Our Life in Gardens

by Joe Eck

  LILACS

  PERHAPS EVERY PLACE in the world where plants can grow at all has one that is inextricably bound up with its essential identity. One cannot think of Los Angeles without its improbably gawky Washingtonia palms, towering upward like plants invented by Dr. Seuss. The low-lying areas of Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Louisiana would be different landscapes entirely without their ancient live oaks hung with Spanish moss. Arizona will always seem to be sprinkled over with saguaro cactus, and Texas will have its interminable stretches of sagebrush.

  New England has two emblematic plants. One is of course the sugar maple. For centuries it has been an economic mainstay, and in any accessible region of New England, specimens exist that will have provided sap for three hundred years or more. They will always be the vastest trees on any property, for though the great pines were cut for flooring, the enormous oaks for furniture, and lesser trees for firewood, maples were always left standing. We have one ourselves, a twin-trunked giant perhaps as much as four hundred years old, “the best sugar tree,” we were told when we moved here, “for miles around.”

  It would surprise many New Englanders that the other plant emblematic of the area, the common lilac, is not native. It has been grown here so widely and for so long that one cannot picture a New England house without at least one, and in fact, arguments might occur over its origins, with stubborn old New Englanders stoutly insisting that it has to be native, because the cellar hole of their great-grandmother’s house, now fallen in and obscured by weeds, still has a fine old lilac growing in what was once her dooryard. “Stands to reason. How could the pore old lady ever gotten anything fancy?” These are arguments transplanted New Englanders quickly learn to terminate, changing the subject to the weather, or the maggot problem with the sheep.

  But the persistence of lilacs for many years, a hundred or more, is not difficult to explain. Longevity has always been prized on New England farms, and like the farmers who planted them, lilacs are hardy, enduring plants. They can resist winter lows of minus 40 degrees and still bloom come spring, and for many years. The Governor Wentworth lilacs in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, were planted in 1750 and are still thriving. The house on the farm in Pepperell, Massachusetts, where we lived when we were young, was built in 1759, and there were lilacs as much as fifteen feet across with gnarled, gray trunks a foot or more wide. One of them stood near a stone commemorating Adah Hassell, one of the first white children born in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Plants that live a very long time—the span at least of three human generations, often more—are intriguing, and though we know that the oldest living thing on earth is most certainly a plant, debate as to which plant that might be continues, as new discoveries appear in the pages of science magazines or The New York Times. Lilacs do not hold the longevity prize, of a thousand or more years, though a hundred years for a lilac is no large effort.

  What makes lilacs treasured is not the years they can accumulate, however, but the beauty of their flowers, which come just as the last memory of winter and its ice and snow and barrenness are passing away in the May sun. They flower exuberantly then, hundreds of cobs of bloom appearing over gaunt, gray trunks. That conjunction is itself an emblem of the renewal of the year, but we wonder whether without the fragrance peculiar to lilacs they would matter so much. For there are fragrances—of roses certainly, of violets, gardenias, and carnations—that seem to carry the most powerful resonances. None, perhaps, is more powerful than the smell of lilacs.

  The genus Syringa is not a small one, nor is it occupied merely or even largely by the one that is most familiar to gardeners, the common lilac, S. vulgaris. There are in fact twenty-three recognized species, all native to the old worlds, to Europe, India, China, Korea, and Japan. There are good reasons for growing almost every one of the twenty-three, and many do grow here in our garden. But the Balkan S. vulgaris has given rise to more than two thousand named cultivars, varying in growth habit and leaf, but most significantly in flower. The species has been a particular passion of the French since 1570, when Elizabeth of Austria brought it with her when she became the wife of Charles IX. Cultivation of lilacs quickly spread to gardens throughout France, and beyond. But the modern history of lilacs really begins in the late nineteenth century, when Victor Lemoine (1823–1911) undertook a celebrated breeding program with S. vulgaris that his firm continued until 1950, producing hundreds of magnificent plants, many still unsurpassed for beauty of form and scent. The Lemoine hybrids so dominate the world of lilacs that most lilacs are still known as “French lilacs.”

  It would be easy to make a garden only of lilacs, for there are so many from which to choose, and we have known someone who did just that. Thirty years ago, when we first began our garden, we visited Al Lumley, the track coach at Amherst and a passionate lover of lilacs. He had assembled a remarkable collection, six acres in Pelham, Massachusetts, that were planted to hundreds of lilacs, all arranged in neat rows and all in bloom the Sunday morning we visited. To anyone interested in plants, a large collection of one species is a very great pleasure, for though you yourself may not want to have so many different forms, it is hugely entertaining to evaluate their differences, to compare this with that, and of course, at the end, to make your selections, which will always be more numerous than you thought when you first decided to visit. On that May morning as we wandered among great old specimens, some blue as the sky, some purple like a bishop’s cope, one the palest yellow like very rich cream, and some so heavy with doubled bloom that the flower trusses hung down like bunches of grapes, it was very hard to know what dozen young plants we would carry away from Mr. Lumley’s nursery. He particularly praised a nineteenth-century selection called ‘Bleuatre’, whose small single flowers are as clear a blue as any ever seen in a lilac. Over our many years of looking at lilacs, we have never seen its equal in clarity of tint.

  We bought others as well. For years we lost the name of the one that hangs double and thick like grapes, but it has turned out to be ‘Victor Lemoine’, named by himself for himself. The rich, deep purple ‘Stadtgartner Rothpletz’ also came from our visit to Mr. Lumley, as did the Wedgewood-blue ‘President Lincoln’, the Jersey-cream ‘Primrose’ that is called yellow but really isn’t, and the double white ‘Miss Ellen Willmott’, commemorating a great gardener of the last century who employed seventy-two gardeners and bankrupted her huge fortune. All these plants are still very much a part of our garden, all planted around a little terrace below the south bedroom window where their tops are visible in the long June twilight and their fragrance is good company, all night long.

  Our lilac travels began essentially in 1979. We had read of another whole class of lilacs, not from an American writer but from Vita Sackville-West, who before her death had become enamored of the Preston lilacs. They were created in the 1920s at the Morden Experiment Station in Canada by Miss Isabella Preston, who made multiple crosses between S. villosa and S. reflexa. Indeed, Sackville-West has a memorable portrait of Miss Preston, creeping around at dawn with a rabbit’s fur brush, performing marriages. It is a fanciful portrait, for we suspect Miss Preston was a sensible scientist. But her achievements were remarkable, and the Preston lilacs are too little known in gardens.

  They are large, muscular plants to perhaps twenty-five feet, with thick, smooth gray elephantine trunks. They form generous clumps, though as with all lilacs, three or four should be selected, and the rest removed, to create a structural plant, rather than one that is simply a wad of many ascending stems. They are prodigious of bloom, with hundreds, possibly thousands of flowers on a single large shrub. Many do not admire their fragrance, which is close to a near relative, the cat-scented common privet. But they bloom a month later than common lilacs, and the richness of their color and the abundance of their bloom offer a magnificent tier of flower above the shrub roses, which will just be coming in then. Preston lilacs are sometimes difficult to locate. But we found a nursery to the north of us, almost huddled up against the Cana
dian border, and up we drove, since a hard day’s journey means little to any gardener who is after good plants.

  We brought home three, and really, it would be very hard to claim that any of them was finer than the other two. ‘Nocturne’ forms an anchor piece at the left edge of the perennial garden and produces huge cobs of violet-black that justify for once a plant’s fanciful name. ‘James Macfarlane’, a soft clear pink, is planted on the lawn edge of the rhododendron garden. But our favorite perhaps is ‘Agnes Smith’, a rather rangy plant to perhaps thirty feet tall, planted at the head of the rose path just as it transitions into the woods. That plant is not actually the work of Miss Preston herself, but of Owen Rogers and Albert Younger, who took up her work at the University of New Hampshire and made their own crosses. They introduced it in the early 1970s, just before we began our most active phase of garden building, and they called its flowers white. They are not white at all, but a pearly soft pink that one might call “bosomy” if one could do that without a blush.

  We make elaborate claims for almost any plant we grow, for if we grow them, we love them. That is until we don’t grow them, for some have been discarded as worthless, and some have simply shown a bad disposition. Any one of those discards could return again, for sometimes survival in compost piles has a way of glorifying a plant you thought you hated, and anyway, if gardeners cannot change their minds, what is it all about then? Still, there are a few plants that will always have a place here, and for which we make the most elaborate claims. Some are stately and some are lowly, but all of them possess a quality that extends beyond structure of twig or branch, leaf color or form, or even flower or fragrance. That quality we could only call soul. Lilacs have that, in abundance.

  MAGNOLIAS

  WHEN WE FIRST DECIDED to move from Boston to Vermont, the catalog of what our friends said we would never be able to grow included almost everything we loved. On their list—which they seemed to elaborate with each commiserating letter or phone call—were hollies, stewartias, paper bark maples, dogwoods, boxwoods, witch hazels, and rhododendrons. Our prospects in hoping to establish a garden here looked very bleak. Had it not been for the social wisdom of the state and the care with which it preserves its natural beauty, we might have felt we had made a very foolish decision. Horticulturally, it seemed we had.

  The most dismaying part of this endlessly strung-out list was deciduous magnolias, which, we were assured, would not tolerate routine winters of minus 20 degrees. A few might squeak through, but even those few would probably have their flowers blasted by late spring frost, if winter itself had not already mummified their buds. This was distressing information, since both of us had loved magnolias since we were children. They were features of our grandparents’ and parents’ gardens, and in spring, their purple richness was up and down the streets we walked to school. They were also a distinguishing feature in the older parts of Boston, especially Back Bay, where we had lived. There they really meant spring, in all its floral abundance, and since we were coming to a thrilling sense of our adult life in so many other ways, their freshness on that old city’s air meant gardening to us, another passion among many that we shared.

  In the beginning, Weston Nurseries, in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, was our main source of good plants, and of all the magnolias they listed, only one was recommended as possibly able to endure the climate of our brand-new, southern Vermont garden. It was Magnolia ×loebneri ‘Merrill’, and we could not have begun our enduring passion for deciduous magnolias more auspiciously. That first tree now stands more than thirty feet tall, with three elephantine trunks ascending from the ground, each dividing into muscular branches that terminate in a mass of twigs. All winter long their tips are decorated with fat, fuzzy gray buds that hold the promise of spring, seeming ready to split their calyxes in any warm spell.

  Wisely, they don’t, waiting until the real warmth of spring, which here is usually in the last week of April. The flowers consist of about two dozen lax, inch-wide petals (tepals, to be technical), though they hang so thickly on the twigs that they recall the snow recently deep on the ground. The end of April is an unstable season, and so the blooms of ‘Merrill’ risk being frosted. When our great tree is in bloom and temperatures drop, there are agitated nights, with much checking of the thermometer at the back door. It is an anxiety all gardeners know, for many other tender things have ventured out then. But when, one morning, we realized that the blossoms of our ‘Merrill’ had withstood a night in which the thermometer dropped to 19 degrees, we essentially quit fretting. Come morning, most of the flowers were a full rich white, and not the brown rags we had feared to see.

  Most gardeners, no matter what space they are given to cultivate, are also collectors. We are certainly no exception, and since our first deciduous magnolia was planted, we can now count thirty-eight specimen trees in the garden. But the precise moment we decided magnolias were for us after all was in 1973, when an article written by Dr. David Leach appeared in the newsletter of the American Magnolia Society. It was an account of those magnolias that had survived the dreadful winter of 1963, where, in Dr. Leach’s Pennsylvania garden, thermometers reached lows of minus 35 degrees. We set out immediately to search for those that had sustained “no” or “slight” injury. Our printout of that article contains red pencil checks by each, and we located every one.

  Magnolia stellata was on the list, and it was easy to obtain, since it was stocked by almost every nursery because it is a good sales item in spring, producing its many-tepaled white flowers while still in a five-gallon nursery can. It has many selected forms, including the pink-tinged cultivar ‘Jane Platt’, which was not so easy to find, but which we located via mail-order from Gossler Farms, in Eugene, Oregon. (Gossler Farms was—and still is—one of the very best sources for hard-to-find magnolias.) Magnolia stellata is one of the two parents of ‘Merrill’ (the other is M. kobus), and another cross between the two species produced the free-flowering ‘Leonard Messel’, which we tucked at the back door, where it would be sheltered from the west wind. Like ‘Merrill’, the nine petals of each flower are straplike, but in ‘Leonard Messel’ they are a fine, bright pink. The tree is now as tall as the house, producing thousands of flowers, even in part shade.

  Fond as we became of all these magnolias of stellata parentage, we still thought of a magnolia as possessing the opulent, large-petaled cup of those that grow up and down Boston’s Commonwealth Avenue. It was a boon, then, to find one M. ×soulangeana on Dr. Leach’s list in the “slightly damaged” category, M. × soulangeana‘Alexandrina’. We could live with slight damage, if we could even occasionally see its chalices of bloom, rose pink from a distance but actually creamy white washed with pink up close. We planted it near our stream, thereby accidentally discovering a fact invaluable to the future of our garden, that if any tree can accept percolating water near its roots, it gains at least a zone in hardiness. In fact, over twenty or more years, Alexandrina has never failed to bloom, even after our coldest winters.

  Working on that same principle we also planted our first M. virginiana, the southern sweet-bay magnolia, actually in the bog formed at that edge of the stream, because we read that it would tolerate waterlogged soil. And so it has, growing into a rather lanky but still beautiful fifteen-foot-tall tree hanging over the plank bridge, and producing its intensely scented twoand-a-half-inch, creamy white, cupped flowers, sometimes at nose level. By now, we had really begun to prove our smug Boston friends wrong, because M. virginiana is usually rated to Zone 6 (–10 to 0) and we were clearly in Zone 4 (–30 to –20). So we planted other Virginia magnolias, and now there are six in the garden, all in boggy places along the stream.

  In the mid-1980s, just at the peak of greatest expansion of our garden, the number of magnolias that were hardy to Zone 4 suddenly seemed to explode. As a result of breeding done by David Leach, Phil Savage, and others, there were suddenly more magnolias than we had space to plant. Their hardiness descended from the genes of M. acuminata, the na
tive American cucumber tree (so called for its narrow, six-inch-long green seed pods), the natural range of which extends from Georgia to Illinois. When crossed with more tender species, M. acuminata also contributed flower pigments that produced blooms of clear yellow, introducing that color to the genus for the first time. Suddenly, there was a flood of gold, beginning with ‘Elizabeth’, released by the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in 1977, and the largest-flowered of the yellow magnolias, with huge, butter-colored chalices of bloom. The flood still continues, bringing new magnolias into circulation with each spring’s catalogs.

  When gardeners are confronted with a plethora of new plants in a genus they adore, the only possibility is to contrive some special place for them. That prevents the garden from becoming jittery because forms of a favorite plant are scattered all over the place. So we planted a magnolia walk on either side of the pergola that guides you through the woods to the guest house, the daffodil meadow, and the vegetable garden beyond. We could double or quadruple the choices now, but we selected ‘Butterflies’, ‘Ivory Chalice’, ‘Miss Honeybee’, and ‘Yellow Lantern’. (‘Elizabeth’ had already been planted at the foot of the rock garden, far away, and that was a mistake, because she is exposed to the cruelest spring winds in our garden. But she was too big to move.) We interspersed these selections with four specimens of M. ×’Who Knows What’, called that because they are seedlings gathered from our garden, and are of indeterminate parentage. Two have pure white flowers and one is the palest pink, indicating to us that ‘Merrill’ and ‘Leonard Messel’ had gotten together at some point. The walk ends in a single specimen of M. tripetala, the umbrella tree, so called because its vast green leaves are produced in whorls and each measures twenty-four inches long. It is hidden a bit in the woods at the end of the walk, both as a full stop and because its distinctly tropical nature would be unsettling farther down. Magnolia macrophylla has even larger leaves, to three feet in length, but in our one attempt with it the leaves got hopelessly shredded by our spring winds.