by Joe Eck
In the beginning, we simply used large crates we knocked together from any odd boards. But now the plants are so huge that we have to construct boxes in place over them, contraptions made of sheets of plywood held together by standard hooks and eyes, the kind on screen doors. It is a lot of work. And as we usually defer it until Thanksgiving, it is work generally undertaken with frozen fingers. But the alternative—to leave them to the mercy of our harsh climate without protection—would surely result in loss of much of the top growth, and even the death of the plants themselves. That is unthinkable.
We used to believe that there was no substitute for English box, but now we know there is. It isn’t the much hardier Korean box, Buxus microphylla var. koreana (now B. sinica var. insularis), also called “littleleaf box,” for we have also had plants of that from the garden’s beginning, rooted from a basket of hedge trimmings given to us by a friend. They now form a tidy little hedge around three sides of a small terrace. They are beautiful at all seasons, even when their foliage pigments display a warm golden brown with the arrival of cold weather. Most people object to that, however, and so a form that remains green all winter has been developed, appropriately called ‘Wintergreen’. It is also a very fast grower, excellent for low hedges, but its leaves are as small as most Korean box—hardly more than one-third inch wide and long, and so it cannot compare in nobility with true English box, the leaves of which are almost three times as large.
The best alternative to English box is one of the remarkable hybrids developed by Sheridan Nurseries in Ontario, Canada, beginning in the late 1960s. They are all crosses of B. sempervirens with the much hardier B. microphylla, and all have the word “green” in their name—’Green Gem’, ‘Green Mound’, ‘Green Velvet’, and ‘Green Mountain’. They are all excellent plants, but the first three are mounded and relatively slow-growing, and so are useful for low dividing hedges in parterres and ornamental potagers. The last, ‘Green Mountain’, is upright and attractively pyramidal, and it grows as rapidly as English box. It is perfect for freestanding specimens or for taller hedges. We have had plants in the garden here in all exposures for ten years without protection, and all have come through that many winters in good condition. That is more than we could say for B. sempervirens ‘Vardar Valley’, collected in a very cold part of Macedonia in 1934 and often praised not only for its hardiness but also for its hazy blue young foliage. Here at least, it has withstood winter cold no better than ordinary English box.
A beautiful boxwood developed at Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe, Illinois, sometimes called ‘Chicagoland Green’ and sometimes Buxus ×’Glencoe’, has done wonderfully here, never suffering a sign of winter damage. We have three plants from the original test plants sent out years ago, and from small rooted cuttings they have developed into upright, vase-shaped plants each about four feet tall and of great beauty. But their leaves are small, and their growth tends naturally to be in loose, open sprays—wonderful in its way—but not a look-alike for the box we love best. Their wood can also be brittle under heavy snow, so plants are best cinched up by heavy twine in late autumn. That is a good precaution to take with any boxwood left uncovered for winter, for it is heartbreaking, come spring, to find that a perfectly hardy specimen has been split apart by snow or ice.
Over the years, we have grown many other forms of boxwood, some of which have been quite satisfying, and some, duds. Buxus sempervirens ‘Graham Blandy’ captivated us originally by its rigid, upright growth, which in ten years reached a height of about five feet but was no more than eight inches thick. It was a startling vertical accent, and it was also so easy to protect, because burlap in many layers could simply be wound about its slender form. Still, it had an irritating habit of growing skinny side branches that splayed outward, spoiling its one reason for being. When it contracted a bad case of boxwood mite, we did not treat it, but simply chucked it.
All the suavity that a boxwood can bring to the open garden seems increased when it is grown in a pot. Over the years, we have accumulated several potted specimens, trimmed into large globes or pyramids that provide weight when used with groups of potted flowers, and quiet distinction when stood alone. (Since, in winter, all potted boxwoods ask is a cool, frost-free place to sleep, we are apt to accumulate more.) With patience, boxwoods can be trimmed into almost any shape, and so we also have three standards in pots, little mop-headed trees on slender stems. The smallest, now about thirty years old and only a foot and a half tall, is one of the original Korean box rootlings that just seemed to want to grow that way. Almost as old is a much larger standard of B. sempervirens ‘Vardar Valley’, the cultivar that disappointed us so in the open garden. In a beautiful old square terra-cotta pot, standing four feet tall and with a head as round as a basketball, it carries an air of quiet sophistication wherever it stands.
But our favorite of the three is a three-and-a-half-foot-tall standard of B. sempervirens ‘Elegantissima’, with small, oval creamy-white-edged leaves on dense, short twigs. It was given to us twenty years ago as a cutting by the late Marshall Olbrich, co-founder of Western Hills Rare Plant Nursery. It is both beautiful in itself and also a living reminder of a very dear friend. ‘Elegantissima’ is the tenderest and most fragile of all English boxwood varieties, and so we take especially good care of it, in the hope that we can leave it in our turn to someone else.
CAMELLIAS
IT IS NOT REALLY SURPRISING that Georg Josef Kamel (1661–1706) never saw even a dried herbarium specimen of a camellia. He was a Moravian apothecary, who in our eyes more than doubled the value of his calling as a Jesuit missionary by cataloging the medicinal plants of the Philippines, where he began to botanize in his late twenties. How many souls he may have saved for the Roman Catholic Church has not been recorded, at least on earth. But his brilliant botanical discoveries, sent to his English correspondent John Ray, were published by Ray in 1704, and constitute the first systematic study of the rich flora of the Philippines. They appeared under the Latinized form of his name, as was then customary—Camellus—which the great Linnaeus (born a year after Kamel’s death) assigned to the genus Camellia in tribute to Kamel’s work. Linnaeus was always gracious and free-handed with the honors that were his to bestow, and so Kamel’s ignorance of camellias matches that of many other distinguished botanists, such as Leonard Fuchs (1501–1566), to whom a living fuchsia would have seemed a miracle.
The genus Camellia contains approximately two hundred and fifty species, widely extended from northern India and the Himalayas throughout China and Japan and into Indonesia. They are among the oldest of cultivated plants, not only for tea, evidence of which exists well before the third millennium b.c., but also as a fermented “green food” that could be left in the ground all winter and then prepared with garlic, oil, and dried fish as part of the desperate attempt to fill the hungry gap between autumn’s plenty and spring’s abundance. The wood of camellia trees is strong, close-grained, and hard, making it suitable for carving into utensils and tools. Venerable, treelike plants also provide an unusually high grade of charcoal, if one can bear to think of them that way. The seeds of camellias, particularly C. japonica, produce oil of great medicinal and cosmetic value. In its various species, then, the camellia was so useful that its cultivation has been ensured from most ancient times to the present. And if, as eighteenth-century philosophers argued, beauty follows use, then the camellia is almost without compare among garden flowers, a fact that the earliest Asian literature noted.
Plants, like words in poetry, are both beautiful in themselves and also for the associations they trail behind, the histories they have in the world and in one’s own life. Our own history with camellias stretches back over thirty years, when we bought our first four plants in promising bud in early autumn at the old Heimlich’s Nursery, in Boston, and brought them back to pot up in Vermont. We bought the pots too, fine honeyed-orange ones that flared from the base to a roll at the top, one of which still remains with us and still holds a camel-
lia, though not any of the original ones. They were the blood-red, anemone-flowered ‘Professor Charles S. Sargent’, the old informal pink ‘Debutante’, the formal double ‘Alba Plena’ of stunning white, and ‘Pink Perfection’, another formal double with petals that looked as if they had been carved of the clearest inner parts of the shell of some sea mollusk.
Of those first four camellias we grew in Vermont, we would still defend three, leaving out perhaps only the redoubtable ‘Debutante’, the pink of which has a shade too much blue in it, and the flowers a little too much looseness. We regret not having kept the others, because when a camellia can be made happy it is happy forever, and thirty years is nothing in its life. But we moved on, to other plants, even to other camellias. When, from indifference or some minor unintended failure of theirs (or ours!), they grew poorly, or we simply got greedy for another pretty face and tossed them away, their individual beauty continued to tug at us, long past the grave. ‘Pink Perfection’ is doing that, though it has been twenty years since we had it in a pot.
The first camellias we grew in the ground at North Hill were part of our general conviction that whatever else our brutal newly adopted climate brought us, we would still have a bit of the mildness of San Francisco here in Vermont, however tiny it had to be. We wanted to step out the side kitchen door into that dewy freshness and flower, even if it was only one step, even though the real world out the front door was howling with sleety ice and bitter cold. So we designed a small winter garden protected by poured cement frost walls and with rich soil open to the living earth. Camellias were important there from the first, planted in the ground with a fine cherry-red leptospermum, a ceanothus pinned to the wall, jasmines of several sorts, tender rhododendrons, and even a Magnolia grandiflora, the very compact cultivar called ‘Little Gem’, because we thought it might be important, in a room hardly fourteen by twenty-four feet, to be thrifty with space.
Most of all that has gone now, as we shifted to new plant interests such as Daphne bholua, with its rich floral scent at Christmastime, or the gaunt old wisteria, a huge, ten-foot-tall bonsai in an old clay tub that occupies the coldest corner and will rain fragrant ivory flowers come late winter. But there will always be camellias there, and now some of them would be the envy of any established southern garden.
There’s an eight-foot-tall ‘Yuletide’, a sasanqua actually, with bleached-bone trunks and small, inch-long laurel-black leaves in which the flowers nestle, blood red and flattened around a boss of golden stamens. It is the first to bloom, and on a clear November day it smells gently of tea, a reminder that its near relative, Camellia sinensis var. sinensis, is the source of that ubiquitous beverage. Across from it is a Higo camellia, one of the so-called snow camellias of Japan, anciently cultivated because their relatively low stature, to five feet or so, allowed them to be covered by mountain snow until the mild weather of spring, when they bloom with unusual freedom. All Higo camellias are single, and ours, called ‘Yamato-nishiki’, is variegated, as the word “nishiki” always indicates, with rich carmine-red stripes staining in random widths its broad, rounded white petals. They begin by cupping a two-inch-wide boss of many stamens of the clearest golden yellow, which loosens into a sort of pillow as the petals flatten to reveal a pea-green eye, actually the fertilized ovules.
Midway down the house and across the fieldstone path from ‘Yamato-nishiki’ is a broad, four-foot-tall bush that bears the rather inelegant cultivar name ‘Berenice Boddy’. We always did think it would sound better if given a strong French pronunciation (bay-ray-niece bo-die), but the lady in question is known, having been the wife of the founder of one of the most remarkable camellia plantings in North America, Descanso Gardens in Los Angeles, where many fine camellias were hybridized. In a good year, Mme Boddy can produce hundreds of flowers from mid-September until the end of February. They are technically semi-double, which means that three rows of petals will overlap to produce a somewhat cup-shaped flower. They are of clear, luminous pink, the special quality given by washes of deep and light pink over a white, crinkled base.
The only other camellia in the winter garden is ‘Katie’, a very tall-growing upright variety that has now achieved ten feet in the highest far corner of the lean-to structure, and produces its flowers, visible from the open window over the sink, quite late for a camellia, usually not until February. They are formal doubles, with many petals laid in alternating layers to create a flattened, perfectly crafted flower that most people would imagine the ailing heroine of Dumas’s play La Dame aux Camellias to have worn. Poor ‘Katie’ has an almost embarrassing vigor, however, and must receive a severe annual pruning just after flowering to keep her from bursting through the roof into a world she would not find to her liking. But flowers are abundant as a result, and of a pretty bright pink, perhaps with a shade more blue in them than should be, without which ‘Katie’ would be put into real competition with our still-mourned ‘Pink Perfection’ (and to accommodate which, she may soon be shouldered aside).
Four mature camellia plants are hardly enough for a long winter, even if they are joined later by tender rhododendrons and azaleas, orchids, fragrant daphnes, jasmines, and wisteria, with the quiet comfort of our venerable standard bay tree and several old standard tubbed boxwoods tucked along the path. So we found we were acquiring new camellias, grown in pots that found winter lodgings sometimes in the winter garden, sometimes in the lower greenhouse, and once (with disastrous results, for camellias hate house temperatures maintained for the comfort of humans) in what we thought was a rather cold spot in front of the living room French doors. When we had acquired ten or so fine bushy plants in fifteen-inch clay pots, and come to love their extra flowers, always in the darkest time of our year, we realized that we had a collection—a passion, actually—that required attention. This happens often, and we have learned over the years not to ignore the signs. For that is where joy lies.
Finding a suitable place to over-winter a rather large collection of potted camellias turned out not to be so very difficult. Almost from the first construction of our simple house, a narrow little building connected it to the barn, providing a unified front and helping to gentle the precipitous slope down to the stream. We called it the woodshed though it never did much but float between the two larger structures, ripping away from the one and pushing against the other, and so we were cautioned by builder friends not to load it up with too much fire-wood. It therefore became a storage shed, which simply meant a place to put anything you could not find a place for otherwise. It housed breeding pigeons at one time, and a brood of guinea keets as they careened toward even more manic maturity. Mostly, however, it was a mess. And it continued to wiggle sideways, no matter how light a burden of domestic detritus it was asked to bear.
In aspect, this small building is hardly desirable for greenhouse space, for though its exposure is east-west, it is low and dark, and further, is shaded on the east side by the house and barn, and by a towering and much-treasured old yew tree on the west. For camellias, however, it seemed ideal, since they have the engaging quality of blooming when they are essentially dormant, in winter. They also demand only minimal heat—somewhere between 45 degrees at night and 10 degrees higher in daytime—which could be supplied by pipes beneath a paving of antique brick, which, in addition to being a pretty surface on which to stand the pots, served as a sponge, providing the plants with their only other winter requirement, enough humidity practically to grow moss on the windowpanes.
So far, thirty potted specimens, including a tea plant grown as bonsai, have found winter quarters in a space barely twenty by twelve feet. There is no way into it except through an outside door on the east side, which is hardly the first compromise we have made with what real estate agents call “accessibility.” But on a blustery winter day, there is something quite splendid about opening the heavy plank door and entering a world fecund with earth and mold and rich with flower, glowing against black-green leaves. We think, by the use of pressure-treated fo
ur-by-fours of varying heights stood on end, we can increase the number of our collection to perhaps fifty plants, maybe more. After that—so strong is our addiction—we are not sure quite what we will do.
COLCHICUM
SOMETIMES WE FIND AUTUMN a melancholy season. What we had eagerly anticipated a mere six months before—the first snowdrops, hosts of daffodils, a garden drenched with the scent of roses, the first fresh peas—has passed so quickly. And what lies ahead are shorter days, cold winds, snow and ice, a world bereft of color. So it is a happy fact that among the last flowers of our garden, a few seem almost to be the first flowers of spring. Crocus speciosus and C. sativus delight us with their limpid blue flowers centered by golden anthers, a late feast of beauty for us and a real one for the autumn bees. Along the conifer border, colchicum also begin magically to appear, studding bare ground with chalices of vibrant lilac magenta, just the color that looks best with tawny autumn leaves. A single bulb catches the eye from a great distance, and a full drift, in rich warm pink, with perhaps a tawny maple leaf or two caught among them, is the last best thing in the garden to look at.
We find it puzzling that colchicum are unfamiliar to so many gardeners, for the genus is rich in virtues. First of all, most thrive under a wide range of cultural conditions, from the severe winter cold of Zone 4 to the torrid summer heat of Zone 9. Possessing natural repellents, they are free of diseases, insect pests, and predators, including deer and rabbits. Though single bulbs can be breathtakingly costly, up to twelve dollars apiece, colchicum are exceptionally easy to divide. We began with twenty-five, and now perhaps there are two thousand along the front of the conifer border, all from divisions in early spring, just as the green snouts appear above ground, or in mid-summer when the leaves die down. It is easy and satisfying work, and our initial investment has paid huge dividends.