Our Life in Gardens

by Joe Eck

  We have never met with this cultivar again, and we know now, from many other forms of yew growing all through the garden, that we need not have been so cautious. Still, it is an attractive plant, differing from the commonly chosen ‘Hicks’ yew by a denser, slower growth, and from ‘Hatfield’ by the fact that it never forms a central trunk. For all these virtues we might have chosen it even without our fearfulness about hardiness.

  When the yews arrived, we remember thinking two things. First, they seemed terribly lonely and insignificant, sitting in a huddle at the edge of the road, with a vast expanse of raw sub-soil between them and the newly constructed house. Second, though we knew we wanted a yew hedge (Thalassa Cruso had told us so, in her masterful Making Things Grow Outdoors), we had no idea where to put it. As landscape designers for twenty-five years now, we have frequently dealt with this particular panic in others, and we would have welcomed someone whom we respected saying simply, “Just put it there!” But there was no one to do that, and so we thought first perhaps it should go off the corner of the house, and then perhaps it should screen us from the road. We finally settled on a compromise, which was to put it midway between the house and the road, creating a barrier behind which we could establish a vegetable garden. We thought at that time that it would always be “the Vegetable Garden,” close to the back door and the kitchen, as conventional wisdom dictates. We had no idea then that this property would experience many “gardens,” and that the vegetable garden itself would move five times before it settled in the daffodil meadow, where it has been for fifteen years.

  The choice of where to plant that hedge was absolutely arbitrary, born of impatience, confusion, and our sense that our investment had to sit from weekend to weekend aboveground in the hot spring sunshine while we taught school and were making up our minds. It was our first mark on our land, and in one sense, where we put it was irrelevant. Some other garden would have grown out of some other placement, and occasionally we find ourselves wondering what that garden might have been like. It would have been different, certainly. Better? We cannot know. For though our garden vision has been able to stretch always to what might be, it is no good at what might have been. What difference would it make, anyway, since the hedge is now a towering nine feet high, could not be moved, and will never be chopped down, at least by us.

  So the yew hedge got planted roughly where we decided, though we remember that an enormous buried rock forced us to put the opening in the hedge a third of the way up, and not dead center, as a slavish adherence to symmetry would have demanded. Like so many good things in a garden, that was a happy accident, a forced adaptation to a problem that could not otherwise be solved. Now one enters that space with a focus up, not both ways. We certainly would have chosen to put the opening just there, if we had known to choose.

  What we did know was how wide to make it. Most gardeners realize that a certain generosity of space is an important part of a garden’s beauty. Gates, paths, steps, terraces, and lawns should be wide and gracious. It is true, certainly, that more intimate spaces—stepping-stone paths through the woods, a tiny terrace with a bench just for resting and taking a breath of air, a narrow, single stone fording a stream—can be wonderful if they suggest room for only a solitary traveler through the garden. But access to major areas should be ample enough for two people, at least, to walk side-by-side, and not straggle out like a line of baby ducks. That is the practical side of the issue. But even when a garden is merely viewed, a sense of expansiveness, of wide reaches of space, must be preserved. We think we knew that instinctively, though perhaps we were influenced a little by the need to stretch our thirty bushes as far as they would go. However it was, we made a comfortable opening originally eight feet between the yews on either side.

  But plants grow. And they do not just grow taller. Our ample entrance shrank first to six feet, which was acceptable, and then to four, which began not to be. When it reached three, we knew we had to take some sort of action. For it was clear that things were only going to get worse, until no opening was there at all. One would simply just have to slither through. So we took our tools in hand, cutting away a full three feet on the left side of the entrance. The results were grim.

  For a mature hedge is essentially a green skin clothing a skeleton of gray branches. When the skin of green is removed, sunlight shining on the wood will awaken dormant growth buds that will develop into small shoots and eventually into well-leaved twigs that will provide another green skin. Hedges need not be of evergreens, of course, and many fine effects can be achieved from deciduous plants that will accept this occasional radical surgery, such as beech, hornbeam, Cornelian cherry, and even the much-scorned privet, which can look quite handsome when well tended. Even highbush blueberry can make a fine hedge, if you do not care about the berries, or lilac, if you do not care about the flowers. In fact, almost any woody plant that will accept hard pruning can be made into a hedge. We have even wondered whether willows might be struck as rods to provide a hedge both quick and cheap. Of course, such a hedge would require pruning practically weekly, but that would be no worse than lawn grass.

  But evergreens are best, especially in the dark months of the year, when they step forward in somber magnificence. Among evergreens, from time immemorial yew has been the first choice for high hedges, and boxwood for low ones. The native arborvitae, Thuja occidentalis, makes a very fine hedge, if it is pruned very carefully. Beyond those, there are very bad choices, such as white pine, spruce, and hemlock, which, though often available just for the digging, will never rejuve-nate new growth from hard wood. Nothing can bring a hedge of trimmed white pine, or spruce or hemlock, back into order once it is overgrown. But any hedge—any whatsoever—must be allowed a few inches of annual growth. So sooner or later, it will get overgrown. You can take it practically as a law of Nature. Still, there are hedges that have been handsome for a hundred years or more, and there are three secrets to their many decades of beauty.

  First, they have been maintained according to the cardinal rule of hedge pruning, which is “Prune little and often,” even from the first year of growth, because building up a branched internal structure—what gardeners call a scaffold—will matter later. Second, they have been battened, pruned on a slight slant from bottom to top so that sunlight falls evenly across the face of the whole hedge, preventing the base from becoming thin and straggly. Third, they have been kept in superb health by frequent fertilizing, and by dealing with insect pests and diseases as soon as they appear.

  Of all these factors, probably good culture is the most important. Many hedges are too often planted, periodically hacked at when they look ragged, and then mostly forgotten. But they are not walls or fences. They are living plants, asked to grow far closer to one another than they would naturally grow. How close depends on the species, its rate and pattern of growth, and perhaps on the gardener’s impatience. The best hedges are spaced widely, so that each individual roots deeply before it must compete with its companions on either side. Even so, sooner if not later they become congested, for hedges, unlike probably any other garden plants except lawn grass and groundcovers, are meant to crowd each other and fill the voids between.

  Of the three rules for maintaining beautiful hedges over many years, we neglected two. We did not prune “little and often.” We were too thrilled that our hedge got first twice as tall as the little bushes we put in, and then so tall that we could not see over it. But our second infraction was to give insufficient attention to the health of our hedge. On its own dropped needles, windblown leaves in its shanks, and the general richness of the garden soil around it, it seemed to be doing just fine. Fine, that is, until we had to cut it back hard. Then we wished we had paid more attention to it, for we were asking a lot, and we have not gotten as much as we hoped. Some of the stems, as thick as wooden spoon handles, have shown encouraging puffs of green shoots, and those shoots, cut back by half in early spring, will branch and spread, creating in time a new green skin. But we h
ave spent a whole growing season anxiously scraping with our fingernails, and we know that many branches are dead. It may be that next year’s hot spring sunshine will activate additional buds closer to the trunks and we will have fine new growth there. But a second pruning job awaits us early next spring, of cutting back pulpy dead branches that will never rejuvenate.

  Many activities in a mature garden are best described as “biting the bullet.” We are certainly not the first to discover this fact, for when Vita Sackville-West died, and the two brilliant gardeners she left behind—Sybille Kreutzberger and Pamela Schwerdt—had to take over, their first task was to reduce the yew hedges essential to the structure of Sissinghurst, from their girth of twenty feet to five. Christopher Lloyd also said that the hedges at Great Dixter, planted by his father, Nathaniel Lloyd, more than one hundred years ago, had been reduced four times. Each time was a trauma, and Christo shuddered at the thought that soon it would have to be done again.

  Knowing all that we now know about hedges, we have begun to make preparations. This autumn, as long as the weather allows, we will dig two buckets of composted chicken litter on each return from our morning chores, and spread it at the roots of our hedge. By winter’s end, or in early spring, we will have supplied rich material its entire length. Then we will lime it, for despite the conventional wisdom that all evergreens like acid soils, yews enjoy a neutral to slightly alkaline soil. Once our hedge is in the best health we can manage, we will hack at it again. We do not expect the process to be either pleasant or attractive. But it must be done.

  HELLEBORES

  “IF POSSIBLE,” the great English garden writer Margery Fish quaveringly suggested, “I think hellebores should be grown as separate clumps, so that each plant makes a picture with its flowers and leaves …I like to come across my hellebores in odd places” (Gardening in the Shade, 1964). Of course, she well knew it was not possible, for when one comes to love helle-bores, those “odd places”—snug spots under the holly or against the cool stone steps of the garden shed—quickly run out. So wonderful are these plants that it is not hard for the whole place to go to hellebore.

  Other people know that as well as we, like David Culp, whose Pennsylvania garden contains (at last count) between four thousand and five thousand hellebores. We have never numbered ours. We are not sure we even could, for it would be a little like “Guess how many jelly beans are in the jar.” But our fondness for them has made us break a cardinal rule in our garden, which is that each plant, no matter how splendid it is, should occupy its own place, and not be dotted about everywhere, thereby diluting its impact. So there are hellebores in the back garden along the woodland path, hellebores thickly clustered on either side of the pergola walk, and hellebores in the rhododendron garden. We are even beginning to contemplate a nursery row of them under the huge old blueberry bushes in the vegetable garden. Our appetite for hellebores seems to increase almost as rapidly as new crosses, unfamiliar species, and unusual colors become available.

  It is always interesting to ponder the almost magnetic pull some flowers have on gardeners. In the case of hellebores, the unlikely season in which they bloom is the first of their many charms. In cold gardens such as ours, few plants flower between late December and early March. Those that do are mostly shy things—witch hazels that uncurl their fragrant threads of copper or gold on warm days, the tiny pink perfumed tubes of the winter viburnum (Viburnum ×bodnantense), or inch-high snowdrops piercing through crusts of ice. Hellebores are their companions, though by contrast, many are boldly beautiful, with flowers that would command as much attention in high summer as on a cold, raw day in March. If it could be forced to bloom later (God forbid!), the pristinely elegant Helleborus niger, the Christmas rose, would surely be coveted for a June bridal bouquet.

  “Hellebore” is a mellifluous word, though it has a slightly ominous sound, seeming to preserve a shadow of its dark ancient Greek meaning, “food to kill.” All species of hellebore are poisonous, none more so than H. niger, from which the old pharmacists brewed one of the most deadly poisons they offered. (It is called “niger,” meaning “black,” for its inky black roots.) It is happy, then, that the common names of the two most widely grown species have a more cheerful sound. Helleborus niger, the earliest to bloom, is called the Christmas rose, and H. orientalis, flowering a month or so later, the Lenten rose. Parkinson first made the comparison in the seventeenth century (“like unto a single rose”), and it fits, if one thinks of the wild, five-petaled English eglantine.

  But you must not look for the delicious tea-sweet fragrance of that rose in any hellebore, or for that matter any smell at all, except in the aptly named H. foetidus. Sadly called, both in Latin and in English, the “stinking hellebore,” it smells bad only when molested, and not all that bad either, something like the distant smell of skunk that some people find pleasantly redolent of spring. Its stout, persistent two-foot stalks are topped with beautifully fingered evergreen leaves and with masses of nodding green bells in early daffodil season. It is very beautiful, for all its unfortunate name, though we have largely given up growing it here. Its hardiness is listed only to Zone 6, and its fleshy, evergreen top growth seems unable to survive our cold winters, though we have occasionally had spontaneous seedlings from plants that managed to flower. Perhaps we will try again.

  Also possessed of pure green flowers is H. dumetorum. It is among the first to bloom in spring, and its flowers are the smallest of all the species, an inch or so across, demurely nodding. Many gardeners pass over it in favor of showier species and hybrids, but we admire it just for its modest beauty. We grow it at the base of an old, rotting beech stump on the pergola walk, rather apart from its companion hellebores, the more to show off its shy and gentle charm. It is reliably hardy here, and perhaps one of the rarest hellebores we grow.

  More common in gardens and hardy from Zones 3 to 9 is H. niger, and at its best it can be a stunning garden plant. In earliest spring, a well-established clump can form a perfect bouquet of as many as fifty snow-white, four-inch-wide flowers, looking as if some skilled hand had arranged them in a vase beneath the earth. But “well established” are the key words, for the Christmas rose is notoriously slow to settle in, and cranky in its needs, which seem erratic and even willful, but which certainly include a position in cool, dappled shade, a humus-rich, well-drained limey soil, and plenty of moisture. Still, it may pout like a sick child for some need it cannot name. That is its nature, and the great thing is not to fuss over it, but to do the best one can and be patient. Most certainly, once it is happy, it should never be disturbed, for though old plants can be divided, separated bits are even slower to accept a new life than young plants raised from seed or transplanted from pots. Helleborus niger has also been a shy parent to hybrids with other species, though a handful exist, most notably the wonderfully named H. ×ericsmithii, though who Eric Smith was is a mystery to us. It makes a fine, sturdy, fuss-free plant that bears cobs of abundant white flowers, which in bud look like thick clusters of grapes and which age to green and rose pink. It is not reliably hardy here, but we have had good success with it in a pot, over-wintering it in the coolest spot of our greenhouse.

  As often happens in families, however, another hellebore, H. orientalis, has stepped forward to make good the deficiencies of its close cousin, in its good nature, its ease of cultivation, and—put bluntly—its readiness to procreate. “I fear they are all rather promiscuous plants,” Margery Fish comments in her ladylike way, “but they are all very beautiful.” She is of course right, for the commonest random seedling will show modestly down-turned flowers with a fine brush of green over a rose-tinted base, and when their faces are turned upward, a finer rose or pink, perhaps freckled over with russet. Such seedlings are always to be found clustered under established plants like tiny chicks under a mother hen, and if you are after positive sheets of hellebores—a woodland carpeted with them—then every tiny one will be worth transplanting. They should reach flowering age in their
third year, and though the rarest, sought-out colors will probably not be among them, not a one will seem homely to you.

  Helleborus orientalis is an entirely amiable plant, hardy from Zones 3 to 10, a range few other desirable garden plants can claim. Like the Christmas rose, it would prefer that moist, humus-rich, semishaded, and well-drained spot where so many other choice woodland plants will thrive. But it will put up with far less than its idea of the best, making a fine show in thinner, poorer soils and in deeper shade, or in cooler northern gardens even in full sun. Anywhere you can grow hostas, H. orientalis will be happy.

  It is with the Lenten rose that breeders have had their greatest fun, for in addition to possessing a wide color range as a pure species, it readily accepts crosses with others in the genus, to the extent that the finest forms now available should really be called H.×orientalis, or less ponderously, simply “oriental hybrids.” The leaves will always be similar, made up of handsome, broad-fingered, dark green palms of eight to ten leaflets, each finger three to six inches long, each leaf standing on its own foot-high stem. A single clump develops slowly but surely over many years, eventually forming a circle of a hundred leaves, all facing outward from the center. One of the wonderful things about H. orientalis is that, like a peony, once it has made itself at home it is there forever. Unlike peonies, however, it seems quite unable to compete with other plants, particularly grasses, which soon will smother it out.

  As a result of recent breeding, the flowers of H. orientalis can be almost anything, from five-pointed stars to perfect circles and cups and even (more and more) doubles. As for their color, there exists both a difficulty and a fascination. Most of the flowers could be called pink or red or white or deep purple, but as with fine wines, they always seem in need of more descriptive adjectives. So they are described as brick or carnelian or burgundy red, coral or cameo pink, ivory or acid green, steely slate blue or satin black. Even then, precise descriptions are elusive, for in all hybrid forms there are apt to be strange overwashes of other colors, shadings and subtleties, freckles and stripes. When a particularly fine plant occurs, it is given a name, such as ‘Pluto’ or ‘Black Prince’, ‘Celadon’ or ‘Cosmos’. But hellebores are not bearded irises and still less, daylilies. All species resent root disturbance to a greater or lesser degree, and therefore named forms cannot be divided and redivided for rapid increase. So most breeders have chosen to concentrate on strains—of deep black or pure rose or clear green or white—and in flower forms with pointed or rounded petals, or doubled. More and more, a pretty face is simply described by its strain, as, for example, “Black Seedling Strain,” and that, of course, allows nurserymen to sell young plants before growing them for three years to determine their precise color. Most will be within the range specified, though there are always surprises. Still, to repeat Margery Fish, “they are all very beautiful.”