Our Life in Gardens

by Joe Eck

  We are hardly experts at forcing branches, for there are skilled florists who seem able to force almost anything, at any time, by carefully manipulated temperatures and light. Their produce fills whole lobbies of expensive hotels with tree-sized branches of apple, magnolia, cherry, and peach. Such feats are beyond our abilities, but there are some stalwarts that seem willing to open indoors when cut just about any time after the New Year, and probably the best of them is forsythia. It may be true in fact that branches of it, hung thickly with four-petaled, down-hanging flowers, are more beautiful in a vase indoors in February than outdoors in the garden in spring. This is particularly true of crosses between Forsythia suspensa and F. viridissima, such as ‘Karl Sax’ or ‘Lynwood’, the profuse, almost violently yellow flowers of which can be a visual affliction in hot spring sunshine. But indoors and out, we far prefer the paler, more gently colored forsythia. So we have planted ‘Vermont Sunrise’, an extremely hardy cultivar bred from northern Chinese species at the University of Vermont, to form a loose hedge about eight feet tall at the far edge of the daffodil meadow. It flowers late, just about the same time the daffodils reach peak, and the two are beautiful together. But it also provides armloads of branches in winter, which come indoors looking scaly and chaffy and most unpromising, but which open pale yellow bells within a week. We have long been tempted to combine branches of ‘Vermont Sunrise’ with the so-called white forsythia, Abeliophyllum distichum, a much lower-growing shrub, to about four feet here, but our timing has always been off. We have forced abeliophyllum by itself, and its wine-colored buds and milk-white open flowers, identical to those of forsythia except for color, are both very beautiful and sweetly fragrant.

  Fragrant also is Viburnum ×bodnantense ‘Dawn’, which is normally listed as hardy only to Zone 6 or even 7, though it has grown here in Zone 4 for at least twenty years. We cannot say it is a beautiful plant, for it has formed an angular bush eight feet tall, and its coarse, five-inch-long dark green oval leaves make little contribution to the summer garden. For these reasons, our one gangly bush of it has been tucked between the forgiving presence of a yew and a hemlock. But V. ×bodnan-tense does have the wonderful habit of opening little bunches of candy-pink bells on any warm day in winter. It is sure to be in bloom during the brief January Thaw, but branches may be cut on any day when daytime temperatures are above freezing, and flowers will quickly open indoors, scenting a whole room. Their very angularity also adds charm to any arrangement of winter-flowering branches.

  It is no accident, we suppose, that shrubs which choose to bloom in winter or very early spring produce bell-shaped down-hanging flowers to protect their vital pollen against the wind and are often fragrant, since bees are scarce then, and they need to attract every one. The most fragrant of winter-flowering shrubs are the witch hazels, species and crosses of Hamamelis, but instead of bells, they produce curious flowers made up of one-inch-long threads, gold or acid yellow or amber, according to cultivar. Though the first timorous flowers of V. × bodnantense‘Dawn’ will be blasted by the return of real winter—to be followed later by others—the witch hazel petals simply curl back up over their centers and sleep a bit until warm sun causes them to unfurl again. We often know they are in bloom not by seeing them, but because their unmistakable fragrance lures us across the snow. Anytime after Christmas, whether their petals are spread out or furled, branches can be counted on to open indoors, and fragrance is assured.

  Willows have been a passion with us from the very early days of the garden, when we struck twigs of almost every one we passed. In part we had a lot of space to fill, and almost nothing roots as readily as a willow. In fact, before the invention of root hormones, old gardeners used to brew willow tea in the belief that it encouraged rooting of other plants. We’ve never tried that, but the genus is valuable to us for vividly colored winter twigs, particularly selections of Salix alba. Salix alba var.vitellina produces brilliant, egg-yolk-colored stems, and two forms selected from it, ‘Britzensis’ and ‘Chermesina’, offer a blend of yellow and scarlet or bronze. Along our stream we grow several plants of each for winter beauty, though pollarding them on five-foot-high trunks both encourages vividly colored young stems and creates interesting accent plants for the summer garden. And in the dead of winter, a mixed arrangement made up only of their varnished stems is beautiful.

  We grow other willows for the catkins they produce from mid-winter to spring. Most hardly need forcing, for they form little furry ovals up and down young stems out in the garden in the second half of winter, and may be cut for indoors on any day. Our native S. caprea, which grows in swamps and wet ditches all around us, will begin to show catkins by the January Thaw at least. But earlier than that, at Christmastime even, we can bring out the tiny, gray-blue catkins of S. alba var. caerulea. Long branches—almost limbs—can be cut from a ten-foot bush that has grown at the edge of our rock garden for many years where bog water gathers below the steep slope. Later, the large silver-white catkins of S. ×chaenomeloides will come of themselves, ready to cut by early January. Salix gracilistyla ‘Melanostachys’ will not bloom until March, but its ink-black catkins—the blackest flowers we know—can be encouraged to form indoors at least by the middle of February.

  We must wait almost until mid-March to cut branches of highbush blueberry (Vaccinium corymbosum), and we always have a struggle then between two desires—the pleasure of clusters of tiny, scented lily-of-the-valley flowers on reddish twigs and the thought of the blueberries they would have produced. Our hunger in winter for flowers always wins out, and we steal a few branches, the oldest ones, with gnarled and congested stems. All blueberries require occasional restorative pruning anyway, and so will be the better for our theft. In any case, we have many bushes forming a five-foot-tall hedge across the back of our vegetable garden. They always produce enough berries for us, and so we substitute one form of greediness for another.

  From the final leaf drop in autumn until spring, we admire the structure of many deciduous magnolias in the garden, especially Magnolia ×loebneri ‘Merrill’ and M. ×loebneri ‘Leonard Messel’, with their thick gray trunks and their graceful branches, the smallest twig carrying a velvet, mouse-gray bud. Those grow plump by late January, when each one sometimes wears a little cap of snow. They look as if they would force with the greatest of ease, but we have never succeeded until the first flowers are almost open. Still, their Japonesque beauty is wonderful in a vase.

  In fact, every winter we have a fantasy that we will achieve one splendid arrangement. It would be made up of rods of tawny willow and pussy willow; branches of fully opened witch hazel, forsythia, and abeliophyllum in full flower; angular branches of V. bodnantense; and a few delicate twigs of fully opened blueberry, all from our garden. In all this variety there would be two harmonies: gray branches and the promise of spring. Such an arrangement would require some careful orchestration, for timing would be everything. But all gardeners know that any idea existing in the mind will sooner or later be attempted in the garden, or in this case, in a vase. Perhaps next January Thaw we can bring it off.

  THE GARDEN TROWEL

  WE KNOW GARDENERS who have really beautiful tool sheds. Wooden pegs protrude from rough paneling, and the tools hanging on them are as artfully arranged as paintings. There are rakes and hoes of several sorts and sizes, and spades and shovels for every purpose. Pruning tools are arranged in neat, graded ranks from giant loppers that can bite through a thick limb down to dainty Japanese shears for clipping bouquets of roses. Wooden handles are smooth and sanded, and the metal parts are scrubbed clean of dirt and glisten with a protective coat of oil. Always there is a selection of brooms, for we are talking here of a passion for neatness that can sometimes exist for its own sake. Brooms are of course essential to that.

  We’d love to have such a tool shed, but we love a tidy garden as well, and that has proven to be enough demand on our time and energy. So the tool shed we have is in fact an extremely untidy corner of a very untidy barn
, which is also used to store lawn mowers, the invaluable but unwieldy gas-powered wheelbarrow, firewood for the house, grain for the animals, and alas, all the empty wine bottles, dog and cat food cans, and other household detritus waiting for the next trip to the town dump. But though on a whim one of us may bring home a new rake or hoe on a grain run to the local Agway, mostly we buy a new tool when something wears out. Any old shovel or hoe will do, provided we remember where we used it last. And the answer to the impatient, long-distance shout “Where’s the shovel?” is apt impatiently to be, “Up in the compost heap. Where you last used it.” So much for neatness and order, at least among our tools.

  But without question, the indispensable tool, for which there is no possible substitute, is a nurseryman’s trowel. It carries no fancy brand name, but ours has always come from that sensible nurseryman’s hardware store, the mail-order company A. M. Leonard. The trowel costs around fifteen dollars, not including postage, and is always proudly labeled “Made in the USA.” When brand new, each trowel measures fourteen inches long, eleven and a half of which is taken up by a scoop and a long neck and socket, all made of a single piece of strong forged iron. A hardwood handle, comfortably rounded at the end, is firmly wedged into the socket, so that iron and wood make up one elegant, unified shape. The trowel looks antique from the first, or at least does after a day or two, when the label we never quite succeed in peeling away and the factory blacking have worn off from use, and a light patina of rust sets in. But within our collection, there are specimens of varying lengths, the tips of some having been worn down by hard digging and the wooden handles by hand friction. At any given time, our population of six or so contains one or two that are just right for whatever hand that grabs them. Eggs in a carton, you’d think they were, they are so similar. But not to the hand that loves one above all others, and so all of us respect the cry that can come from anyone who works here: “Who has my trowel?”

  Though other tools may be scattered about the landscape or deposited (with luck) somewhere in the barn, all our trowels are inserted into the earth just outside the back door, at a point where almost all garden rambles and all work begins. It is just in front of a buried stone pediment that holds a potted standard fuchsia ‘Hidcote Beauty’, which in summer rains down its white and coral-pink flowers, almost hiding the ranks of trowels. One waggish visitor dubbed it the “trowel garden.” It is an instinct with all of us at North Hill to tally up the number of trowels there at the end of the day and be sure our particular one is among them. If one is missing, it is of course not ours, and, both out of genuine concern and the day’s fatigue, we are apt to whine, “A trowel is missing.”

  Two distinct lifts of the heart occur where the trowels are stored. The first happens after a busy morning of phone calls and client business, when we are finally free to go out and garden. The second, a moment after, occurs when we bend down and select our own particular trowel. No work in the garden, and no walk either, is possible without that comfortable presence in hand. As gardeners, we are simply not ourselves without this trowel, to the extent that when we travel, we each put one in our luggage, along with the obligatory dinner party sport coat. We even used to carry them on our persons, until airport regulations made simple gardeners into terror suspects. These days, for example, if you are randomly sent through the pouffer, you will register dangerous levels of nitrate, and it is no good, really, explaining that you have been fertilizing the houseplants and that a balanced 10-10-10 fertilizer is one-third nitrogen. Better just submit to the pat down and make no dumb jokes.

  Why are these trowels so important that they are our only tool of preference? First, they are sturdy, almost indestructible, to the point that when one is lost in the shrubbery for two years or more, it will still be in good usable shape. They never bend or buckle, even when we attempt to dislodge a heavy buried rock in what is really shovel work—if only we knew where we left the shovel. The reach, of fourteen inches or so (a little less with wear), can scoop up the deepest-buried daffodil clump, or plant a tulip bulb at the desirable twelve inches, or quickly excavate a hole for a perennial in a one-gallon can. Most of all, however, they are simply comfortable, even when the blade is tucked into the right-hand rear pocket of a pair of Levi’s.

  Gardens are infinitely imaginable, and fantasies of one sort after another slide endlessly through our minds. Sometimes they occupy real ground, now or later, here or elsewhere. We will probably never have the imaginary tool shed with which we began this essay. But the making of any garden is unimaginable to us without this sturdy, sensible tool, the nurseryman’s trowel. It brings us down to earth.

  GENTIANS

  FIFTEEN YEARS into the life of the garden we built a greenhouse, a little, rustic homemade building of barn sash windows and cedar siding. There were two reasons for its construction. The first was that our collection of tender plants had steadily grown, each winter trip to San Francisco adding one or two more agapanthus, another camellia, and rarer plants such as Myosotidium hortensia, the magnificent Chatham Islands forget-me-not with lustrous, hosta-like leaves and unforgettable blue flowers. The second was that the garden fell away to nothing down below, and seemed to require some terminus point, some full stop. We already knew that outbuildings, beyond their merely practical uses, could be powerfully effective in organizing garden space. For these reasons, it seemed a very good idea to build a greenhouse there.

  The trouble, however, was that our hillside falls to the southwest, and there are no level spaces on it anywhere except what we have made. So a gently sloping bank had to be cut away in order to provide enough fill to create level space on which the building could sit. A lot of fill was required, as it happened, leaving us with a very ugly steep slope of red clay subsoil, and at first, we wondered what we had done. But as has happened so many times in our garden, what seemed a huge liability became a gift. In this case, the slope offered the perfect site for a rock garden. So, with much setting in of massive old granite boulders, half buried to seem natural outcroppings, and then a few dwarf conifers, we had the basic structure we needed. We dug gravel into the clay—clay is always more fertile than gardeners assume, if it can be broken up for free drainage—and mulched the surface with more gravel. The result was a more or less plausible high alpine garden, with the huge advantage of constantly percolating water. We discovered that we had more than a rock garden; we had that golden thing, a scree. The question then was, What to plant there?

  Buried in every gardener’s memory are plants he has seen or read about and vows to grow, or wishes he could grow, if only he had the right conditions. In our case, one memory went far back, to high school English classes in very different places, Shreveport and Philadelphia. Both of us had read D. H. Lawrence’s poem “Bavarian Gentians,” with the lines

  Not every man has gentians in his house

  In Soft September, at slow, Sad Michaelmas.

  Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark

  Darkening the daytime, torch-like with the smoking blueness of Pluto’s gloom.

  Early on, then, the plant was fixed in our memory, though we both think it odd that neither of our teachers brought in a picture of a gentian to show. Such pictures came much later, as we thumbed through garden picture books and encyclopedias. So when we could have gentians, they were among the first plants we sought.

  Since we now had a rock garden, we joined the American Rock Garden Society, and we religiously attended meetings every Saturday, even though we were schoolteachers and Saturday was our only full gardening day. The nicest feature of those meetings was not the amazing spread of pastries made by the members, or sometimes even the featured speaker, who was apt to show slides of his last vacation in New Zealand or South Africa. What drew us back each Saturday was the plant sale, of seedlings grown by members. And in that way we acquired our first gentian, Gentiana acaulis. We were cautioned that it was difficult to grow. That of course added to its appeal, though we have not found it difficult at all. We plant
ed it at the edge of the new rock garden, half shaded by a young magnolia ‘Elizabeth’. Over fifteen years, it has become a large patch a foot or more across. When it flowers in late April or early May, hundreds of nearly stemless blue trumpets appear, a stunning deep blue shading to black-blue in their hearts, the five petals flecked over with green. We have never disturbed it and rarely fed it. We dare not congratulate ourselves on our luck, which is due to the site we were given rather than anything we have done.

  Just as G. acaulis passes off, another gentian growing in the rock garden begins to flower, G. decumbens. From bold rosettes composed of eight-inch-long, lance-shaped leaves of a rich, polished green, flower stems emerge, upright at first but then sprawling out languidly and bearing small bunches of small but plentiful watery blue funnels. If it was the first gentian you ever saw, you would wonder what all the fuss is about. Reginald Farrar, in his magnificent book The English Rock Garden (1928), scornfully calls it “a weed,” and even we would never call it particularly choice. But it has the amiable virtues of being very easy to grow, blooming faithfully and even seeding about. Perhaps we have too much of it, but it is very hard to weed up any of its handsome progeny, which appear here and there throughout the sunnier parts of the rock garden. And when all is said and done, it is, after all, a gentian.