by Joe Eck
Chiefly for this reason, barberries were valuable plants to early North American colonists, providing a condiment rich in vitamin C that was also helpful in digesting fatty meats and often useful in concealing less than fresh flavors. The plant also grows well in dry, rocky ground without much attention, and so would thrive at the edges of gardens hard-won from stony forest soils. The first barberries therefore entered North America as agricultural and therapeutic plants, and have managed to stick around ever since. So every despised plant in fields, hedgerows, and ditches could trace its lineage back to some early New England dooryard garden. We once mentioned all this lore to a dear old friend—a many-generations-back Vermonter who had paused scornfully before our barberry—and she replied, “Well, in those days they had to eat just about anything they could find.”
We have only this one bush of B. vulgaris, but there are many other berberis in the garden. Zone 6 is pretty much the cut-off point for the most elegant members in the family, the beautiful evergreen forms such as B. wilsoniae, B. julianae, or B. ×stenophylla. But B. thunbergii thrives here in many forms, all of them hardy to Zone 4 at least. First discovered in western China by Carl Peter Thunberg (1743–1828), the green-leaved species has produced a swarm of beautiful progeny, all of which are very valuable garden plants. The burgundy-leaved form, atropurpurea, grows to about five feet tall and is effective as a contrast to the antique roses. Its pygmy form, ‘Atropurpurea Nana’ (often called ‘Crimson Pygmy’), is planted at regular intervals in our perennial garden, where its dense mounds of growth to two feet tall and its brooding, purple leaves make everything around it look prettier. On the woodland walk there are three specimens of B. thunbergii ‘Aurea’, with bright gold leaves that introduce sunshine to that area even when no sun is shining. Several years ago we were given a single specimen of ‘Helmond Pillar’ by Dan Hinkley, with red leaves and amazingly upright growth. It is now about four feet tall but less than a foot wide, and is wonderful as a vertical marker at the beginning of a secondary path in the rhododendron garden. But our favorite among selections of B. thunbergii may well be ‘Rose Glow’, with new foliage splashed pink and cream and then fading as it ages to red. A low hedge of it runs along the foundation of the winter garden, providing a fascinating backdrop to the vivid annuals grown there in summer. Salvia horminum in the clear blue form called ‘Cambridge Blue’ looks particularly fine in front of it, but so has Cuphea lanceolata, with scarlet, purple-centered flowers that look like the face of a tiny bat, or perhaps Mickey Mouse.
Sometimes we have a fantasy that eventually the forests will reclaim our garden, beginning perhaps at the far edges. One by one the outlying sections of it will have to be abandoned, and the forest that we disturbed when we came here will steadily move forward. Some catastrophe may even eliminate the house itself, and then there would be no reason why the encroaching woods should not come up to its very foundations. All this may happen, for gardens are fragile things created out of the will and the energy of their makers, and domestic gardens such as ours, with no great house at its center, are not the kind that get preserved by organizations like the Garden Conservancy. But this image of eventual reclamation does not distress us, and we are amused to think that certain sturdy things—lilacs, vinca minor, and our B. vulgaris—will be here long after everything else has vanished. It was here before us, and if barberries can laugh, it may well have the last one.
BIENNIALS
GARDENERS QUICKLY LEARN that the neat divisions of the plant world into trees, shrubs, sub-shrubs, perennials, and annuals is far tidier than it is accurate. So much depends on where one lives. For shrubs can grow into small trees, perennials can be annuals, shrubs can be perennials, and “annuals” can be almost anything that is planted for one season with the expectation that it will not return the following spring. Nowhere is this classification more confusing than with biennials. Technically, they are all plants that require two full seasons to mature, building up reserves of leaf and root for the first one and flowering the second. But some, if encouraged by good culture and deadheaded promptly to prevent seed production, can slide into the fuzzy category of “weakly perennial,” returning for at least a second season of bloom, and possibly a third, though it is seldom as strong as the first. Others, if started early and bred to do it, can function essentially as true annuals, flowering the first season from a late winter or very early spring sowing. Then there are some, such as clary sage (Salvia sclarea) or Canterbury bells (Campanula medium), that may actually be “triennials,” producing strong rosettes of basal growth for two years and then flowering magnificently the third. And where, precisely, one puts those plants that may take scores of years to get their vegetable feet beneath them before soaring into bloom, like agaves or bamboos, depends a bit on one’s expected life span, though botanically speaking, they are “monocarpic,” meaning that after they flower and produce seed they die, even at a very great age. This much is certain, however, though novice gardeners sometimes suppose it: biennials are not plants that flower every other year.
Within the group of plants classed as biennial are some of the most treasured in gardens, not for their rarity, certainly, but for their homely, simple charm. Usually, they are considered “cottage flowers,” and their ranks include hollyhocks, forget-me-nots, dame’s rocket, sweet william, Saint Barbara’s weed, and foxgloves. Like all cottage flowers, they seem to carry resonances far beyond their individual beauty, suggesting fine June country mornings with casement windows flung open to bright sun and the sound of bees at work. Somewhere near them there will always be an old, well-waxed table spread with good, fresh things, and the chance to linger in the garden, to work perhaps, or just to sit and stare. These flowers’ very names are redolent of antique association, and even the most snobbishly Latinate of gardeners would think something was lost if they were called, respectively, Alcea rosea,Myosotis sylvatica , Hesperis matrionalis, Dianthus barbatus, Barbarea vulgaris, or Digitalis purpurea.
Despite the tug at the heart exercised by many biennial plants, they are seldom seen in gardens in all the perfection they can achieve, for several reasons. First, many gardeners are enamored of permanence, accepting the false assumption that you can buy a perennial and put it in the ground and expect years of beauty with little effort. “Aunt Alice had this beautiful patch of bearded iris and it bloomed every year. She didn’t do a thing to it!” Well, perhaps, though Aunt Alice may have been a better gardener than she ever let on. Very few perennials will flourish indefinitely without appropriate seasonal attention, and the very few there are, such as peonies and . . . well, peonies . . . hardly make up a garden, or the excitement that may be had from it. One must go to the trouble, if indeed “trouble” is the right word, of overseeing the growth of plants and bringing them into flourishing leaf and stem long before one sees any blossoms at all. Biennial plants may thus be a sort of benchmark of committed gardeners, who will have ceased to think of plants, in Russell Page’s telling phrase, as “so much flowering hay.” They will ask you to admire the pale, gray-green rosettes of a lusty juvenile foxglove, or a swarm of thick-clumped, paddle-leaved forget-me-nots, a mere green carpet beneath the shrubbery, and they will say, “Think how fine they will be . . . next June!”
The pleasures of anticipation always depend on careful planning, and with biennials, that may be the big problem. Most biennials require twice the effort asked by any annual plant, but they are no more permanent as additions to the garden. Many annuals—not always the nicest—can be expected, marigold-fashion, to give two or even three months of nonstop bloom. Few biennials will flower over so long a period, and then they will die ungracefully, either ripening seed the gardener hopes to save for another flowering (two years hence) or simply needing to be cleared off. Either way, their shabby post-bloom occupancy in the garden or the bare patch they leave behind—usually in high summer when things need to look their best—can amount to a sort of garden hangover, causing one to feel one bought their pleasure at too dear a p
rice. If their great beauty, and beyond that the resonances they carry of Grand-mother’s garden (or even of a fanciful grandmother’s garden remembered only from the childhood books illustrated by Tasha Tudor), did not justify the effort they require, then certainly biennials would be grown only by cranky, obsessive gardeners who also cultivate rock gardens and maintain a greenhouse full of species orchids.
Probably the best biennials will always grow in very large old country gardens that are not given to much tidying up. In them, seven-foot-tall hollyhocks might grow against the weathered siding of a barn, showing saucers of pale pink or peach or cherry red or even black-red, so beautiful that one hardly notices their shabby leaves encrusted with rust disease, to which all forms of Alcea rosea are so sadly prone. (Alcea ficifolia and A. pallida, though not so varied in the color of their flowers, are rust-resistant.) Rust and the attendant defoliation, leaving bare shanks behind, is somehow acceptable in the high grass out by the barn, though not in the garden, up close. Dame’s rocket can make its gentle way at the edges of woods or in partly shaded ditches, competing with weeds and making them glorious in mid-June, with three-foot-tall branched candelabra of little, four-petaled flowers in beautiful shades of purple, pink, and white, blended together like the colors of an old, much-bleached housedress. The smell is better even than that of fresh laundry, a rich, spicy, powdery sweetness elusive to Chanel or any other parfumier.
Forget-me-nots will colonize almost anywhere that is not overly worked, as, for example, under old shrubs or in flower borders where a reasonable amount of ground is kept clear by light cultivation. Even as infant plants they are cute, with down-facing, fuzzy green mouse ears, and with thick clusters of buds by late April or early May. Their limpid blue flowers throughout early summer justify their popular name, for seeing them, who ever could forget them? Pink-flowered ones and pure white ones occasionally show up in old gardens, and we have thought that the white one particularly ought to be isolated to come true from seed, to have its fresh icy coolness in a patch of ferns. But we, like so many gardeners, have a strong preference for any flower that is blue, particularly so limpid and winsome a blue as forget-me-nots. Even there, however, we have noticed that there are blues and there are blues. On our acid soil, flowers are the color of a pale June sky, though on more alkaline soils, they approach a deep cerulean blue. Either way they are lovely, particularly as each flower, of whatever tint, is set off by a golden eye. We are also not the first to notice that forget-me-nots are indicators of soil conditions, for when they are pale, more lime is asked for, and when they are rich blue, acid-loving shrubs will need some help. If ever the leaves are pink or purple in early spring, then there are serious problems, either of drainage or of trace elements all plants need to grow well. Old gardeners considered forget-me-nots to be as much instruments that measure the health of a garden as flowers, and old gardeners were seldom wrong.
Among biennial plants, foxgloves probably are the reigning queen, not just for the cunning shape of each individual flower, which simply asks for an index finger to be stuck in it, but more for the great vertical rods of bloom, a shape always precious in any garden where so much is flat or rounded. In the genus Digitalis, to which all foxgloves belong, there are many wonderful garden plants, almost all of which waver uncertainly between being biennial and being weakly perennial. But the most loved is certainly D. purpurea. It is native to much of central and northern Europe, but it has in some sense been appropriated by the English, in whose woods and gardens it flourishes. In its native form, it produces three-foot-tall, slightly bowed spires that are thickly hung with deep pink bells all on one side of the stem. Many English gardeners are sentimental about their wildflowers, and they will tell you that is the only true foxglove, though in fact there are better garden forms, all of which have more than a tincture of American blood in them. Half a century ago, a single plant was discovered in this country bearing pure white flowers on spires taller by about a foot than the wild form, with larger bells, somewhat more out-flaring, but most significantly, arranged all around its perfectly straight stem. It became the parent of the ‘Excelsior’ strain, which produces elegant, four-foot spires in early summer (five in good culture) in an unpredictable but always lovely range of shades from soft pink to white and ivory, the paler shades marked inside with freckles of tan and brown. Out of it have been bred other beautiful strains, some, like ‘Giant Primrose’, almost yellow, and the wonderful ‘Sutton’s Apricot’, which is pink faintly warmed by orange.
Though each year we plant a few flats of foxgloves in the shadier parts of the garden, white for preference and probably some descendant of the ‘Excelsior’ hybrids, many of the fox-gloves that bloom here early each summer are self-seeded plants, almost always appearing in places we would have planted foxgloves if we had thought of it. Over many generations some have reverted to the original one-sided form, and we do not find it homelier than the preferred garden varieties.
These and all other familiar biennial plants can be had in abundance in the right kind of garden, or with the right kind of effort. If a garden is large and perhaps a little relaxed around its edges, seed can be sprinkled, or even ripened plants thrown and scattered, to produce a reliable next generation. That is the good old country way, and it unquestionably produces the finest foxgloves, forget-me-nots, Hesperus, and hollyhocks. But such old-fashioned gardens are very far from most suburban plots, which are limited in extent and must—or at least should—be kept tidy at all times of the year. There is nothing particularly untidy or unattractive about a juvenile biennial, though it will not offer what is usually called “flower interest” that first year. One must wait for that, and a lack of space more than a lack of patience can make that rather hard. An easy solution is either to buy young plants in their second year, when they are preparing to flower, or to grow them in that mythical “out of the way place” all gardens are supposed to have, an extra row in the vegetable garden or behind the garage or wherever such very scarce space may be come by.
Foxgloves, forget-me-nots, and even hollyhocks transplant readily if a generous amount of earth is taken with each plant. The conditions under which transplanting of any kind should be done—a dank, cold drizzly day that only a gardener would find optimistic—are particularly important with biennials, which, after all, are intended to settle in where they have sprouted. In transplanting dame’s rocket, the weather makes no difference at all, for it cannot be done, even if you get up in drizzly rain in the dead of night. That plant will simply not comply, and so had best be scattered as seed in damp, wooded places in dappled light, and with hope in one’s heart. The cheerful part is that once one has succeeded, even with one plant, more are sure to appear.
Beyond all the obvious resonances of biennial plants, the most special one has perhaps become clear. They are as far from tidy, manicured, crisp-edged, freshly wood-chipped suburban gardens as one can possibly get. The values they carry, of ease, of abundance, of lightness of heart and settled history, are equaled perhaps only by distinguished old shade trees and the little bulbs that have seeded everywhere, even in every crack of the pavement. All seem to say, “We have been here a very long time, and we will be here for a while more.” In any garden, that is a voice much to be treasured.
BOXWOOD
WHEN WE FIRST BEGAN the garden we have occupied for thirty years, a boxwood came with us. There are yellowed snapshots of it sitting in its large clay pot in a sea of raw mud, just at the back corner of the house. It is still there, and has been for what startlingly amounts to just about half our whole lives. It may well survive us too, for boxwoods can live a long time. There are individual specimens in England and France, and in Virginia and Maryland, that can only be described as ageless.
Our particular boxwood, however, will need a bit of help. It may even need some sort of trust fund or endowment. But we should really say “they,” for there are fifteen, all grown from cuttings of the original plant, which are now as large as their parent. That i
s to say, about five feet wide and as tall. They are all English boxwoods, Buxus sempervirens, and any good general garden reference will tell you that it is reliably hardy “only to Zone 5, with protection.” In the beginning of our garden we tended to skip over that hardiness part—for North Hill is located squarely in Zone 4 (or at least used to be), and that seemed to eliminate so many wonderful shrubs and trees. We took our chances.
We are not sorry, for these sixteen boxwoods have never been more than lightly pruned in spring, and they have all grown into magnificent dark green pillows. Three of them, including the parent plant, form a sort of loose barrier or dividing point between a little terrace and the Rose Alley, just on the east side of the house. The others march in a regular rhythm up one side of a path planted with antique roses. They give form to that important section of the garden, for rosebushes, taken even at their best (without black spot and Japanese beetle and mildew and all that), never have much form of their own.
But they ask a lot from us. Specifically, each must be protected in winter by its own huge, clumsy wooden box. Burlap will not do, because it does not offer enough wind protection, and the biggest limit to the hardiness of boxwoods is not cold, but bitter wind and winter sun, both of which desiccate the leaves and twigs at a time when roots locked in frost cannot replace vital moisture. So the advice is often given to locate boxwoods on the north or west side of buildings, where shadows will fall on them all winter long. But that is no place for roses, and we wanted them growing together.