Our Life in Gardens

by Joe Eck

  Among the many models he makes, our favorite perhaps is taken from the portrait of the myopic young Rubens Peale, painted by his brother Rembrandt, in which Rubens lovingly holds an old clay pot with one of the first pelargoniums grown in America. It is a scrawny thing, and Rubens, though charming, is not precisely a handsome man. But the pot is beautiful, and its reincarnations under Guy’s hands line our greenhouse benches and when empty are displayed on shelves in our potting shed. We will never have enough of them.

  PRIMROSES

  ‘FIFE YELLOW’, ‘Cowichan Blue’, ‘Barnhaven Gold’, ‘Duckyls Red’, ‘Enchantress’, ‘Guinevere’, ‘Granny Graham’, ‘Broadwell Milkmaid’, ‘Sailor Boy’, ‘Prince Charming’, ‘Satchmo’, ‘Winter Dreams’, ‘Hurstwood Midnight’, ‘Königin der Nacht’, ‘Parakeet’, ‘Seraphim’, and ‘Cherubim’ . . . and ‘Wanda’.

  Even without a picture in a catalog, it is hard to resist ordering plants with such names, for as with roses, their beauty begins there. Add a picture, and the gardener is sunk, the plant budget spent, and the vegetables unordered. There are primroses in every color—canary and butter yellow and cream, indigo, sky blue, purple, maroon, carrot and burnt orange and Chinese red. Except for close study, however, one seldom looks at a single flower, but at many, one packed next to the other in a tight bouquet, or in whorled tiers arranged like Chinese pagodas.

  There are primroses for every site—full sun, full shade, and every exposure in between; for dry ground, moist ground, even boggy ground. They can be had to flower in April, in May, in June and July, and under glass from November to March. That leaves only three months out of the year without primroses, and they are for reading up, ordering, and starting seed.

  The first primroses we grew came as pass-alongs, shared with us by a neighbor named Mrs. Oakes, long dead now, who had divided and redivided them in her own garden for fifty years. We in turn have divided ours, both to have more and to share with others. Primroses also come easily from seed, flowering about eighteen months from sowing. And seeds of hundreds of species are available at minimal cost if you join the American Primrose Society. But there are also many named cultivars, for most species show genetic variety, and some intercross freely, both in gardens and in the wild. In the genus Primula, there are approximately 425 species, but hybrids and selections are impossible to count. A gardener’s whole life is not time enough to grow them all.

  And just for that reason (among so many others) primroses endlessly engage us. Each winter, standing at the kitchen counter, we sow half a dozen new species or hybrids. We sow them in lovely old wooden flats which are then watered well, covered with window screen, and set outside to freeze and thaw. Exposure to alternating periods of harsh and mild weather, called stratification, is necessary to break their dormancy, a protective mechanism that prevents them from germinating in autumn and going into winter as helpless seedlings. By mid-spring they have germinated and begun to form tiny leaves; by mid-summer they are large enough to be established in their own individual little pots; and by early autumn they may be transplanted into permanent locations in the garden, where they may be expected to flower in one or two more years. But whereas a young primrose at the nursery will cost eight or ten dollars, one packet of seed, with some labor, will yield a hundred plants. The labor itself is very satisfying, but the resulting drift is more so. For primroses are like daffodils. The more you have, the better they look.

  The first primroses of the year are already in bloom when we sow our seeds, and their flowers are before our eyes as we work. In early January, cultivars of Primula vulgaris appear for sale in the local supermarket as single plants in three-inch plastic pots, each consisting of a ruff of healthy, dark green quilted leaves surrounding a thick bouquet of flowers in shades of white, yellow, blue, or red, most with a contrasting yellow eye. The price is modest, usually two plants for five dollars, and we suppose that most of the ones sold live very short lives, done in by too little or too much light, or too much heat on someone’s kitchen table. As blooming plants, they are too often asked to survive conditions that really only plastic flowers could be expected to endure, with an occasional dusting. But unless they are treated as something that can be enjoyed for a day or two and then thrown in the rubbish can, winter primroses still have their needs. Those are chiefly for well-drained but constantly moist soil, bright light without too much strong winter sun, and temperatures that do not get much warmer than 65 degrees in the daytime, with a drop of perhaps 10 degrees at night.

  Ours are stood on the kitchen windowsill that opens out on the winter garden, where conditions seem ideal. The plants are transferred to clay pots about three times the size of the plastic ones they came in, they are watered regularly, their spent flowers are faithfully removed each morning, and they are sprayed with a very dilute liquid plant food while the coffee is brewing. Treated this way, they will remain in bloom from January until April. And still they are not for the compost bin, for they may then be planted out in the garden, where most—not all—will return in springtime for many years. The most likely to persist are the whites and many shades of yellow, which are closest to the natural form of the wild P. vulgaris. But it is always worth taking a chance with the blues, purples, and reds. If you like them.

  Just when our windowsill primroses pass out of flower, outdoor primulas come awake. Primula denticulata—called the “drumstick primrose” because of its congested balls of flower atop straight stems about two feet tall—is always the first to show, the fresh green, lettuce-like rosettes and soon-emerging flowers defiantly proclaiming winter’s end, even if a light snow should fall on them, leaving them unscathed. They love moist ground, and in early April their purple, lavender, and sometimes white flowers join the chrome-yellow, satiny blooms of marsh marigolds (Caltha palustris). They signal the most joyful days of the gardening year, for there is nothing finished as yet, nothing passed, but only joyful promise of what is to come.

  The drumstick primroses are soon joined by the many woodland primroses that carpet the pergola walk and the rhododendron garden. Those are almost all descendants of the much-loved English woodland wildflower, P. vulgaris, so called not because it is coarse or common, but because in a fine English spring it is everywhere, blanketing the earth beneath hedgerows and woodland lanes. Ours are scarcely less numerous, especially since the ranks of those with impressive pedigrees have been swelled by generations of winter windowsill plants from the supermarket that all share their descent. Among the earliest is P. vulgaris subsp. sibthorpii, one of the many gifts to us years ago from Linc Foster, whose great garden, Mill-stream, enriched so many other gardens we know. Its lavender-pink blooms carry an orange-and-yellow center, striped and pointed toward the little green button of an ovary, probably to guide bees drunk on springtime to its center. In the woods near it will soon be many others, white and yellow and a dozen shades of pink, with some precious doubles, of which our favorite (perhaps) is the pale lavender one called ‘Quaker’s Bonnet’ that we got from Dan Hinkley.

  All these will soon be joined by P. veris, which the English distinguish by the popular name cowslips. We like cows a lot and we keep several here, essentially as pets and as compost machines, but if you feed one of our cows an apple or a carrot from your hand, you will quickly see that the comparison breaks down. Primula veris differs from P. vulgaris chiefly in the fact that its nodding flowers are produced in branched umbels about eight inches above the ground-hugging rosettes of quilted leaves. They are mostly various shades of yellow, but we have red ones, mahogany ones, some that are almost brown, and a few that are “laced” with an outline of yellow on a dark reddish ground.

  Indispensably lovely as all these primroses are, most primrose fanciers would admit that the jewel in the crown of the genus is P. auricula, once considered a genus all its own. Plants were brought to England by Huguenot refugees and grown on deep, cool cottage windowsills and bred to astonishing colors and combinations, of red and black and cream, usually laced with ot
her contrasting colors. They were “florist’s flowers,” when the word “florist” meant a person fanatically devoted to the cultivation of one special plant, usually for fierce show competitions that were almost blood sports. The tradition survives in England, and so, just about when ours are in bloom, one could go to auricula shows there and see fantastic plants on display, with celadon rosettes of perfect leaves surmounted by almost unreal umbels of flower. In some cases, leaves and flowers might be coated with a dusty meal, called “farina,” which gives the plants a curiously remote look. We have none of the jewels you might see there, but we have some very nice auriculas, blooming in early May just at the base of the rock garden, in shades of yellow and cream and brick red. Unlike the other primulas we grow, their clumps form tubers aboveground, and each one can be detached at any point in the plant’s active growth—even in full flower—and inserted in moist ground to establish a new plant. It is so easy that we are quickly running out of space for auriculas.

  By May’s end, the first P. japonicas show color. These are streamside plants that love percolating water at their roots. From a rosette of leaves that looks much like romaine lettuce, whorls of flowers appear, sometimes as many as six or seven, arranged pagoda-fashion and opening from the bottom to the top. Generally, the flowers are a rich plush purple, the color so much favored for Victorian upholstery, though in the cultivar ‘Postford White’ (sometimes simply called ‘Alba’) the flowers are a pure, rich milk white with a canary-yellow eye. Both forms are lovely, but they deserve places separate from one another, else they muddy each other’s effect and even interbreed into a rather dull, bluish pink.

  We must have thousands of P. japonica along our stream, but we never bought them or were given them or grew them from seed. Years ago, when the garden was new, we bought a potted peony and in it was a small, fresh-looking rosette of leaves of a plant neither of us recognized. It seemed far too attractive to be a mere weed, and so we dug it from the pot and planted it elsewhere. It flowered a year later, and we knew it to be a candelabra primrose. Still, it got forgotten again until the next year, when dozens of little primrose babies appeared along the stream below our solitary findling. The primrose race was on, and twenty-five years later, both banks of the stream are rich with flowers in May, not one of which we planted.

  When one grows many plants in a genus, the question sometimes comes from other gardeners, “But which is your favorite?” There’s only one answer, really, and that is that we love them all, in their separate ways, like parents respond to children in a large family. Still, we are sometimes pressed for a clearer answer. Perhaps we press ourselves. And we know that among primulas we do have a favorite, and it is P. ×bulleesiana. We are not sure from where we got our original plants—probably from the American Primrose Society—though we do remember sowing them, for that was a great year for primrose sowing, and cases and cases of tiny seedlings got pricked out. The resulting plants still enrich our garden.

  “Enrich,” however, is hardly the word for P. ×bulleesiana. “Gild” might be a better one, for at the base of our rock garden, in permanently moist, rather stiff soil, there are perhaps two hundred plants of this cross, which seem as long-lived as peonies. From late May almost to the end of June, they carry many tiered umbels of flower above their fresh, lettuce-green leaves, and the flowers are in many shades that could only be called edible—tangerine and lemon, peach and apricot and melon. That is not the way they started out, however, for in the original seedlings there were other shades, grapish shades of mauve and purple and wine, all, we assume, from the blood of one of their parents, the rose-colored P. beesiana. Those were certainly nice enough in their way, and at first—loath to throw any primrose away—we segregated them to a far corner. But they did not survive, and now we are guaranteed the colors we love from 99 percent of our seed, which, perhaps hubristically, we call the “North Hill Strain,” and is the only plant in general commerce that carries the name of our garden. All the colors are warm, almost Mediterranean, redolent of the sort of early summer we hope we will have in southern Vermont.

  The last top whorls of P. ×bulleesiana end our primrose season in early July. But it has been long and rich, and it commences again in November, when the first plants of P. obconica appear in florists’ windows. It is a species from the warmest parts of China, with large, lobed, and haired leaves above which it bears foot-high umbels of faint-scented flower. They are usually blue or white, but occasionally one sees a plant with flowers of a haunting salmon pink set off by an acid-green eye. If we can find it, one plant of that color will decorate our Thanksgiving table. For like the turkey and the stuffing, we cannot resist it.

  PRUNUS × ‘HALLY JOLIVETTE’

  IN 1976, WHEN OUR FUNNY LITTLE house had just been completed, we spent the whole first winter staring out the windows. Only the view to the north was beautiful, consisting of old-growth New England woods across a stream. The front of the house looked down on a raw new driveway, below which was a narrow strip of degraded meadow from which the top-soil had been scraped off in the fifties to pay some farmer’s mortgage, or perhaps to buy some cows. Out the back door were the corpses of large maples and beeches that sadly had had to be cut to level the ground on which the house stood. But the worst view was to the south, which seemed to be a great sea of raw clay studded with rocks, but which was actually only about two hundred feet from the public road. We had a clear view of it, and whoever passed on it had a clear view of us, thanks to the glass walls of the winter garden we had so much desired. It was a disheartening sight.

  It wasn’t the raw earth that troubled us so much, for we knew that though it was subsoil, it could be improved with leaf duff that lay thick in the woods, and with manure supplied by neighboring farms, which was then almost free for the hauling. Instead, it was the sheer sense of nakedness, of chilling exposure to the world, that disturbed us. Ours is a friendly town, and if our coming here among settled Vermont folk felt intrusive, we never heard about it. So what unsettled us was not hostile or chilly glances from our new neighbors, but just the sense of being visible at all, in the way that some quiet woodland creature who prefers to go unnoticed might be unnerved by being stared at.

  So the first problem we faced in our infant landscape then was the creation of a vegetable shelter, a green wall between us and the road that would not only protect us from view but, more crucially, give us the sense that we were protected from view. Privacy is said to be the ultimate luxury. For us it was a necessity, especially because we intended to build a garden here, and gardens are by definition private and enclosed spaces.

  It is the law in Vermont—and perhaps in other places—that precisely twenty-one feet from the center of the road is set aside for public use—whoever in fact owns it, it’s essentially public land. So the following spring, we began establishing a line of sturdy conifers at just that distance from the road’s center. Screens work best when there are several layers, and it is important to start with evergreens, which ensure protection at all seasons, but especially in winter, when other trees and shrubs are bare and they seem to step forward. In front of the evergreens we planted several small trees and a selection of shrubs that would grow thick and tall. Five were planted in an arc to embrace what was to become the front yard, and they consisted of two clumped white lilacs (Syringa vulgaris ‘Alba’), a multistemmed Sargent crab apple (Malus sargentii), a larger, standard crab apple ( M.‘Snowbank’), and what has proven the most delightful tree of all, the little flowering cherry called ‘Hally Jolivette’.

  It is a pretty name for a tree, and it originally belonged to the wife of Karl Sax, director of Harvard University’s Arnold Arboretum from 1946 to 1954 (who himself is commemorated by the chrome-yellow, free-flowering Forsythia×intermedia ‘Karl Sax’). During the 1940s he made a series of complex crosses between Prunus ×subhirtella, the delicate rosebud, or Higan, cherry, and P.×yedoense, the Yoshino cherry, most famous from the plantings around the Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C. From
the hundreds of seedlings that reached flowering age, he selected one to honor his wife. Anyone who grows it will quickly understand why he chose to single it out in this way.

  Both P.×subhirtella and P.×yedoense are relatively tall trees, quickly reaching a height of about twenty-five feet. But as both are themselves hybrids, something in their remote genetic makeup produced a relatively diminutive offspring: ‘Hally Jolivette’ seldom exceeds fifteen feet, and is more likely to reach only ten. Left to grow naturally, as ours has been, it produces a dense multistemmed tree. It has other landscape uses, however, for it can be trained to a standard, with a single trunk, in which case it becomes a small tree of great distinction. We have also seen it espaliered in a fan across a high, sunny brick wall, and it is dense and twiggy enough that it might be used as a deciduous hedge, as the Cornelian cherry, Cornus mas, sometimes is. It could also be tucked into the corner of a small city backyard where two fences meet, or perhaps used as the one tree selected for the square scrap of ground left in front of so many Victorian town houses, a pleasant alternative to the ubiquitous purple saucer magnolia.

  The chief glory of ‘Hally Jolivette’ resides not in its form, however, or the many uses to which it might lend itself, but in its flowers, produced in late spring in such numbers that its willowy, russet-colored twigs are almost obscured. Flower buds are vivid even when they first appear as tight little cones of deep, rich pink, and they are lent extreme beauty by the tender, newly unfurled leaves that are tinted bronze or chestnut brown. When fully opened, each individual flower is about an inch and a quarter across and dangles downward on a slender, threadlike stem as long as an inch. The frilly petals, in a double row, are tinted almost white at their edges, but deepen down through pink to a rich wine-red in the center of the flower. Blossoms are born in clusters of five or more all along mature twigs and even old wood over a period of as many as twenty days in mid- to late May, some in bud and some fully open. This is an extraordinarily long time for a flowering cherry to remain in bloom, for the blossom time of most flowering cherries is generally so brief as to offer a cautionary example of the transitoriness of youth and beauty. But apparently the tree is sterile, never setting fruit, reminding us that Karl Sax and his wife were early and fervent supporters of Planned Parenthood.