Our Life in Gardens

by Joe Eck

  And so, in their way, are the random seedlings huddled under any mature plant. It is for that reason that we have contemplated a nursery row of them in the vegetable garden, a place for them to develop from the one tiny, three-lobed leaf that is their newly sprouted shape, to strong, youthful clumps that can then be carefully transplanted into our woods of old beeches and maples. Then, perhaps, we could share Margery Fish’s pleasure, and “come across our hellebores in odd places.”

  ILEX

  A FRIEND OF OURS writes often in the depths of winter, sometimes every day, to tell us what is happening in her garden, and to ask what we have happening in ours. It is a season in which one is desperate for news. And there is always something, even in the darkest days of December, in one or another of the greenhouses at least. But outdoors only the last bits of the native witch hazels still unfurl their threads of petal, dull mustard yellow but vivid against the prevailing white of snow and the gray bark of the trees. Outdoors, at this season, bark is mostly what one studies, and though the somber beauty of trunk and twig are all deeply satisfying, they also create a hunger for any speck of color that might be. So the blaze of berries on the Ilex verticillata always causes a shock of pleasure, even though we have been seeing them at this season for almost thirty years.

  There are three bushes, trees really, since each is ten feet tall, spreading across the gray clapboards of the house and extending upwards to its cedar-shingled roof. Each of them is thickly hung with scarlet fruit, and because their twigs and trunk more or less match the gray of the house and roof, the berries seem spangled there. With snow thickly on the ground, and only the somber black of the yews and rhododendrons, winter in the garden might present a most melancholy scene. We are glad, then, for the brightness of the ilex berries, and treasure them for as long as they last.

  We are hardly alone in our appreciation. For though we have few guests at this season, the garden is not unvisited. In early October, just before the weather gets crisp and the leaves turn, robins begin their flight south, and our garden lies squarely in their path. To us, it is a mystery that the robins prefer the three ilex across the front of our house to those growing in the wild, with berries so numerous on the twigs that they weigh the branches to the ground. We see such bushes all along the highway from the Canadian border well into southern New Jersey and beyond, and they are never robined. Perhaps house-grown berries are tastier, or perhaps the prevalence of well-stocked bird feeders has made the birds believe that the best things are often to be found around people’s houses. Or maybe they are just eager to make us miserable, intruders, after all, in a world they knew long before us.

  Whatever the explanation, they settle in flocks on our bushes and can strip them in a day, each bird gulletting down more berries than you would think its little body could contain. We sometimes impatiently call them “robbings,” for they are greedy in really unseemly ways. We used to net our bushes, and one year we fired some sort of harmless gun in the air that had been given us by a neighbor whose boy had outgrown it. Now we just hope a sudden cold snap will encourage them to get on their way southward before all our berries have been taken.

  But we are inconsistent. For after the passing of the New Year, beautiful little crested cedar waxwings will come, shyer than the robins, lingering only a little while to grab a berry or two before flitting away. We wish they would stay longer. And in February, when the bitterest cold we experience has turned the ilex berries to wizened black raisins, flocks of yellow and purple grosbeaks appear. That is the only time we see those birds, and we sit at the kitchen table, just on the other side of two big-paned windows, gladly watching them take every berry, for there must be little else for them at this season.

  There always seems to be an improbability in this display, so brilliant and in winter so welcome to us and apparently to many other creatures. Most of the year, these bushes are unre-markable, at least to the casual eye. There is, to be sure, a handsome muscularity to their trunks and a pleasing intricacy to their interlacing branches. From the beginning, we have carefully eliminated suckers to leave each clump with only three or four trunks. Each trunk is now about five inches in diameter and looks like a stout young cherry tree. When the ilex are in full leaf, visitors sometimes wonder why we have let them block the windows and arch over the front steps. But when October comes to strip the leaves away, every eye lingers, both ours within and those of a thousand birds, it seems, without.

  Any gardener is always mentally remaking spaces, wondering, “What would it look like if I took that away and put something else in its place?” We have never had such a thought about these ilex. We are a little sorry, perhaps, that the house front could not accommodate even more of them, for then we might have added an orange fruited one, a yellow, or even a rare white, in contrast to the prevailing scarlet. But the house isn’t going to get larger, and we aren’t going to crowd more specimens in front of it. So those others are elsewhere in the garden, secondary grace notes, making scrims of many colors against each other. They are nice there too, and oddly, the robins seem to leave them alone.

  Much as we love I. verticillata for its naked beauty, there is another in the garden that keeps its leaves in winter, which we have cherished for many years. Ilex opaca, the native American Christmas holly, is usually rated from Zones 5 to 8. But both of us have loved it from childhood and with something much-loved we have been willing to take reasonable bets with hardiness ratings, especially if the upper limit is close to ours. So twenty-six years ago, a fine specimen came on the first truck from Weston Nurseries, a six-foot-tall female with an impossibly heavy burlapped mass of clay at its roots. We muscled it up the drive and planted it at the northeast corner of the house, hoping that there the house’s shadow would prevent its broad, shiny leaves from desiccating in bright winter sun. That is the bane, we knew even then, of many broad-leaved evergreens.

  Still, we gave our one holly extra protection. For many years a heavy pine box as large as the Volkswagen we then drove was maneuvered into place over it in early December. That was, of course, the season when it looked its prettiest, and we did somewhat wonder what sort of sense it made to cover it up just at its main season of beauty. But simply keeping it alive was satisfaction enough. That was true—and remains true—about so many things growing in this garden.

  Eight years later we built our barn, attaching it to the house by a small building that was initially a woodshed (which is to say just another place for garden clutter) until it became a glassed-in, minimally heated space for winter-flowering camel-lias. The barn and woodshed created a small semi-enclosed courtyard that lay in the shadow of the house all winter long. So we moved our holly there, just under the living room windows. In its honor that space became the Holly Court and it became another sort of ilex to look at, from another window. Two, actually, for you can see into its center from the living room, and down into its top from the second-story bedroom on that side.

  Here is a landscape pronouncement of possibly dubious value: Any ilex ought to be planted in front of or below windows for winter beauty, simply because you stare out of windows so much during that season. Even in a spring when bees are scarce, I. opaca will still look handsome just for its spiny, matte-green foliage, though it set never a berry. Ilex verticillata will still display its beautifully whirled and congested stems when picked quite clean by birds. On that theory, we planted a drift of I. glabra, the native North American inkberry, in front of the upper greenhouse and just at the feet of the I. verticillata. A more experienced gardening friend had told us that I. glabra “looks just like boxwood but is much hardier.” Wrong on both counts. Ten winters turned the leaves of all our plants a sad brown, and the eleventh—an unusually severe one—took them down to the roots and we grubbed them completely away. We are not sorry, for in their place are super-hardy Sheridan hybrid boxwoods that never need protection and always look good throughout the winter and into spring, just as any evergreen should.

  And we learned th
is important lesson: Never, ever plant anything that is supposed to look like something else. It won’t. And if it isn’t pretty in and of itself, it cannot serve the garden well. So if we could grow I. glabra into a really fine big plant, then we would—and perhaps will—though not there, on the sunny south face of the house where winds are fiercest and winter sun the strongest. Instead, we would grow it in a sunny patch of the rhododendron garden in the open woodland along the pergola. We’d choose ‘Ivory Queen’, with beautiful white berries against the dark green leaves, reminiscent of mistletoe. But when we planted our first I. glabra, in the beginning of the garden, we didn’t know enough to know all that.

  LEUCOJUM

  EARLIEST SPRING boasts many small bulbs of great beauty, scillas and chinodoxas, snowdrops and crocus, often in a rainbow of species and selected cultivars. In such a vivid crowd, the lowly leucojum is often overlooked, for it exists in only two species that are commonly grown, Leucojum vernum and L.aestivum , and of the two, only the former, the spring snowflake, possesses variants sufficiently distinct to have been given two varietal names. Besides that, everybody knows what a crocus is, and a snowdrop too. But most gardeners have never heard of leucojums. Yet in very early spring, on a wet March morning, clumps of L. vernum are not to be overlooked, whatever might be offered by treasured sheets of snowdrops, or a wealth of multiplying Crocus tommasinianus in translucent lavender. And that is so, for many reasons.

  First, there is a curious sturdiness about L. vernum that contrasts pleasantly with its more fey spring counterparts. Seldom exceeding a height of six inches, it forms bold, leafy clumps of rich green that could never be described as wispy or grass-like. Almost simultaneous with this growth, slender flower stalks emerge, each bearing one or two down-hanging bells composed of six equal segments, all a pristine, waxen white that seems to reflect the mild spring sun. For all their modesty, however, there is something antic in the poise of the flowers, for each petal (sepal, actually) is curved outward at its tip, and sharp pointed, the point accented by a dot of acid green that, upon close examination, turns out to be chartreuse yellow shaded to deep green. (More chartreuse, and you have the distinction of growing L. var. carpathicum; less, and you may have L. var. vagneri. It depends on the day and the weather.) The flower looks like a jester’s cap with out-flaring flaps, the green dots serving for the bells, and the effect, for so small a thing, is luminous. Leucojum vernum seems to make everybody smile.

  And there’s another special thing about L. vernum. Whereas the slow emergence of snowdrops is watched over and measured by the gardener in millimeters from early January to March, the spring snowflakes, true to their elfin nature, appear almost magically overnight. Suddenly, they are just there. This may be in part because the low-lying, shady hollows they favor are not the first places, in spring, a gardener looks. Actually, we often have to lift a thatch of partially decayed maple leaves from a crown, revealing almost fully grown leaves and flowers, all supine and butter yellow. But a day or two in the sun, such as it is then, turns them green and upright.

  If Leucojum vernum, for all its charm, is somewhat rare in gardens, part of the explanation lies in the difficulty of establishing the dry bulbs in autumn, when most gardeners assume all bulbs should be planted. It can be done, though the life of bulbs dug from the field is short, and so they should be ordered for early delivery in late August or the first weeks of September. The bulbs should be planted singly, about six inches apart and two inches deep, in moist, even boggy soil, for it is a peculiarity of this branch of the family that they prefer such unexpected conditions. Even so, prepare for disappointment the first year, since some of the bulbs will never quicken, and others may seem to languish for a year or two until they become established. Far better to plant “in the green,” while the plants are still growing in late spring. That is how ours came to us, when a friend, before having to leave her well-established garden in Connecticut, dispatched packages of bulbs in full growth, wrapped in damp paper towels. So beg a clump from a fellow gardener, and separate and plant the bulbs as quickly as you can, within a day or two. They never look back, and often bloom modestly the following spring, abundantly thereafter. Clumps will seldom need dividing, unless one is either greedy or altruistically inclined.

  The other leucojum often grown by gardeners is L. aestivum, popularly known as the summer snowflake because it blooms much later, just as the leaves on the trees have unfurled. It certainly bears a resemblance to its spring cousin, but it is more remarkable for its differences, and therefore, for its different garden uses. It forms thick, black-green clumps of leaves to as tall as fifteen inches, among which the flower stems, only a little taller, nestle. Each stem is surmounted by two or more delicate, nodding bells, with characteristic outflaring petals and tips of green, though this time, they are unmixed with chartreuse, saving those gardeners intent on cataloging the minute differences among flowers a deal of trouble. The flowers are small, hardly what one would call showy. They are in fact each scarcely an inch across, but against the black-green of the grass-like leaves, they glisten.

  Like L. vernum, the summer snowflake flourishes in damp, humusy soil, and it will accept and even be grateful for dappled shade. It is therefore best established in the woodland garden among ferns, or perhaps in a hollow bay of the shrubbery, where its quiet, cool beauty will not experience much competition. Leucojum aestivum is a little easier to establish than L. vernum, but it is still best planted in the green. And since well-established, large clumps always look most beautiful, division should occur only when absolutely necessary. There is a slightly more vigorous, taller form, called L. a. ‘Gravetye Giant’, though only by close comparison is it marginally taller (by three or so inches) than the typical form. Get it if you can, but do not be very disappointed if you cannot.

  It is a peculiarity of the genus Leucojum, which contains at best only ten species, that the two most common are native to damp European woodlands and almost boggy meadows, while all the others inhabit dry, rocky slopes around the Mediterranean from Spain to North Africa. Almost in compensation for the arid deprivations of their homelands, the remaining leucojums—what might be called the “other” leucojums—are fey and rather fussy, but they all possess a tiny, refined charm that will appeal most to the rock gardener, or to those who grow winter- and spring-flowering bulbs in pans in the cool greenhouse. Once cultivated in either place, they are apt to become addictive.

  Most commonly grown in this group is L. autumnale, which, as its name suggests, blooms from August to October, at just the opposite end of the seasonal progression from the spring and summer snowflakes. It is an airy, delicate little plant, producing fine, hairlike leaves of a deep black-green scarcely five inches tall. Often, however, the first equally slender flower stems appear before the leaves even emerge, looking pathetically vulnerable until the leaves follow. The flowers are tiny, scarcely one-quarter-inch long and across, typically tinged with pink, though lacking any markings. A delightful form with even tinier growth bears flowers tinted a stronger pink—though still quite pale—which is usually given separate species status, as L. roseum. We grew it for years without, we are embarrassed to say, perceiving the difference.

  Three other species closely resemble L. autumnale, though they are scarcely grown except by specialists in rare bulbs. Leucojum trichophyllum bears tiny bells composed of pale pink, pointed and reflexed sepals, and L. longifolium produces equally small flowers with pure white, rounded petals. Both are very nice. But particularly to be sought out is L. nicaense, which seems the most robust of the tiny leucojums, and also sets copious seed that can achieve flowering age within three years. All three species will begin blooming in late winter and continue through spring.

  Though L. autumnale and the other species that resemble it are sometimes suggested for the rock garden, their precise cultural requirements really make them best when grown in pots. All are native to arid Mediterranean climates, and so demand both a very free-draining soil and a dry perio
d in summer—what the old gardeners called a “summer baking.” In most of North America, these are conditions that can far more easily be achieved in a greenhouse. Their fragile autumn, winter, or early spring beauty also richly repays the closest observation. So they are really at their best when established in shallow bulb pans, which must be kept in the hottest, driest conditions one can find throughout the summer, and moved into cool, frost-free conditions in winter. No need to worry about when to begin watering in autumn, for the bulbs themselves will tell you, by the surprise of a tiny, hairlike leaf or flower stem. You can get out the magnifying glass then, to see the beauty that is there, or you can wait for the more impressive show that is soon to come.