wall of windows at the back overlooking the main part of the garden and surrounding woodland. It clearly refers to both Japanese and Arts and Crafts design conventions, both of which are associated with naturalistic settings. Visually, the house is an unobtrusive presence from outside; its gray wood siding and low profile blend easily into the forested location. The house is so unobtrusive, one contractor we hired told me he had been driving past for 20 years but had never realized a house was here.

View Out to Garden

From inside, the ample fenestration brings the outside in, even in winter when a surrounding snow cover can provide special delight. The hope for a new future, the tranquility of the wooded location, and the immediacy of the experience of nature won out. We bought, and moved the four miles from Rosemont.

While we were thinking about moving, I did have doubts. What had been a view across an open field in 1965 had become congested with 50-year-old cedars, and the change to a mixed hardwood forest was immanent. I counted trees and guessed we would need to cut down 80 or 90, mainly weedy cedars, just to get less than an acre of open space.

I understood that making a garden in this place would not be easy, and I certainly regretted giving up my Oudolf-inspired garden in the nearby hamlet of Rosemont, but I felt up to making a change. An opportunity for a new garden!

Garden Practice

A naturalistic garden seemed most appropriate to the style and location of the house. Anything remotely formal, other than some topiary shapes to provide sharp contrast with the surrounding wildness or some kind of symbolic structure or artwork, would be out of place. I started by planting directly into the existing matrix of plants, figuring the weeds I already had would suppress potential new weeds lurking in the seed bank and maintain existing stable groundcover as I developed the garden over the next several years. (I quickly discovered that many of the existing 'weeds' consisted of highly desirable Carex communities, Scirpus, Juncus, Sysirinchium, Lobelia syphilitica, fleabane.) My aim is to develop communities of more desirable and ornamental plants that will form a new weed-suppressing matrix.

Planting Directly into the Existing Matrix - Summer 2006

I took help wherever I could find it, mainly from books. For sizing the garden area and establishing spatial relationships to the house, John Brookes' many books on garden design were extremely valuable. For approaches to plant selection and planting design my main sources were Oudolf and Kingsbury's 'Planting Design: Gardens in Time and Space', Kingsbury's 'The New Perennial Garden', Hansen and Stahl's 'Perennials and their Garden Habitats', 'Dynamic Landscape: Design, Ecology and Management of Naturalistic Urban Planting' edited by Nigel Dunnet, King and Oudolf's 'Gardening with Grasses', and Rick Darke's 'The American Woodland Garden: Capturing the Spirit of the Deciduous Forest' and 'The Encyclopedia of Ornamental Grasses'. There are many others, of course. Most of my sources were European simply because I could find the information I needed there, Rick Darke being one notable exception. (One might ask what this says about much of American garden writing.)

Plants remain standing over winter to provide visual interest and as a framework to display ice and snow. In the early spring I burn plants I can safely put flame to (historically appropriate prairie practice) and cut down the rest using electric hedge clippers, leaving the remains in place as a mulch and to gradually increase the organic content of the soil. This leaves a rather dismal view for a few weeks until the early irises and grasses begin to provide some visual interest.

The Garden after the Early Spring Slash and Burn

Results

After three years of work planting, building stone walls, and this year making a small pond, the garden is nowhere near completion but it does achieve moments of beauty, and it is thriving without the kind of intensive intervention typical of more conventional gardens. I have found that many perennials have a hard time getting established in my stressful environment; large plants, though they are expensive, have much greater success.

Moments of Beauty

Although my conditions are not conducive to successful seeding, I've found that many seeds do germinate in the second year following random broadcasting and I now have communities of iron weed (Vernonia noveboracensis), cup plant (Silphium perfoliatum), and Great Blue Lobelia (Lobelia syphilitica) established from seed. I'm still lacking sufficient groundcover plants to complete the matrix planting, and that is a challenge I will continue to focus on next year.

Some weeds do still make life difficult, especially Japanese stilt grass (Microstegium vimineum), which usually covers virtually the whole garden by season's end. This year I got the upper hand (I think). Using repeated cutting and hand pulling, I prevented most of the grass from seeding. Since it's an annual, I hope to see less of it next year, and to entirely eliminate it in in a few years.

Principles

So... these are the principles I'm using to develop my garden:

• Consider the culture and history of a site before designing a garden
• Use plants appropriate to existing ecology and environmental conditions
• Establish self-perpetuating plant communities, keeping watch for overly competitive or invasive behavior
• Intervene minimally
• Don't use supplemental watering (except when needed to establish new plantings)
• Don't fertilize - use only compost and allow organic matter from previous years to decay in place (unless diseased)
• Make aesthetically appropriate design decisions (make it pleasing to the senses)
• Provide habitat for wildlife

Please don't take offense. This list is for me, not you - to help me keep on track, measure progress, and decide when change is needed.

Garden Diary: Two Exotic Groundcovers

Sweet woodruff (Galium odoratum) and myrtle (Vinca minor) make a striking carpet at this time of the year. The myrtle has been in bloom for about a month. Only in the past week have the colonies of Sweet woodruff popped into bloom. Both are considered invasive exotics, but at Federal Twist they coexist happily, seemingly without affecting the native carexes, the numerous seedling trees, or the highly invasive, but native, poison ivy.

I know the myrtle was introduced over 40 years ago because William Hunt's architectural plans called for extensive plantings to control erosion on the steep banks surrounding the house, which was built in 1965. I welcome its periwinkle blue flowers every spring, especially in the wilder woods in front of the house. I have no idea when the Sweet woodruff was introduced; it has formed several distinct colonies that, I admit, seem to grow a little larger each year.

The thick mats of mixed myrtle and Sweet woodruff remind me of William Martin's "layering" planting technique, as he described it in his Vista lecture recently in London (see post below). At his well known garden, Wigandia, in Australia, he gardens on the side of a volcano, in soil and environmental conditions vastly different from mine. His technique does not involve horizontal, visual layering of plants as in a border, but rather vertical layering. He covers the ground thickly with a low, even "thuggish" (to use his word) kind of planting, then grows the larger, more structural plants through the layer covering the ground. I was happy to hear his description because I'm trying to use a similar technique in my garden on Federal Twist Road.

The mat of Sweet woodruff and myrtle is one preexisting example of this "layering" technique given to me by Edith Howeth, the first and previous gardener at Federal Twist. I'm experimenting with other combinations in the main garden at back, where conditions are different - more open, very wet, and sunny.

Memory in the Garden

I've cut down the trees and created a circular clearing in the woods. With views into the forest all around, my new garden has to be a close friend with 80-foot white pines, hickories, red maples, beech, cedar - deer, wild turkey, foxes, frogs - all kinds of flora and fauna. And it has to thrive in wet clay.

Wet Prairie

I've chosen to make a variation on a wet prairie, an ecological model appropriate to my site, and one that probably can sustain the visual and aesthetic interest I want. I'm not at all certain wet prairies have existed in New Jersey in historical times, but I do know prairies existed in the east of the North American continent. Peter Heus' admirable description of a wet prairie remnant in West Virginia is one well documented source.

Mine will be maintained by cutting and periodic burning, with no soil improvement other than what the plants, animals and insects do themselves. I'm using many natives, but also exotics if they grow well in my conditions, and taking a wait and see approach, letting the plants find their favored positions, and intervening only to keep harmony. It's to be a garden "in tune with nature." In regard to sense of place, that's my garden's story from a practical and ecological perspective.

Sense of Place

But sense of place is broader than environmental or ecological setting. The garden also exists in cultural and historic contexts, and I do want to consider those aspects of place, in a subtle way that does not shout for attention - and certainly not in a pedantic or dry academic fashion.

The word “historic” is freighted with negative connotations for many and can be off-putting. In a lecture on history in the garden, given as part of the Vista lecture series in London (see this link), noted UK landscape architect Kim Wilkie suggests that substituting the word "memory" for "history" makes it much easier to think about these issues in more personal terms: "I think what we need to do is understand what a landscape is about, the ghosts that are there, the feelings that are there, the memories that are there ... It is looking at the daubs and the tears and the hieroglyphs and allowing that, hopefully, just to give you the charge to continue the story..." Wilkie's analogy to an old manuscript is appropriate. Like a palimpsest, it carries virtually invisible messages from the past.

Blue Jingle

The rock around here is called "blue jingle." It has a bluish color and makes a metallic clink when you strike one stone against another. The scientific name is argillite, a sedimentary stone formed at the bottom of ancient lakes in the Triassic period, about 200 million years ago. (You can see it in the photo on the right, exposed in the bed of Lockatong Creek.) This stone does not fracture easily, and it is extensive in the geology of this area, making for water supply aquifers that yield comparatively little water. More important for gardeners, it slows percolation of water into the soil, keeping rainwater and snow melt near the surface, and creating a huge amount of runoff during storms. As a consequence of the qualities and distribution of blue jingle, we garden in shallow, wet soil on Federal Twist Road. Streams run full, like torrents, after heavy rain.

So the conditions under which I garden and my plants must grow are ordained by the geological history and the climate of this place. I accept this and work with it.

History and Culture

White Europeans have lived in these hills for over 350 years; they have left many artifacts. They cleared their fields of stones, making long, intersecting stone rows that separated the fields. These rows extend throughout the surrounding woods today. My property is bounded by long, capacious rows of argillite, which I'm using to build dried laid stone walls that are, in a real sense, monuments to the local geology, and to the European settlers who first cleared the land of rocks to make it farmable.

The aboriginal people of this area, the Lenni Lenape, lived here for many thousands of years, far longer than we of European descent, yet left hardly a trace. It's too easy to forget their long stewardship of the land, and their gradual loss of their place and way of life. The absence of signs of their existence speaks loudly of how they lived and passed from here. Their memory should be marked by some silent sign.

So too the newcomers, the builders of our house, the Howeths, who asked a notable local architect, William Hunt, to design it in 1964. I have 35mm slides of William Hunt surveying the site just a few days before JFK was assassinated, and many others showing open fields dotted with small junipers, and the original landscaping. Little is left of that but the images, several trees planted around the house, and a carpet of myrtle that remains from that time.

My Garden’s Story

This is the rough material for my garden's story. As I learn to read the land, watch the movement of water over its surface, observe the changes in vegetation with increased sunlight, imagine how the land has changed over historic as well as geologic time, and learn more about the human past, I also have begun to see a design, an abstract structure emerging - first the circular shape of the clearing that is the main feature of the garden, then the lines, circles and rounded forms that signaled life in the forest - curved trails, straight stone walls, meandering paths, and the circular blot of a dead fire.

Garden Design

When I first started this garden I was not aware of its past, only of the shapes that work naturally here. Taking the great circle of the clearing in the woods as a pattern, I repeated it at different scales to begin to create structure.

The simple plan shows the garden design emerging from repetition of lines, curves, and circles. The two circles shown in violet at the front of the house, one of gravel, the other of dry laid stone, screen the entrance and provide raised areas with relatively dry planting conditions.

These are reflected in the long curved path running from the front of the house around to the main garden area in the back.

The curved path is reflected, in turn, in the curve of another stone wall to the left, running around the end of the house and across the back, all of this at the base of a mound on which the house rests, to keep it above the surrounding wetness. As you walk the path to the back, this curved wall opens the view to reveal the main garden space, and creates a kind of momentum pulling you along from front to back.

Across the garden from the house, a second curved stone wall (shown below), much lower than the one at the base of the house, visually encloses the garden space and helps define it as separate from the forest behind. The large dotted arrow on the plan indicates the most distant view out through the forest wall surrounding the garden but, in fact, all views are into forest.

At the back of the garden, opposite the pond and balancing it visually, could be a final feature that exists only in concept and is still subject to change. It could be a circle about 25 feet in diameter, with a flat stone perimeter perhaps three to four feet wide. The center of the circle would be planted with native Indian grass (Sorghastrum nutans). The stone would be argillite. This would be a visually prominent feature, and would acknowledge the people who originally inhabited this ridge above the Delaware.