Our Life in Gardens

by Joe Eck

  Most species form little rosettes of leaves not more than eight inches across, and sometimes much less, for every species seems occasionally to create a dwarf plant that is completely endearing, as tiny things are. Each leaf is only an inch or two long and as broad, and generally they emerge from the center of a fat, rounded corm that sits smugly on top of the compost—or ought to, if the plants are correctly potted and one expects a long life from them. With some, such as C. coum, old corms develop a dimple in the center, presumably to catch a precious drop or two of Mediterranean spring rain. But there are some, such as C. rohlfsianum and C. africanum, that shoot their sparse leaves outward from the central corm underground until they emerge at some distance from it, often on the very edges of the pot. Yet within that rough description, which covers most cyclamen, there are endless variations. Not so much of flower form, which certainly may vary in size or color or season of bloom, but of leaf. Leaves may be rounded or arrow-shaped, dark green, green with a finely etched zone of silver, all silver, or pewter-leaved. Some might even be called “leaden-leaved,” though such a description robs them of the lightness that is always the most salient characteristic of species cyclamen.

  There is one major exception to this general description. Even as a naturally occurring species, C. persicum is heftier, to perhaps a foot across, with marbled leaves three inches wide. But through selective breeding, it has reached Brobdingnagian proportions. It is the cyclamen you see in supermarkets, fattened with chemicals and swathed in tinsel, fleshy, out-of-shape, and destined for a very short life on a Christmas holiday table, or as an emergency hostess gift. Often these plants are as big as a potted azalea, and in colors far from the natural range of the genus, including ice white, brassy scarlet, sugary pink, and deep purple. There are even “picoteed” forms of some shade of pink or white marked with a stronger color at the edges of the petals. In our early years as gardeners, we often brought one home at Christmas, which we generally managed to keep blooming until spring by removing spent blossoms, fertilizing regularly, and growing it in a cold, sunny window. Quite cool, for no cyclamen on earth, even the overbred florist’s sorts, will last for long in temperatures that exceed 60 degrees in the daytime and 10 degrees less at night.

  But recently a race of miniature Persian cyclamen has become available, in the same color range as the giants, but much more appropriately cyclamen-like, with tufts of leaves eight inches wide, surmounted by delicate flowers on slender stems. Some are wonderfully fragrant, particularly the white ones. A few of these have been added to our collection, where, once carried over a summer dormancy and freed from fertilizer dependency, they assume a grace and character far closer to wild species than any giant Persian cyclamen can ever manage. One could make a collection just of them alone.

  Even more collectible are other species, for though the colors of the flowers stay within the white to pink to purple range (never red), within each species there is an astonishing variation of leaf form and patterning. Most common among these is C. hederifolium, but we also grow many in pots on the greenhouse bench where their flowering can extend from the end of August until well into November. Cyclamen hederifolium blooms well before its first leaves appear, producing dozens of thin brown stems extending from the fat dark corms at soil level. The little white or pink bloom shows five swept-back petals revealing the puckered mouth of the perianth within, where bright yellow anthers are clustered. Just as the flowers fade the leaves begin to appear, rounded or heart-shaped, marbled or zoned, sometimes showing a shieldlike blazon, sometimes a feathered patterning of lighter green at the edges, and sometimes all silvered over. From Ellen Hornig at Seneca Hills, we also have two plants with dark green, very narrow arrow-shaped leaves, a variant that rarely shows up even in a large sowing of seed.

  Though C. hederifolium is marginally hardy for us, all the rest are not. We know, for we have tried. And sometimes we have stumbled, accidentally and with great pain. More than fifteen years ago, when Nancy Goodwin was still running her remarkable nursery, Montrose, in Hillsborough, North Carolina, we got from her a single seedling of C. africanum, which we grew into a very large corm as wide as an apple that produced masses of small pink flowers every October. One year, we set it pridefully atop a stone wall outside the greenhouse, the better to enjoy its beauty. In the night, the temperature dropped slightly below freezing, and the next morning it was a mess of slimy leaves, its cell walls shattered by ice crystals it could never have experienced in its North African home. We learned a lesson then, in that painful and unforgettable fashion that is every gardener’s hard experience, and from which, more than perhaps anything, good gardening is born. Happily, however, we whimpered to Nancy about our loss (begged, you might say) and another came to us in the mail as a gift.

  Cyclamen africanum is another of the species that blooms naked, with leaves that follow and persist until spring. They are of such great beauty that they offer a reason to admire the plant just for them. Also, when the flowers are spent, the plants have the curious knack of curling their bloom stems under their leaves and inward, like tiny pig’s tails. Minute cyclamen seedlings then sprout at the edges of every pot, and even on the greenhouse floor. Fortunately, even the tiniest are apt to show their identity from the beginning, and the tiny, pea-sized corms can be carefully dug out with the blade of a knife and potted on.

  When you have two of anything you treasure, you are on the way to a collection. In our gardening life, this rule has proven true many times, but never so clearly as with species cyclamen. We have pots not only of C. hederifolium and C.africanum , but also of C. balearicum from the islands off Spain, C. creticum, C. cyprium, and C. libanoticum. Cyclamen rohlfsianum, from Libya, is especially precious, for though its slender, fragrant pink flowers born in autumn and even its leaves are sparse, they are large for a species cyclamen, and they look like little hands, with five distinct lobes. We have three pots, each with a different pattern of silver marked over the green leaves.

  We are still some distance from having all the species in the genus, though we make up for that gap by growing many forms of C. coum, perhaps the most variable in the whole genus, new forms appearing in nearly every random seedling. As we find new forms, we do not seem able to give up any of the others, some of which have flourished here for fifteen years. Under good conditions, a cyclamen corm can live practically forever. We muse sometimes about how odd it is that just those conditions can occur in southern Vermont, so very far from the countries in which our plants variously originated.

  THE DAFFODIL MEADOW

  WHEN WE FIRST CAME TO VERMONT, building a house was about the last thing we had in mind. We wanted to buy a house, and we could easily picture exactly what it would look like. It would have some land, of course, because we intended not only to make an ornamental garden but also to raise vegetables, and we wanted to keep animals of all sorts, dogs and cats but also poultry and pigs and possibly even cows. We also hoped our land would have woods, enough that you could get lost in them, or at least have that impression. But there should also be an open, sunny meadow, or maybe two, one kept mown and one left to wild asters and goldenrod and brambles for gathering blackberries. As for the house itself, it should be old, at least two hundred years old, with as many of its original features preserved as possible—wide-planked floors, working fire-places in most rooms, heavy timbered beams, and small-paned windows. This picture could be elaborated on endlessly, but that was the general idea.

  It was not a realistic one. For though we had some resources—mostly supplied by kind parents—they were still far too limited for the house we had come to Vermont to find. We were the frustration of many Realtors, but one actually seemed touched by our optimism and promised, as he put it, “to do my damnedest.” His name was Stub Burnet, and he is now dead. He was old even then, but he chose to travel around on a moped, and we now think he had a secret plan for us. He wanted us to build because land was still plentiful then, but a house such as we wanted was not to be bought f
or our meager ready funds. One day he putted up to the house we were renting and insisted we see a property. “No house. But lots of advantages. Twenty minutes is all you’ll spend to look, anyhow.” So the three of us piled into our little Honda, and he directed us to Readsboro, where, incidentally, we had been determined not to look at anything. Halfway up North Hill was “the piece,” about twenty-three acres. It had plenty of woods, it had a sunny meadow far back into the property, and it also had the one thing we had dared not put on our list, a running stream. Besides, it was cheap even for that time, five hundred dollars an acre. “OK,” we said to Mr. Burnet on the spot, “we’ll build.”

  Two years of exhilarating misery followed that rash commitment, during which the house somehow got finished and the garden got begun. But it was very much a little house buried in the woods. Beautiful as the old beeches, maples, and ash were, there was a feeling of claustrophobia around us, and we began to feel the need for light and air. And though shade gardens are wonderful things, they are not the whole of gardening, and we did want the whole. So we agreed with a neighbor, Jim Sprague, to cut a meadow in exchange for half the timber for his winter firewood. Now that we have been rural people for over thirty years, we realize that a large portion of the deal was pure kindness on Jim’s part. He was a crusty old fellow, with social prejudices that sometimes took our breath away. But he liked us and liked our land, which he had known for over seventy years, and liked the idea of clearing a meadow out of the woods. So we marked a roughly square section of about two acres, comfortably far from the new house to leave a fringe of woods, and Jim set to work. We did not even once pause to get sentimental about the splendid old specimens being felled. We had a plan.

  Part of that plan was not to establish a meadow of naturalized daffodils. A meadow, certainly, maybe for livestock, and indeed, the first year we tethered two Nubian goats there to graze the thin grass which came that spring from a first seeding. They drove us crazy with their bleating, got loose over and over, and finally found their way into the stew pot. We cannot really remember when we decided that the purpose of that meadow, all along, had been to establish a fenced vegetable garden at the top, and plant the rest—probably about an acre and a half—with daffodils. For like so many other features of the garden that have given us great pleasure, it just seems always to have been, suggesting an almost Platonic assumption about our garden and our presence here, one of an infinite number of possibilities that may be realized in this space and matter. Just as we cannot imagine the incarnations that came long before, we will not obviously see those that will come long after. But it is a daffodil meadow now, at least for our fraction of an instant here, though that is already half a lifetime.

  Having daffodils in the garden seems an almost elemental need in gardeners. And not just a few daffodils, but as many as you can possibly cram in. It would be interesting to know what nongardening readers make of Wordsworth’s great poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.” But no gardener can fail to respond to his “host of golden daffodils.” A host is certainly the right idea, since the richest experience with daffodils is when there are more of them than you could possibly count or even estimate.

  “But how many are here?” the few visitors who see them at their peak on a raw April day always need to ask. “How many did you plant in the beginning?” Those are complicated questions because the first planting, of around two thousand bulbs, occurred at least ten years ago, possibly even fifteen. The initial idea was to border the wide mown grass path that runs through the meadow with drifts on either side, from the point at which it leaves the woods and proceeds up to the vegetable garden gate. Since the lane is about five hundred feet long, two thousand was certainly no more than a few, though that number would have overwhelmed a garden of average size. Every October in the following years, we added a minimum of two thousand more, and early on we began to divide congested clumps from the garden below to fill up bare patches in late spring when the daffodils were still in leaf, since bulbs transplanted while they are growing settle in readily, if the work is done carefully and in rainy weather. So the easiest answer to that question is “Oh, there are now maybe twenty-five thousand.” At best, this must pass as a reasonable estimate.

  Our daffodil plantings have now reached the edges of the meadow where it meets the woods. In the beginning, the idea was to plant each variety in an elliptical drift perpendicular to the path itself, each drift interlocking with its neighbor. That way, we could always identify each variety, and we could blend pale or deep yellow sorts with cream or white ones, and of course include the occasional double or pink form. As we have expanded outward we have adhered faithfully to that idea, because in any planting some underlying principle of order should exist—else the whole fabric will fall into a nervous chaos.

  For that reason, we would never plant the inexpensive blends that nurserymen sell. They are simply leftovers from Holland bulb auctions all tumbled together, bought cheap and sold cheap. Worse, though it is a nice feature of daffodils that they bloom over a long season, here usually from the first week of April to the last week of May, each variety doesn’t bloom that long. For there are early, mid-season, and late varieties, and each flowers according to its genetically programmed time. In the dooryard garden, that sequence is wonderful. But in a mass planting it isn’t so wonderful, since early ones will pass before mid-season ones bloom, and both will linger in shabby completeness just as the late ones open. That results in a mess. So when we make additions to the daffodil meadow, we confine ourselves to mid-season sorts. For any others, such as the lovely and very late heirloom-pink ‘Mrs. R. O. Back-house’ or the wonderful, long-cultivated double white called ‘The Bride’ (which actually will bloom in June if hot weather does not cause it to wither first), a place must be found in a remote and sequestered area off to the meadow’s side or in the garden down below.

  From the beginning, we have bought only the sturdiest old varieties for our meadow, and that is a practice we would strongly recommend to anybody. There is certainly always something wonderful about studying any daffodil close up, especially when it is an heirloom variety or one of the rarest new cultivars, with, for example, a corolla of clearest pink or lime green, an unusually neat arrangement of perianth, or a celebrated fragrance. We would never forgo that pleasure, and so each year we buy three bulbs, or perhaps five, of ten or so different varieties from Dave Burdick, who specializes in both classes. Those are potted up singly, sent through a winter chill in the bulb closet, and brought out in March to develop in the greenhouse. When they are in flower, they are set on the kitchen windowsill to study and to memorize. Just as they finish blooming, they are accustomed to outdoor living, and then, after daffodil season is done, each is slipped into a spot in the garden for future bloom.

  But never in the meadow. For many of the most sought-after daffodil varieties are expensive, either because they are new breakthroughs or because they have been painstakingly rediscovered and multiplied. Many are also simply too fragile to compete with rough grass. Fortunately, however, there are plenty of wonderful ones to be had cheap, and the cheapest are often the sturdiest and the best for naturalizing.

  So over almost thirty years our garden has become a sort of daffodil democracy, with each in its place but none lower than the other. The rarest daffodil on the market, at perhaps one hundred dollars or more a single bulb, will find a spot along the rose path, close to us for frequent admiration, and there it will probably multiply. But even the most beautiful of those couldn’t rival the sturdy, snow-white ‘Empress of Ireland’, an old variety that has multiplied abundantly in the meadow, though always confined to its own personal drift. We’d be bereft without the annual reappearance of ‘Ice Follies’, its flattened face beginning pale yellow and fading to white, or ‘February Gold’, which we never see until April, but welcome always for its perky flowers of the deepest daffodil yellow. All these old varieties, and others, are sure to increase with little care, and that means they will always
offer what daffodils should, the first abundance of the gardening year.

  FORCING BRANCHES

  IN THE MIDDLE OF JANUARY, almost always, there comes a brief period of mild days so predictable from year to year that it has a name like any other season: the January Thaw. Those days are a tease, really, for the cruelty of February still lies before us, and even March can go out like the lion it came in as. But for a few days rain might fall, snows melt, and even night temperatures hover around 20 degrees, which any seasoned Vermonter would consider balmy. Our little stream roars, and we are lured out into parts of the garden we have not visited for two months because the drifts have been so deep. Our garden blood stirs, as surely as must the blood of our two tortoises, buried deep in the greenhouse earth to sleep out the winter. But they don’t stir. Their pinched, nostrilled snouts never appear aboveground, and ripe strawberries and slugs remain in their dreams. We are different from them.

  Here in Vermont, the January Thaw does not hurry winter along, for we must still be in thrall to it for two or even three more months. If we lived in the coastal regions of the next state below us, Massachusetts, we might actually poke in a few pansies during these mild days or even plant a row of peas. But that would be quite foolish here, and so we continue to subsist on an indoor diet of forced paperwhite narcissus, supermarket cyclamen (the dwarf ones that proved fragrant and are saved from year to year), and our carefully cosseted collection of camellias. Later in the month, the jasmine in the winter garden will bloom, scenting the house with its magic fragrance.

  These are all greenhouse flowers, and we could have more, by choosing from shrubs and vines that flower naturally in warm climates in winter. But to have flowers from the garden, only cheating will do. Cheating is a harsh word. “Forcing” is hardly less a one. But we engage in that activity every January, not to delude ourselves that spring is here, but only to secure a fleeting glimpse of it. When winter closes down again, the January Thaw will seem as much a distant memory as summer does. So we make the most of this briefest of all seasons. On treks through the garden, we are aware that buds have swollen and even twigs and branches have taken on a fullness they did not show for two months before. Briefly, the sap has risen, and though it will surely find its way back underground as soon as temperatures fall, now is the time to harvest branches of flowering shrubs and trees for forcing.