Our Life in Gardens

by Joe Eck

  Lately, there have been other crosses with M. acuminata, most notably with the rich, red-purple M. liliiflora, which has yielded a whole new color range for hardy magnolias, distinctly weird and haunting, almost but not quite brown, with purple and yellow streakings. It is the blend of colors you’d expect in an orchid, perhaps, but never in a hardy blossoming tree. Of course we are fascinated, and have acquired one of these crosses already, a five-foot-tall specimen called ‘Woods-man’, which last year produced its first strange-colored chalices of chocolate-rose.

  Someday, we suppose we will have to admit that we have planted our last magnolia, but on this cold February day, with the catalogs spread before us, it does not seem likely just yet. Surely we can find room for one more. We have at least one spot in mind, behind the poultry house, against the wall of massive boulders that indicates that boundary of our property. Magnolia sieboldii ‘Colossus’ could fit in there, with its five-inch-wide waxy white petals arranged as a bowl around winered stamens. Though usually listed as hardy to Zone 6, like so many other magnolias growing here, we are sure it will be hardy in Zone 4. And like so many other things in gardening, it is a case of “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

  NATIVE GROUNDCOVERS

  THE WORD “GROUNDCOVER” has an unpleasant sound to many gardeners, too often bringing to mind seas of boring pachysandra or myrtle. Often, it also suggests a certain lack of seriousness about gardening itself. “Want a low-maintenance landscape? Well . . . plant groundcovers!” It is certainly true that both pachysandra and vinca have their uses, and though they are not the most thrilling plants in the world, once established, they can eliminate many maintenance problems practically forever. But they are not one’s only choices. The native American flora is rich with other plants that can also suppress weeds; require no deadheading, staking, or division; and look great on natural rainfall and reasonably fertile soils. Many are also plants of the first distinction, admired worldwide for their elegance and beauty.

  Among any class of plants, one has favorites. Within the group of native plants suitable for groundcover, our own is actually a pachysandra. It is not, however, the one usually seen, Pachysandra terminalis, which is a native of Japan. Rather, it is a cogener, the word applied by botanists to any plants that share a genetic heritage but developed in parallel but different ways after the continents divided many eons ago. Popularly known as Allegheny spurge from its natural range, its botanical name is P. procumbens, an odd mis-description, for its habit is not at all lax, but rather, stiffly upright. Its matte, mid-green leaves are produced in neat, flattened whorls atop naked stems as much as a foot long, beginning with larger leaves at the edge of the circle and diminishing to quite tiny ones in the center, usually numbering a baker’s dozen. In a well-grown patch, each whorl overlaps its neighbors to create a dense cover impenetrable to weeds. It grows best in shade, but sad to say, not dry shade, for it craves moist, humus-rich forest litter. Increase is very slow, new shoots rising near existing ones and over time—sometimes a long time—steadily creating a large colony. But as with all desirable plants that take their own time to increase, a modest stock can best be built up by tearing the clump apart early each spring and replanting the bits at wider-spaced intervals.

  Growing in almost the same natural range as P. procumbens is Shortia galacifolia, though it is an even rarer plant, both in gardens and in the wild. Popularly known as Oconee bells, it takes that name from a Cherokee word meaning “beside the waters.” That is where you are apt to find it, growing in moist shade near streams and on the shaded banks of woodland lakes. Its rich green, paddle-shaped leaves are heavily veined, and so shiny, both above and below, that they seem varnished. The plant shingles over the soil in an evergreen mass hardly six inches tall, and with the advent of cold weather the foliage takes on beautiful tints of russet and bronze. And in spring, just as the snow melts, tiny shuttlecock flowers rise above the foliage, little snow-white bells that emerge from burgundy calyxes. They last hardly a week, but during that week, you should hope for English visitors to your garden. For there, it is a holy grail plant, and your horticultural reputation will be assured.

  The prettiest flowers shouldn’t, perhaps, last a long time, but leaves are a different matter. And so another American plant, again found in the same woodland duff of the southeastern American mountains, has always been celebrated because its leaves have the extraordinary property of lasting up to three months in a vase of water. The plant is Galax urceolata, but as it is the only species in its genus, most people call it simply “galax,” or by its pretty other name, “wandflower.” A first cousin to shortia (which borrows its own species name, galacifolia, from it), the leaves are taller, to about ten inches, and slightly cupped, which intensifies their varnished elegance. Flowers, which occur briefly in early spring, are amazingly dainty little bottle brushes borne high above the leaves, on stems so hairlike that they dance in the slightest spring breeze. The leaves, which at their largest measure not more than four inches, turn a beautiful burnished red in autumn, when they used to be picked and dispersed in huge numbers by the florist trade. In fact, the city of Galax, Virginia, was once the center for such export, though since gathering plants from the wild has become appropriately unpopular, the town has turned to other pursuits.

  The plants so far discussed are true perennials, all producing lush leaves from crowns or stolons. But the North American flora also boasts several low woody shrubs that form large, monospecific colonies in the wild, and can serve as useful groundcovers. The absolute aristocrat of that group must be Cornus canadensis, which bears the inelegant common name “bunchberry,” from its thick clusters of fleshy red seed, but which otherwise is indistinguishable in everything but its height from its cousin, the American dogwood, C. florida. The leaves are the same, though borne in whorls atop stems hardly four inches tall. In the center, sometime in mid-spring, the “flowers” appear, really four chalk-white pointed bracts surrounding a cluster of tiny true flowers in the center. And because they are bracts, not petals, they look fresh for a long time. Outside the places it chooses to grow natively, which would extend roughly from Nova Scotia to Virginia, it can be cranky to get started. But it is very useful to know that its pink, questing stolons travel best in well-decomposed leaf mold, or even in rotted bark mulch. If young plants are established in such nutrient-poor organic material, they may clamor across it gleefully.

  Among our favorites within the group of woody or semi-woody sub-shrubs is certainly Paxistima, sometimes also spelled Pachystima, which gives everybody trouble. Of the two species grown in gardens, P. canbyi is the nicer, with tiny, needle-like, shiny green, and finely toothed leaves borne alternately on sprays of wiry stems, but thick enough to discourage all weed competition. It is popularly known by a pretty name, cliff green, attesting to the fact that it prefers moist but well-drained sites, and is happiest growing at the top of a retaining wall or in a rock-strewn woodland. Its other popular name, rat stripper, is a little harder to understand, though we once did see plants in a garden stripped bare of every leaf, leaving only the naked brown twigs. Rats must have done that work, though we cannot think why, perhaps for mere mischief. Paxistima has several ways of covering ground, for it forms stolons from the mother plant, but also roots wherever its lax stems touch moist earth. This habit may be encouraged by bending a wiry stem to earth and placing a small stone on top to hold it down. Flowers are not much, greenish white in summer, and most people never see them, though presumably they set seed, and spread that way too.

  Scandinavians might object to the claim that another wiry little shrub is “a native American,” for Vaccinium vitis-idaea minus is their much-loved lingonberry, first cousin to our cranberry, V. macrocarpon, both members of the magnificent blueberry clan. But lingonberry occurs just about everywhere on the globe that is cool and moist. It forms dense mats of tiny, boxwood-like leaves on wiry brown stems, spreading over the earth by means of stolons and rooting stem tips as it goes. It is an ada
ptable little plant, as comfortable growing in Zone 2, where winter temperatures reach a low of minus 50, as in Zone 7, where they only reach zero. We cannot imagine how the Scandinavians can gather so many tiny berries, each twice the size of a BB, to put up in jars, and then use them to glaze their superb roast chickens in winter with lingonberry conserve and heavy cream. In our own garden, we often see their lovely nodding white bells in spring, and even an occasional red berry at Christmastime. But it would be a poor chicken indeed that could be glazed by any lingonberries we could gather. Still, the plant is very pretty, and on a rather barren sunny hillside slope here, it has flourished without care for years.

  All these lovely plants are native to the eastern seaboard of North America, ranging from the White Mountains of New Hampshire, where many vacciniums flourish, down to the Virginias, where sheets of galax may be found. But the West Coast offers treasures too, the best of which perhaps is V. hexandra, named for the English explorer George Vancouver. A native of Washington State down to the redwood forests of California, it has proven—as many West Coast natives do—surprisingly adaptable to other climates throughout Zones 4 to 8. Wherever it grows, if it can be given cool shade and moist soil, it will form thick sheets of thumb-sized bright green leaves arranged on wiry stems. It is a first cousin, related to the beautiful Asian epimediums, but it grows lower than any of them, hardly ever reaching more than six inches in height. There are gardeners who have complained that it is rampant and needs controlling every year by spading the outsides of the colony. We could wish you to be that lucky.

  No real garden should ever show bare earth, much less a sea of bark mulch, which always represents both an opportunity lost and a failure of horticultural seriousness. A good garden may be recognized in many ways, but one of them is in the richness of its ground-hugging plants. Those gardeners who scorn “mere” groundcovers might seriously rethink the issue.

  NERINES

  IT TOOK US MANY YEARS to understand the specific needs of nerines. Thirty, to be precise, because it was that long ago that we acquired our first one from beside the garbage can of a friend in Marblehead, Massachusetts. “They are one-shot deals,” he explained, “like paperwhites. You can’t make them bloom again.” But they seemed so promising, each one sitting on top of the soil and looking like a fat daffodil bulb. There wasn’t any foliage, but there was one wizened pink flower on a long stem that seemed to tug at us. Anyway, bulbs always give you that feeling of potential life that makes them hard to throw away, even if they are only sprouted onions in the crisper drawer. The bulbs were shoulder-to-shoulder, not nicely spaced like you’d plant a pot of tulips for forcing, but joined at the base and pressing against the rim, as if they had multiplied to that extent. And there was also the pot, an old clay one, white-crusted with lime. In any case, at that time we seemed to be running a Shelter for Unloved Plants, rescuing half-frozen ficus trees from city curbs and shrunken, dust-covered African violets from the rubbish room of our apartment building. So we took these nerines. At the least, the pot would be nice to have.

  The first thing you feel about anything you rescue is that you should be especially good to it. So we tipped those nerine bulbs out of their pot, divided them carefully, and then repotted them into two pots, the first the one they came in and the other recycled from somewhere else. We used the richest compost we had, and fertilized them carefully all that first winter, during which very healthy, straplike, eight-inch-long leaves appeared. We were really hoping for abundant bloom in autumn—from two pots now—but nothing came. Our plants ripened their leaves and then quietly went to sleep for the winter. This happened for several years, but as they were no trouble and we had hopes that flowers would eventually occur, the two pots just hung around. But still, our friend had been right. They seemed a “one-shot deal.” And we hadn’t even had the first shot.

  Then we had the great privilege of visiting a very old garden in a small village in Normandy that had been tended for over forty years by its owner, the Comtesse d’Andlau. Like many antique French houses, hers presented a blank north face flat on the street, but its south side opened through wide French doors into a large walled garden. When the house was built in the eighteenth century, much of that space would have been a paddock, a small home orchard, a place to tether the family cow or even to raise a pig or two. But it was now planted with remarkable trees and shrubs, some—like the white-berried Sorbus cashmiriana—of extraordinary credentials. (“Clementine Churchill gave me seed of that.”)

  Sadly, our visit was in late October, on a cold gray and drizzly day, and mostly there was little to admire in the garden except bark, berries, and impressive plant labels. But as our little group turned back toward the house, we noticed that the whole of the narrow bed between the old stone terrace and the French doors was vivid with carmine and coral pink, white and purple. We must have given a gasp of surprise, because Mme d’Andlau said, in her richly accented English, “Very fine, do you not think? They are nerines. Of course, you must not be too good to them!” Of course. For there was the mystery solved, in fewer than ten words: You must not be too good to them.

  Two species of nerine are commonly grown in gardens where they are hardy, and in pots elsewhere. Nerine sarniensis was cultivated in France by at least 1630, and in Guernsey by around 1655. It is popularly known as the Guernsey lily because of the supposition that large numbers of bulbs washed ashore from a foundered Dutch merchant ship, took root on the shores of that island, and flourished. This watery survival gives the genus its pretty name, after Nerine, a water nymph, and the species name derives from Sarnia, the ancient Roman name for the Isle of Guernsey. But though N. sarniensis thrives in the mild maritime climate Guernsey enjoys, by whatever path it came to be cultivated there, it is magnificent, producing strong bloom stems to as much as eighteen inches tall, topped by an almost spherical umbel of inch-wide, six-petaled flowers. There may be as many as twenty separate flowers in an umbel, from each of which protrude prominent stamens, rather like the whiskers of a cat. The color of the typical species is an extraordinary rich scarlet dusted over with flecks of gold. It is hard to better, though there are beautiful selections that may be pinkish white, strong pink, or orange.

  Our nerine—the one that came to us from beside our friend’s garbage can years ago—is N. bowdenii, first introduced into gardens by Athelstan Bowden-Cornish, a specialist in South African flora, in 1902. In its typical form, it produces bloom stems to about fifteen inches tall, each crowned by a rather ragged umbel of two-inch-long, five-petaled flowers of a warm rich pink, ruffled along their edges and often marked with pencilings of darker pink. That seems to be the form we have had for years, though it is now relatively rare in commerce, having been superceded by hybrids that produce fuller umbels of apricot, coral, peach, pink, grape purple, and even icy white. We have some of those too, but we don’t like them all that much better than the form we started with. Or rather, we like them differently. And after we received our clue from Mme d’Andlau, we have not been without nerine flowers in late autumn, ever since.

  Actually, she was perhaps only repeating what many good European gardeners know. For Tony Norris, an English nurseryman who accumulated more than eighty thousand nerine bulbs and nine hundred cultivars by the end of his life, observed wild plants of N. sarniensis growing lustily north of Cape Town, South Africa, in some of the worst soil on earth. The chosen habitat of that species is gravelly scree or rock crevices where the nitrogen content of the soil is as low as three parts per million. Norris reasoned, then, that the previous assumption that nerines would relish the fat soils preferred by their cousins in the family Amaryllidaceae—the Hippeastrums—was simple error. He suggested a potting medium of three parts acid sand to one part peat, and no fertilizer. Other specialists have suggested other mixes, though it is certain that the best results occur from lean, fast-draining soil that is poor in nitrogen but fairly rich in phosphorus and potassium. Also, it does no harm to lace the potting medium with a bit of th
e worst soil in one’s garden, to supply necessary trace elements. On this lean diet, nerines may flourish for ten years or more in a pot, and they ought to be left alone for just about that time, since “Do Not Disturb” is the motto for them all. They will flower best when they become so crowded that their bulbs touch the edges of the pot, in fact just exactly the way the bulbs in that pot we rescued were, before we mistakenly made them more comfortable.

  Mme d’Andlau grew her beautiful nerines on garden soil above a bed of ancient brick rubble and decayed mortar. Anyone who gardens in Zone 9 or 10 could do that as well, but the rest of us must grow our nerines in pots. Bulbs are always expensive because named forms can be reproduced only from offsets of mother bulbs, a slow process at best. However, three bulbs established in a six-inch-wide clay pot, with one-half of each bulb showing above soil level, will multiply to ten or so in five or six years, blooming more profusely each year and representing wealth in many senses. After the foliage has withered, the advice repeated in many books is to turn the pots on their sides and place them in the driest, hottest place available, such as on a shelf at the top of the greenhouse, to ripen them for bloom the following autumn. We’ve had better luck, however, by treating our nerines more gently, placing them in sunny, protected places over the summer where a little water—but not much—may occasionally reach them.

  However they are stored, they generally tell you when they have woken up by producing a slender bloom stem from the neck of each bulb. This sense of timing is a minor horticultural mystery. When the buds first show, the pots must be brought into strong sunlight, watered sparingly at first, and then more frequently as the flower stems extend and the tips of new leaves begin to appear. In a greenhouse or on a sunny windowsill, the flower stems will always bend toward the strongest light, and so pots should be rotated a quarter turn each day. It is a gentle attention and the most that nerines really want from you.