Our Life in Gardens

by Joe Eck

  Our pergola, for all the wonderful plants we can grow along it, takes its primary value simply because it connects place to place, guiding you firmly up to the daffodil meadow and the vegetable garden, which you really ought to see. So we imagine that Pliny the Younger might stroll down it in sandals, toga flapping in the cool spring breezes of Vermont, and say, “What took you so long?” So might his uncle, Pliny the Elder, though he was so fat that he simply leaned against a tree when Pompeii was engulfed, and died. He probably couldn’t make it up to our vegetable garden. But he would like the pergola, which we got in large part from the place where he lived.

  POPPIES

  NOT ALL POPPIES look like poppies. Bloodroot is a poppy, but it looks like a daisy unless it is the rare double form, when it looks like a gardenia. Macleaya cordata is called the “plume poppy,” but it is hard to see the poppy part in a flower that hasn’t any petals at all, and waves its bronze plume on a stalk eight feet tall. What most of us call a poppy is characterized above all else by petals, most typically a double row of four to six, in a color so clear that it has a name among painters, “poppy red.” It is the flower sprinkled over the elegant green and gray landscapes of Camille Corot, and its paper facsimile is given out on Veterans Day, as proof of a contribution.

  There are more than seventy species of poppy, most of which are herbaceous—either annual or perennial—but some are woody, including two California natives that are among the most beautiful in the genus. Romneya coulteri bears spectacular, five-inch white blossoms surrounding a thick boss of golden stamens. We have flowered it here, beautifully but briefly, for it resents a confined life in a flowerpot. In fact, its questing roots can break through asphalt driveways, as we once saw in a friend’s garden in Los Angeles. With Dendromecon rigida we had better luck. It happily settled into life in our little winter garden off the kitchen, blooming as early as March, with rich yellow, sweetly fragrant four-petaled poppies against leathery gray, arrowhead-shaped leaves. But like so many California native plants we tried to grow here, it resented the abundant summer water its neighboring camellias and tender rhododendrons required. It languished, and after three or four years, it died. So luminous and beautiful are its early spring flowers that we might try it again, but next time in a pot.

  Happily, another California native poppy, Eschscholzia californica, has gladly accepted life here in Vermont, not in the protected climate of the winter garden but out in the open, where it seeds about exuberantly and returns faithfully from year to year. Though technically a short-lived perennial, it develops rapidly from seed the first season, flowering in a huge range of color from the brassy but beautiful orange most often seen in the wild, through red, bronze, pink, apricot, cream, and white. Double forms also exist. The one absolute requirement of California poppies is for excellent drainage, for they are native to arid soils, and so ours grow in a freestanding planted wall about four feet high that extends the length of our lower greenhouse and shop. In early summer, tufts of filmy gray foliage appear from self-sown seed, pretty enough in their own way to provide an effect, but flowering soon begins in June and continues into August. Then the plants begin to grow shabby, so we cut them to within three inches of their base. They quickly send up fresh foliage, and produce flowers that last until hard frost in early October. From that second flowering, enough viable seed usually falls to guarantee a good crop of plants the following year, though for security we sprinkle packaged seed over the bed in early April.

  Mixed among them we grow another poppy, Hunnemannia fumariifolia, native to the mountains of Mexico. Like the California poppy, it relishes cool nights and requires sharp drainage. It is called the “Mexican tulip poppy” because its four crepe-like petals form a cup around a boss of golden stamens and are perhaps the clearest, purest yellow of any flower we grow. All poppies resent root disturbance and so are best seeded in peat pots or directly in the open ground. Hunnemannia, however, does not merely resent disturbance; it is completely intolerant of it, and so it must be sown where it is wanted.

  High above the planted walls at the other end of the garden, among the roses and peonies, opium poppies are in flower by late June. These are known botanically as Papaver somniferum from their use since ancient times as a soporific. But their rich, bosomy opulence makes them most unlike their Californian and Mexican cousins. They are sometimes called “lettuce poppies,” or even “bread-seed poppies,” for that is the most benign of their uses. They are in fact the source of opium and of its refined forms, morphine and heroin, but here, they are grown for the beauty of the flowers. Usually we grow three sorts, our favorite of which is a rich Concord grape single that we originally got from Lauren Springer, and which has traveled the world since as ‘Lauren Springer’s Grape’. We have fondness, too, for a huge white double with more than sixty petals, ethereally called ‘White Cloud’ but looking more like an exuberant cheerleader’s pompom. Our third is a mysterious double black without a name, the inky petals of which do in fact suggest sinister properties. But two years ago, a loose, blowsy single appeared, of a pale strawberry sherbet color with a dark mauve stain at the base of each petal. We are sure it was sprinkled into our garden by some waggish visitor, as the great Ellen Willmott is said to have done with the silver-leaved Eryngium giganteum, which has since always been known as Miss Willmott’s ghost. We are not yet sure what we think about that.

  Opium poppies are self-fertile, and so we keep some distance between the various types to have them come true from seed. Seed is sown in April in peat pots to minimize root disturbance, and we have strong young plants to set out in May. But self-sown seedlings always also appear, and those develop into the best plants. However, whether transplants or volunteers, opium poppies should not be crowded together, since at maturity well-grown plants can be a foot wide and up to three feet tall. Their broad, celadon-gray leaves are eight inches long and four inches wide, laid one upon another to form a wide rosette, quite beautiful in itself. And the unfolding flower bud is balletic in its grace, first arched like the neck of a swan, and then straightening as the calyx bursts to shake out crinkled petals, much like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon. Though the double forms lack the grace of the singles, they persist twice as long, lasting four or five days before shattering, as opposed to merely two. However, even single forms will last three or even four days, if they are cut early in the morning when they are just opening, the cut ends dipped immediately into boiling water or seared with a candle flame, or, less glamorously, a cigarette lighter.

  Dancing all about the garden are the great-great-grandchildren of a poppy we grew from seed at least twenty years ago. It is Papaver rupifragum, and it seems as long-lived as a peony. It originated in Spain and therefore is called the “Spanish poppy.” It is also an abundant self-seeder, so once you have it, you have it forever. Like all poppies, however, it hates root disturbance, so unwanted seedlings can simply be scuffled out. The flowers are very delicate, always single, each born on a two-foot-tall wiry stem, and of a beautiful clear orange. There are many plants of it in the rock garden, where the first one was planted. But others have appeared between the stones of terraces and paths, and even in pots of tender shrubs that are used to ornament the garden in summer. How reassuring it is on a cold March day to find a little plant of P. rupifragum shyly unfolding a flower in a tubbed wisteria or camellia. The Turkish P. spicatum is similar to rupifragum in size and in the delicious tangerine color of its flowers, but it is double, and for us at least, not a self-seeder. So we have only one plant of it, though that one has returned faithfully for over fifteen years. We always mean to gather seed and give it company.

  One can never have enough poppies of any kind, and so we grow many others, including perhaps the representative of the genus in most people’s minds, P. rhoeas. It is called the “Veterans Day poppy” because after the dreadful carnage of World War I, the fields of Flanders were ablaze with its scarlet flowers. It comes in many shades and in doubles, but nothing quite equals
the purity of the original scarlet red. We are very fond also of P. commutatum, called the “lady bird poppy” because each of its four tiny, inch-long scarlet flowers is marked with a black spot at its base. But the signature plant for our garden at North Hill is yet another poppy, one much rarer in American gardens because it is a lover of the cold. It requires a small story.

  When our garden had been just begun, we paid a call one spring afternoon on an (even then) legendary gardener across the river in New Hampshire. Kris Fenderson was not our senior in years—perhaps, indeed, he was a little younger—but he was certainly far ahead of us in making a garden in the colder parts of New England. We were both delighted and encouraged by his collections of conifers and rare deciduous trees and shrubs, and especially by his accumulation of all sorts of primroses, many of which he shared with us that day. But with a true gardener’s generosity, just as we were leaving, he took up his trowel and dug six rosettes of the fabled Himalayan blue poppy, Meconopsis betonicifolia. We hesitated to accept so rare a gift, but Kris assured us that they would do just fine for us if we simply gave them what they needed—humus-rich moist soil, dappled light, and regular division every two or three years. We have been faithful to his instructions, and the original six crowns became several dozen, blooming here every June, to our great delight and the envious astonishment of many visitors. Even a few miles farther south they can be cranky, and in Boston they are impossible, since they will consent to thrive only where nights are cool, and here, even in July or August, we generally have a fire in the kitchen fireplace.

  But it is not mere rarity that justifies growing any flower. Meconopsis are a sort of holy grail among gardeners because of their color, which is the most limpid blue in perhaps the whole flowering world. If grown on acid soil, which they prefer and we have, it can only be called pure sky blue, with no admixture of red or purple. Thick, hairy gray leaves emerge in early April, each one shaped like a rabbit’s ear, and as they expand, fat stems and buds appear in the center. The first flowers open in late June. They justify our long life in this place, where so much is denied us. Not just blue-leaved palm trees and tropical creepers, but plants that gardeners in climates only imaginably more temperate than ours take in stride, like crape myrtle and English holly, camellias and osmanthus. Still, for show, we have this bed of utterly improbably blue poppies, and we find in it much compensation.

  POTS

  MANY GARDENERS are in part historians, concerned with creating garden effects that are redolent of other places, other times. And for them, one of the most precious parts of gardening is the sense of being in their own place while also catching whispers of being somewhere else. It is partly for this reason that gardeners so much value potted plants in the landscape. No one knows for sure how early the realization occurred that plants could be grown in containers, though the skill was well understood in Egypt by 4000 b.c., and certainly had been learned from even more ancient Babylonian and Mesopotamians practice. In our time, growing plants in containers is as obvious as boiling water in a pot, and every kitchen windowsill has at one time been graced (or disfigured) by a potted plant, briefly for show or in permanent residence.

  But when you think of it, scooping a plant out of the earth, establishing it in an earthenware jar or stone basin, determining its needs for drainage and extra nutrients and water, finding the right exposure of sun or shadow—those are all earth-shaking discoveries to gardeners, equal practically to the discovery of the wheel. And if it is true (it is at least fancifully true) that our development as individuals recapitulates the development of the species as a whole, then child gardeners begin just where the Mesopotamians and Babylonians did, with the joyful discovery that a plant growing in the earth could also grow in a container. And better, it could also be portable, for carrying things from here to there is very important to a child.

  The portability of potted plants has been of inestimable importance to our species as a whole. The discovery of container gardening made possible the transport of plants from far places and actually began the endless exploration of plant hardiness, which really is only a determination of whether something that grows far away can also grow here, in whatever country and place gardening occurs. Some cuttings and bare-rooted plants could endure long transport and still survive. Witness the banana, the best forms of which never set seed, yet were “disseminated” as basal cuttings with a bit of root tissue all throughout the subtropical world long before Columbus made his famous voyages. An important food source, bananas could be transported with very little earth about their roots, and reestablished far from Southeast Asia, which is their original home. In the seventeenth century, when the great importation of plants began, fruit from potted citrus and pineapples graced the Christmas tables of titled and wealthy gardeners from Germany and France through Poland to Russia, grown in stove houses and orangeries that allowed the tubbed trees and plants only a brief summer vacation. Actually, the history of potted plants seems almost as long as the history of human civilization. And the cultivation of plants in pots has a significance that extends through the entire band of human concern from pure sustenance and utility to the highest levels of horticultural embellishment.

  There must be strong resonance of all that for anyone who grows a plant in a pot. For committed gardeners, however, it is also an essential act, making possible the cultivation of something rare, something special, in a way that gives it an intimate focus and keeps it under the eye until it is known. Then it might spend its entire life in a pot if it is not hardy, or planted out into the garden if it is. Or perhaps just discarded. For it is a fact about pot culture that it is easier, somehow, to upend a potted plant into the compost than to hoick it out of borders and beds. Plants grown in pots also allow for endless experiment, and for that reason, in our many years as gardeners, we have gone through a huge number. Some, such as our Xanthorrhoea, now over thirty years old, or our bay tree, almost that venerable, seem apt to remain for the rest of our time in this garden, if not even longer. Others we have grown we hardly remember. They are “leptospermums without number . . .”

  This we do know, however. The sure mark of a lovingly tended garden, whether it is a great estate or a simple cottage, is a clutter of choice plants in pots and tubs, all in thriving good health. Most will be tender plants, gardenias or citrus, begonias or camellias. And some will reveal surprising histories, originating as cuttings given by great-aunts or far-flung cousins, or inherited from grandmothers, family heirlooms that go back a hundred years in a single trunk and leaves.

  There are so many plants, also, that simply will not agree to live where you live, except in a pot. They are too tender for your winters, or they dislike your soil, or—and this is often the case with very small properties, or with gardeners who are reduced to cultivating on a balcony—there just isn’t room elsewhere. We are always touched by the shifts and contrivances gardeners exercise to save a precious plant over the winter, or to transport it many miles away to a new home. We’ve done a lot of that ourselves. And we have known for many years that almost the heart of gardening lies in cultivating plants in containers. Most plants, after all, enter the garden that way, and a good many might also leave it in the same manner.

  In the matter of the pots themselves, we are very particular. They must be of clay, as was most anciently the case, and good clay if we can afford it. There is no argument that plastic pots are easier to maintain, for it is simply true. They do not break, and they endure severe weather without punking into slivers. Moisture levels are much easier to maintain because the walls of plastic pots do not constantly transpire moisture as clay ones do. It must even be confessed that some plants actually prefer growing in plastic pots. For these reasons, plastic pots are the nurseryman’s darlings, manufactured (and discarded) in countless millions. Burn just one in the fireplace, and you will know the oil-based energy they contain. Now they can even be bought in stylish models that are advertised as looking exactly like good Italian pottery but able to with
stand the worst rigors of winter. That may be true until you thump them. For then, instead of the rich ring of a clay pot, you get a hollow plunk sound. Most gardeners don’t need to thump, however. Any plastic pot is as unmistakable for what it is as an artificial flower on a tombstone, and no one is really ever fooled. Even common clay pots from the local hardware store are vastly to be preferred, for with one season they take on a wonderful patina, a whitey encrustation that forms over the brick-red surface as salts and lime dissolve and weep through the porous walls. If heavy, thick-walled pots are inherited, or found in junk shops, garage sales, or even town dumps, they are especially to be treasured, for they are sturdier than most modern ware and they already possess the grace of age. Sometimes, one might even find one that broke a century ago, and was patiently put back together with wire brads. That is a great treasure for the care and thrift it shows.

  For many years, our clay pots either came from the local farm supply store or were lucky finds we stumbled on in the corner of some old nursery that had shifted to the convenience of plastic or was going out of business. In fashionable antiques shops we occasionally splurged on a fine old English or French pot, and once, in Florence, we bought three Impreneta pots with rolled rims, made in the same way since the Italian Renaissance. We brought them home on the plane in our laps, at a time when you were still allowed to do such things. Then, about fifteen years ago, we met Guy Wolff, and our whole pot habit altered. For he was willing to make hand-thrown clay pots to antique designs, and that is what we wanted. It must be said that the first experiments were not a success, but quickly Guy came to understand this medium, new to him, and the pots grew finer and finer. Now, working from historic fragments, his pots are without compare, and our collection is enriched each year by a new firing.