by Joe Eck
Not all our gentians grow in the rock garden. Above the house, almost at the opposite end of the garden, G. asclepiadea has thriven without much attention for twenty years. It has a place much like G. acaulis, under the partial shade of a magnolia, and in constantly moist but well-drained soil above a bog. It is popularly called the “willow gentian” from its gracefully arching wands and its narrow, two-inch-long leaves. They really do look like sprays of willow, though their botanical name associates them with the god of medicine, Asklepios, because gentian roots were used by ancient Greek physicians to treat severe nervous disorders and provided an antidote to poison. We grow it for other reasons, chiefly for its grace and the surprise of its trumpet flowers, appearing in August on the tips of four-foot stems, bending them closer to the ground. Our original plants were blue-flowered, but one or two pure white ones have come of themselves. We think of where they grow as primarily a spring garden, planted to marsh marigolds in single chrome yellow, but also in a smaller, paler yellow double form and in white, and to Primula florindae, with two-foot stems topped by clusters of yellow bells. Because it is a bog, with percolating water running under it, all those flowers are precocious, and some years we enjoy them as early as late March. Later in the season, the bog is given over to foliage, to the four-foot-tall umbrella leaves of Darmera peltata, to selections of blade-leaved Iris pseudacorus, and to large-leaved hostas. So it is always a surprise, in August, when we stumble on G. asclepiadea, a quietly beautiful plant that waits its time to bloom. Then a whole part of that section of the garden comes back to us, with the full force of spring’s first discoveries.
We grow—or, as gardeners so frequently say, “once grew”—other gentians throughout the garden. Gentiana andrewsii is native hereabouts, and we collected plants from our own land and grew them in the garden for years. The species is called the “bottle gentian” or “closed gentian” because its flowers, borne in late summer at the tops of erect, two-foot-tall stems, never seem to open. You keep thinking they must, but they don’t, and so how the plant ever sets seed is a mystery. Perhaps some minute insect bores through unobtrusively, or maybe it is self-fertile, tending to all that business without assistance and in secret. We have lost it, largely due to the aggressiveness of the double-flowered form of Houttuynia cordata, one of the many pesky plants we love here. But we loved the bottle gentian too, and we must find it again.
Gentiana septemfida, the crested gentian, is not the last to bloom, but it comes very late in August, and marks the beginning of autumn here, for it will continue in bloom even when orange maple leaves fall about it, making a beautiful contrast to its dark blue, white-throated flowers. It grows in two places, down in the rock garden and at the edge of the little thyme terrace where we sit in the evening. Both locations offer it the full sun it requires, and individual plants have formed low mounds of congested growth, consisting of almost stemless laurel-green leaves each about an inch and a half long. The flowers are also about that size, and when they occur, their abundance almost obscures the leaves beneath. The species is native from Turkey to Iran, and is usually rated as hardy only to Zone 6. But as with many other plants that grow low to the earth, our abundant winter snow cover allows it to thrive here.
The gentian we love the most is the last of its genus to flower in the garden, and perhaps the last flower on any perennial plant we have. For it blooms when everything else is brown and faded—the colchicum, the tiny cyclamen, even the late autumn crocus, Crocus sativus and C. speciosus. When fallen leaves lie thick on our paths and even the fruit on the Ilex verticillata has begun to be stripped by robins on their way south, G. scabra chooses to bloom, its deep blue trumpets on semi-erect, two-foot stems almost lost in fallen leaves. It flowers so late that even its own narrow, two-inch-long leaves color too, in shades of faded rose and biscuit yellow and orange. There is something deeply touching about any flower that blooms so late, and we wonder how it has time to make seed. It seems forgetful of that necessity, and even, therefore, faintly tragic, or at least melancholic. But then, so is the season in which it flowers. Seedlings do appear, however, from time to time, close to the large flat fieldstones that make a path above the stream. We can only marvel at them and be grateful.
Gardeners who live in cool mountain climates such as ours can have gentians in bloom from late April to late October, one species stepping forward as another fades back. They are all quiet plants, somehow, despite an intensity of blue that is almost legendary, and that gave D. H. Lawrence the poem we have remembered.
HARDINESS
“VERMONT?” a horticultural friend quavered when he learned we had decided to move there. “Why Vermont? It is so cold there. And the growing season is about fifteen days! You’ll be lucky if you can even grow ferns and mosses.”
Even then, thirty years ago, we knew that gardeners loved to exaggerate the difficulties of climate, theirs and yours. It is always colder than it is, or drier than it is, or hotter than it is, either because it feels that way, or because of some remembered, once-every-fifteen-years event. But we had also done a little research, and had determined that though winters in Vermont were certainly cold—as much as 30 degrees below zero at times—there was reliable snow cover that insulated the ground and protected the roots and crowns of plants. Better, Vermont also enjoyed cool, buoyant summers, with evenly spaced periods of sunshine followed by brief spells of summer rain, and a long, mellow autumn that was famous for its beauty. Soils can be dry and rocky in the northern part of the state, but the southern part, where we proposed to move, was glacial till overlain by a deep, well-drained, neutral to slightly acid loam, the “ideal garden soil” that is seldom met with.
We had also seen the land, twenty-three acres on a south slope at the base of the Green Mountains, high above the isolated and not very populated village of Readsboro. The land was beautiful, with old mature hardwoods of maple, beech, and ash and a sprinkling of somber hemlock. A five-acre meadow lay far in the back corner. Most wonderful, however, was a little stream that gurgled through the property, looking, on the first day we saw it, fresh and alive and somehow companionable, as if it welcomed us. Some people buy land because it is available as an investment or because they suddenly need to build a house someplace. We bought ours because we fell in love with it. And if, like a lover, it had all the characteristics we found desirable save one, we would learn to compromise on that.
Our feeling for our land has not blinded us to the real challenges and even difficulties of making a garden in such a cold place. They are considerable, and as some recede others step forward. There are always surprises, though we are happy to realize that they fall about evenly on the sides of success and of disaster. Over our years here, we have gained some wisdom about both, and that is what we wish to pass on.
In the first few years of our gardening life, we were too ignorant to assess our chances of success very accurately. So, like most beginning gardeners, we checked in references, which always list the probable hardiness of any plant. We had determined from the USDA hardiness map printed routinely at the beginning or end of most gardening encyclopedias that our garden-to-be lay geographically in Zone 4. Consequently, if we read for example in Wyman’s Garden Encyclopedia—our bible then—that a certain tree or shrub was “Hardy to Zone 6,” we did not add it to our dream list or, when we saw it in a nursery, give it more than an admiring wistful glance. Though many beautiful plants were designated for survival in Zone 4, many others were not. And as the costs of building left so little money for trees and shrubs, we were very conservative about taking chances.
We have since learned that though hardiness maps are a valuable resource and are constantly being revised to reflect more subtle geographic gradations in climate, they are at best a rough-and-ready guide to actual hardiness. They do offer parameters, but, with careful manipulation of other variables such as soil quality, drainage, water, fertilizer, mulches, and various winter protections, any gardener should be able to extend the range of his
garden by perhaps two zones above his own. Plants now grow here that are generally listed as hardy to Zones 7, 6, and 5, and in fact, if all the plants listed to Zones 6 and 5 were eliminated from our garden, it would be a poor thing to see. So when an inexperienced gardener says to us, “But that’s not hardy here!” we frequently reply, “Try it.” We doubt, however, whether many of our plants in the warmer ranges would have survived here in the beginning, for several reasons.
The first is wind, for though the south-facing slope of our garden provides both abundant sunshine and good air drainage, bitter winds rake up and over us from below, and winter wind is the first enemy to hardiness. We are always a little embarrassed when asked by other gardeners to “admire the view,” for in most gardens, views generally mean wind, and wind inevitably means the loss of all but the sturdiest plants, many of which must be natives adapted to withstand it. Our own views, though not spectacular, are—or rather were—very fine, particularly to the south of the garden, where thickly forested mountains rise up, part of the vast Green Mountain National Forest. From inside the garden, we now get only the merest peek at them, for they have been mostly planted out to strong-growing conifers that provide shelter from the desiccating winds of winter and early spring. Those conifers—mostly spruce, pine, and arborvitae—were planted early in the garden’s life, as much to provide privacy and a sense of enclosure as shelter. But now most of them are perhaps thirty feet tall, and they have given us at least a full zone of hardiness, so we consider most of our garden now Zone 5, and a warm Zone 5 at that.
It is a general truth that as gardens grow older, they grow warmer. Most plants, after all, live in mutually sustaining communities, not isolated as a single specimen, as one sees too often in the middle of suburban lawns. As layers of plants build up, they offer protection for others. The tall hardy and wind-resistant evergreens shelter lower-growing, more tender ones, which in turn shelter delicate perennials, ferns, and woodland plants. In the case of plants that do not die down to the ground as perennials do, that protection is not only from wind, but also from winter sun, which can desiccate the exposed leaves of evergreens and the bark tissue of deciduous plants while their roots are locked up by frost and therefore unable to replace moisture. Such shelter belts provide pockets of the garden that seem warm even on the coldest days—or at least warmer. If they are occupied by something known to be perfectly hardy, it should be transplanted elsewhere to make a place for something marginally hardy. In fact, a large part of securing hardiness is shifting things about in a restless attempt to make everything, even plants of dubious hardiness, grow happily in the garden.
Houses also offer wonderful protection for marginal plants. Some evergreens will gain a zone of hardiness—or even two or three—if shaded in winter, a condition most frequently offered by the north or west side of houses or outbuildings. The wonderful thing about such spots is also that there may be a basement wall that leaks heat, a fact only a true gardener could celebrate. We treasure every inch of our foundation walls. On the winter-shaded sides, we have been able to grow a splendid specimen of the native American holly, Ilex opaca (leaf hardy to Zone 6), and a splendid clump of tall bamboo with glamorous golden stripes on its green culms, which now reach almost to the house roof. Even the sunny, windswept portions of the foundation have provided homes for sweet violets in many varieties, and—improbably—a single plant of Nicotiana langsdorffii, which came of itself and has stayed faithfully for seven years, behaving as the true perennial it is, though it is root hardy only to Zone 9.
Where there is percolating water under frozen ground, as, for example, beside our little stream, trees and shrubs that would otherwise perish in our winter lows manage also to flourish, provided they will accept swampy ground at their feet. Knowing early on (from references) that the native sweet bay tree, Magnolia virginiana, was essentially a swamp dweller (though reliably hardy only to Zone 6), we took a chance and planted one in a small bog that forms in the upper garden where the stream briefly divides. It has persisted for twenty-five years, rewarding us all summer long with four-inch-wide, creamy white fragrant blossoms. And, though it is quite hardy, a specimen of Hamamelis ×’Brevipetala’, the intensely fragrant Chinese witch hazel, surprises us each December with its precocious orange-rust thrums of flower. In another site here, it would perhaps bloom in March, but in December, it is most welcome indoors, as an alternative to the traditional sorts of Christmas flowers we never have.
There are other ways to play what might be called the “hardiness game.” Chief among them is winter protection. In most years we can count on reliable snow cover, of a depth terrifying to most gardeners elsewhere but comforting to us. But one winter out of every ten will be what is called an “open winter.” Then, no snow falls until March—if then—and the coldest temperatures we can endure occur in late December, January, and February. Early in the history of our garden, we had our hearts broken by these open winters, and since then, we have laid about two tons of evergreen boughs over sensitive plantings every year. Two tons is not so much as one might think from the sound of it, about four pickup loads, and farmers around us are glad to supply them for a little extra money between Christmas tree harvesting and sugaring. In fact, probably the best boughs are from the bottoms of Christmas trees, chiefly spruce, for pine is too loose and hemlock loses its needles. Spreading boughs is late October work, clean and efficient, and there is a comfort in tucking in heaths and heathers, rock garden plants, hellebores, and tender and newly established perennials under such a sweet-smelling blanket. In a normal year, snow would do this work. But we feel better for doing it ourselves, and we must assume the plants do as well.
It is a happy fact that the earth itself is always warmer than the ambient air, so if the air temperature is minus 20 degrees, it may be much warmer close to the soil. It is that warmth we hope to capture with our covering of evergreen boughs. But any marginal plant we can bend to the ground gets bent, and then covered with Remay, a wonderful horticultural cloth that traps soil warmth, and then by evergreen boughs. Such treatment is given to many of our roses, particularly the pillar roses, which would otherwise whip about in frigid winter winds and simply not be there come spring. It is nasty work, with every thorny cane hungering to rip into tender human flesh. But once done, it is done, and clouds of fragrant flowers are our reward in early summer. The taller bamboos are also bent to the ground and covered in the same way, and though they are generally kinder under our ministrations, their thick culms can creak and then crack, spoiling next year’s show. Roses are mean and bamboos are meek, but both must be treated with great patience.
Then there is the use of clunky boxes and burlap and whatever sturdy thing might be left in the basement that has promise for this purpose. We know a very fine gardener in New Hampshire, in a zone as cold as ours or perhaps one below us, who once boasted that he had gotten winter protection down to a coffee tin and a rose cone. Not so here, for though our snow cover and our evergreen boughs will do for most winters, we have learned that certain important plants need a sturdy shelter to endure our winters. For example, English boxwoods are important features of the garden, and ours have now grown into great pillows five feet wide and as tall. Because they are evergreen, they have not a hope aboveground in our blustery winters. Burlap will not do, nor will Remay. Only boxes work, and we have now had to resort to a hinged affair, because there is no place here to store a box five feet wide and as tall. When the boxwoods are uncovered, their fine rich green in early spring is splendid against the daffodils.
Finally, we treat every broad-leaved evergreen with an antidesiccant marketed as Wilt-Proof. It is mixed with water and sprayed on with a backpack sprayer, just before temperatures begin to drop below 40 degrees, which in our garden is in late October or early November. Careful judgment is required, but if one should miss the moment first time round, there is almost always a second chance a week or so later. And we hope there is a third, when the January Thaw occurs, sometime toward the
end of that month. All the rhododendrons are treated, including the most hardy, such as the Yakushimanums, for though they can perfectly well endure our winters, their beautiful apple-blossom trusses in spring are completely spoiled by winter-browned leaves. We want a ruff of fine green around each bouquet of flower, and we have it, this way.
Gardeners live for challenges, and playing games with hardiness is perhaps chief among them. There are no gardeners anywhere, even in the most privileged of climes, who do not long to grow something they cannot. All gardeners know Pride, Envy, Lust, Greed, and sometimes Anger, and manipulations of the hardiness of plants encourage all of those, though not Sloth. Still, try as hard as we will, sometimes we fail. We know with plants, as Marianne Moore said in her poem “The Student,” that
Wolf ‘s wool is the best of wool
But it cannot be sheared because
The wolf will not comply.
HEDGES
EARLY THIS SUMMER, a time that is really the prettiest in the garden, we finally accepted the fact that we had to do an act of violence to our great old yew hedge. It was planted in 1978, the first real year we began gardening here. The thirty balled-andburlapped plants, each three feet high, were a special cultivar called ‘G-4’, which sounded to us like a cough syrup, or possibly some patching material for automobile bodies. But it had been highly recommended for its hardiness by our friendly salesperson at Weston Nurseries, in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, and since we had moved so far north of Boston, or so it seemed then, we were not yet ready to take chances, especially with a large order that had sorely taxed the small budget of two young schoolteachers.