by Joe Eck
When we first planted the deciduous shrubs and trees against the evergreen screen in the front border, it seemed to us that we had plenty of space. So we allowed our ‘Hally Jolivette’ to form a dense, twigged mass of stems to perhaps twelve feet tall, really more a shrub than a small tree. At one point we thought we might have done better to restrict our plant to three or five ascending trunks, in order to make more room for the hostas and other shade-loving perennials that grow at its feet and face down that border along the lawn edge. But the quichee of growth that has resulted has had one happy benefit: as old trunks have become moribund, we have been able to remove them, counting on a stock of youthful ones just ascending. In this, ‘Hally Jolivette’ is also unusual among flowering cherries in that it forms stools, or thickets, of many trunks, much in the manner of the shorter-growing flowering quinces, selections of Chaenoemeles.
Though P. ×’Hally Jolivette’ is sometimes still listed as hardy only to Zone 6, it is a favorite small tree all across North America, and has grown happily here for twenty-five years. It seems indifferent to the quality of soil, provided it is open and well drained, for as with all cherries, heavy, poorly drained clay soils will almost always result in root rot. The results are heartbreaking, consisting of abundant flower and some twig growth for a time, and then suddenly abundant flower and death. Our soil is open and friable, and so we have not had to struggle with that problem, but soils that are heavy by nature should be lightened by incorporating generous amounts of peat, sand, and compost, and the young tree might be planted on a slight mound. Artificial fertilizers should be avoided, as growth is quick in any case, and too much may produce weak wood and encourage diseases.
Fortunately, they are few, the worst being an anthracnose-like fungus that attacks the delicate, inch-long leaves in unusually wet springs, causing them to shrivel and blacken. Generally, plants throw off the disease and refoliate as soon as sunny, settled weather arrives, though a severe infection might merit the single application of a fungicide spray.
Like so many things we planted in the early years of our garden, ‘Hally Jolivette’ strikes us as a piece of pure luck. We knew very little about it beyond a rather dry description in Wyman’s Gardening Encyclopedia. We had not even seen a picture, either of its mature form or its unforgettably beautiful flowers—at that time the age of glossy picture books, illustrated garden encyclopedias, and the Internet still lay before us. Now, if we were to set out to choose a flowering cherry, even one hardy to our zone, we would be presented with a bewildering number of choices, among which we would be hard-pressed to choose the one we liked best. ‘Hally Jolivette’ makes us glad we started out without those resources, in simple happy ignorance.
PRUNUS MUME
AMONG THE MANY PLEASURES of our early years as school-teachers were the vacations—summer of course, and February, and best of all, Christmas. Just as the days grew achingly short, the cold intense, and the snows deep, we were sprung from stuffy classrooms, free to play in the snow, huddle by the fire, or best of all, go someplace else. Colleagues would travel to warm places, Florida, the Islands, or Mexico. But we would go to San Francisco, always San Francisco, year after year. We went for all the generally understood reasons—the beauty of the city, its restaurants, its opera and ballet, the Castro, and—for us, just beginning to make a garden—the plants. We would wander in Strybing Arboretum on foggy early mornings, marveling at so much already in flower: the great Magnolia campbellii with its huge down-hanging cups of pink or white; camellias in every shade from scarlet red to tender pink, cream, and white; even the earliest tender rhododendrons, one of which, a sturdy bush, bore huge trusses that were the most intense blood red we had ever seen in a flower.
We also visited nurseries, first in San Francisco and Berkeley, and then by rented car others in Marin and Sonoma and Palo Alto. But every visit ended with a drive up to Occidental, ninety miles north of the city, to visit Lester Hawkins and Marshall Olbrich’s Western Hills Rare Plant Nursery. We went to visit them, but also to buy plants, some of which we knew would be hardy in our newly developing Vermont garden, and some we knew would not be. Still, they would say, “Take it and try.” Often, the tenderest ones were in flower at that season, and so we bought them in the expectation that they would grow in our little greenhouse off the kitchen. We thought of that greenhouse as a tiny San Francisco backyard garden, and what bloomed in it made us miss the real thing less when we had to come home.
Late one December when we visited Western Hills, Lester was striking cuttings of the iconic little Japanese apricot, Prunus mume, then in full flower in many West Coast gardens. It is perhaps the most universally recognized of all Japanese flowers, appearing as it does so often on porcelain and in paintings, its beautiful cup-shaped blooms held tight against angled bare green stems. Because it is among the first flowers of earliest spring, it has come to signify longevity to the Japanese and is much treasured by them. In the garden—a warm Zone 7 garden at least—it makes a small tree seldom taller than twenty feet and as wide. But it takes well to pot culture.
Because we had admired Lester’s bundle of blossoming twigs, later that day he thrust a rooted plant into our hands, already a miniature tree three feet tall with a straight trunk and little round head of twigs, a few of which were even decorated with a flower or two. “Take one,” he said. “It’ll do for you.” He meant outside, in the garden, for Lester had only the vaguest sense of the cold we gardened in, since he and Marshall had never gardened anywhere but in Occidental. If a plant had survived their worst freak winter, they thought it was bound to do well in Vermont. We stayed silent and accepted his gift. For in our little imitation San Francisco backyard, we thought it would do fine.
And so it has, now for almost thirty years. The trunk has thickened—though not as much as one might suppose over that many years—and the head has grown dense with twigs, which are encouraged to multiply by hard pruning just after flowering and the cutting back of long soft growth by half in mid-summer. The pot is larger too, a good clay one about fif-teen inches high and ten inches across. That is as big a pot as our little tree will ever occupy, because a larger one would be out of proportion to its height and the greater root run would encourage it to grow larger. So we have recourse to the same root-pruning technique used by Japanese bonsai masters. Every two years we remove the root mass from the pot in late spring after the first growth has hardened, and scrape away the compost with a chopstick until we can trim off about two inches of dangling white root all the way around and as much off the bottom. Then the tree is repotted with fresh compost, well watered, and stood in the shade for a week or so until fresh roots have formed and top growth has resumed.
Lester’s gift was the English cultivar ‘Peggy Clark’, with two rows of petals of the clearest shell pink cupped around numerous yellow stamens that give each flower a slight gilded appearance. The fragrance is of almonds on any sunny day, and bees are grateful for so early and plentiful a source of pollen. The consequence is an abundance of fruit. But since our tree bloomed under glass in the depths of a Vermont winter, we saw little fruit, only what a passing draft had caused to form. The fruits are charming, fuzzy little oblong yellow apricots hardly more than twice the size of a thumb. When they are ripe, the taste is rather acrid, yet pleasant, if you stop to think about it before spitting it out. So this year we took the trouble to brush each flower painstakingly with the bristles of a small artist’s brush, several times, because the flowers open successively over a month or more. We hope we have supplanted the absent bees and actually secured the formation of a good crop.
We have gone to this trouble because we want to make umeboshi, the marvelous pickled plums that are often served at the conclusion of a Japanese meal. They cleanse the palate, are thought to aid in digestion, and are very good, once you have acquired the taste. We have, both in Japan, where we have had two apiece, served side-by-side in exquisite little bowls, and in New York, where the chef Nao Sugiyama serves them, each suspe
nded in a perfect cube of shimmering clear aspic. We have the pickling recipe, taken from Shizuo Tsuji’s authoritative Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art. If we succeed, we may even try his recipe for rice balls, with an umeboshi at the center of each. But as Mr. Shizuo Tsuji comments, “There are as many variations in making umeboshi as there are villages in Japan.” So apparently, we have leave to experiment in creating the North Hill version.
RAMPANT PLANTS
A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO, on a day our garden was open for the benefit of the Southern Vermont AIDS Project, we were down in the lower greenhouse when a woman stormed in. The day was beautiful, and visitors had been most appreciative and generous to the cause. Everyone else was beaming, and so we had to wonder what had upset her so much.
“Are you the owners? I have a bone to pick with you!” (That expression itself is terrifying, like “I want to pick your brain . . .”) “Your garden is full of invasive plants!”
“Oh, well …Yes… some …I guess . . .” one of us stammered out. For though a seven-acre garden has a lot of plants in it, “full” seemed a bit of an overstatement.
“Yes,” she insisted, “full of them! How can you have so little concern for the planet?”
We sat there, selling lemonade and chocolate chip cookies made by the volunteers, and we wondered how to answer. Ours is a carefully worked garden, where few things are ever allowed to get out of hand. Besides, over thirty years, we have learned tricks and devices for controlling all plants, whatever their proclivities. And the foothills of Vermont are very cold, after all, exercising an almost inevitable restraint on just about anything exotic we might wish to grow. We offered up all these reasons for our choices of plants, but they were clearly not convincing. She drove off with a very sour face in her new SUV. When we asked at the contribution table, no one remembered her, and so we did not know how generous a donation she had deposited in the jar when she entered.
But the challenge of this visitor has left a question in our minds, since home gardeners are clearly more sensitive than many other people to the well-being of the earth. They are keenly aware of the alarming climatic changes we are experiencing, the balmy days in December that are more reminiscent of San Diego than of Vermont. But though we may be thrilled by the fact that the sweet, tiny Cyclamen hederifolium now persists under the crab apple tree from year to year, greeting us each autumn with its inside-out flowers of strong or pale pink and pinkish white, it really ought not to survive here, in what used to be a cold Zone 4. Glorying as we do in its survival, we can experience no joy in the conditions that make that survival possible.
We recycle our garbage with the stringent conscience of Catholic schoolchildren, but exploiting the chance to grow plants previously forbidden to us—a chance afforded by conditions quite beyond our individual control—is quite different from willfully introducing a plant, however beautiful, that might escape from domestic gardens to threaten native habitats. So we have made an inventory, a sort of roll call, of the most sinister plants, those most likely to pose an insult to the planet. Or at least to our part of it, a corner of southern Vermont.
There is one clear offender, and if there is a Circle of Hell reserved for people who willfully introduce invasive plants, we might find ourselves occupying it. That plant is Impatiens glandulifera, a native of the foothills of the Himalayas. It is by anyone’s measure both beautiful and satisfying to grow. From seed that over-winters and sprouts when frost is barely out of the ground, it quickly ascends to a height of as much as eight feet, each branch clothed in handsome, four-inch-long lance-shaped leaves of dark, watery green, marked by a prominent tan rib. Flowers are borne in loose panicles at the tops and the tips of side branches. Each flower possesses the complex structure of an orchid, with a flared upper and lower lip, and a nectar-rich pouch that is irresistible to bumblebees. There may be as many as fifteen or twenty flowers in a panicle, colored fully opened and as tight buds, and the colors are sumptuous, sometimes a pale pink shaded with white, sometimes peach, and sometimes a deep old rose. A rare and less vigorous variety, ‘Pallida’, produces flowers of so pale a pink that they appear to be white. The plant is bold and stately, and it can make a fine annual hedge along the damp side of a barn or at the edge of the garden. And finally, on certain days, mature plants emit a strong fragrance of ripe apricots.
The trouble comes with the seed, for each flower will produce a narrow, ribbed, pointed seed pod that when ripe will explode at the lightest touch with something that feels like an electric shock, propelling the seed many feet from the parent. Most species of impatiens can do this trick, from which they get their popular name, touch-me-not. But none perform the trick with such gusto as I. glandulifera, making it at once the delight of children and a genuine threat to the environment. A single mature plant may produce a thousand peppercorn-sized seeds, and though most will sprout near the parent plant in a congested thicket, some will be propelled a farther distance, and will in turn propel some of their seed even farther. It is a very prolific plant.
Defenders of I. glandulifera will point out that it is site-specific, thriving only in rich, permanently moist soils in semi-shaded conditions near the edges of woods. But of course, loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria) is also quite site-specific and gloriously empurples miles and miles of wetland in late summer, to the exclusion of all native vegetation. Impatiens glandulifera might well prove its successor, though in a different growing environment. It is a plant to be feared, and each spring we attempt to eliminate as much of it as we spot here. That may be closing the barn door after the horse has escaped. But we have seen stands of the plant as far away as Chatham, New York, certainly not progeny of ours, and though it does our consciences little good, we are clearly not the first offenders. Still, for all its undeniable beauty, its cultivation here was a mistake.
We’d not say the same, however, for the gentle Japanese primrose, Primula japonica, which came here twenty-five years ago as a rosette of green in the pot of a peony from Weston Nurseries, in Hopkinton, Massachusetts. It was both attractive enough and unfamiliar enough to arouse our curiosity, and so we transplanted it near our stream. The following spring, it produced a whorl of leaves that looked like a romaine lettuce, from the center of which emerged our first candelabra primrose, five tiers of cherry-red flowers with wine-dark centers opening successively from the bottom to the top. We cannot guess how many plants have descended from that first flowering and the poppy-seed-sized grains of seed that followed, though now they occur in patches all up and down our little stream, and many young plants have been shared with other gardeners who admired them.
Like all streams, our own continues its life long after it leaves us, disappearing into a beaver swamp below our property and reemerging across the road, where it empties into larger streams that in their turn empty into the Deerfield River, which itself contributes its waters to the great Connecticut River, which flows into the ocean. We have heard from people who live farther down our stream that beautiful flowers have appeared growing out of leaves that look like lettuce. They are our primulas, clearly offspring of that first plant. To them we have added a pure white variety with a honey-gold center, sometimes called ‘Postford White’, and we hope people downstream may get some of that, for it is very wonderful. But though robust, P. japonica is like all primulas, gentle in its ways, long-lived where it is happy but fragile if conditions do not suit it. We cannot believe that it could ever become a pernicious weed.
Several bamboos we grow might be a different matter, especially as what we recognize unmistakably as global warming continues to advance. Bamboos divide into two categories—clumpers and runners. The clumpers, chiefly members of the genus Fargesia, are no real problem, for they form congested colonies that widen annually, but always in delightful and nonthreatening ways. Running bamboos, on the other hand, produce long-noded, straw-colored underground shoots, each terminating in a sharp tip that can penetrate through the soil (and indeed, even through asphalt), sometimes surprising dis
tances from the mother plant. Bamboos are thrifty plants, surviving well on little, and where conditions suit them, they can create whole forests, devoid of any other vegetation. For some beautiful creatures, such as the giant pandas, this is fortunate, since 99 percent of their diet consists of bamboo leaves. But we have had to go to such trouble to grow bamboos in our cold garden that we do not much fear their escape, and sadly, we cannot anticipate the appearance of a giant panda, much less the capacity to satisfy its hunger.
Even in our climate, however, running bamboos can be wayward, appearing in places they were not planted and are not wanted. We therefore employ several tricks to contain their growth, the chief of which is to site them very carefully so that some barrier, such as a path or mown lawn, restrains their progress. Also, the more cold-hardy running bamboos will grow toward sunlight rather than toward shade, and if a planting is backed by some shade-producing shrub, a rhododendron perhaps or a crescent of mountain laurel, it will not spread in that direction. Where none of these tricks are possible, we have also employed underground barriers or buried containers made of marine plywood, causing the bamboo essentially to grow around and around itself as if in a large pot.
Our first experiment with bamboo was Phyllostachys aureosulcata, the yellow-groove bamboo, which we planted at the outside corner of our glassed-in winter garden. We reasoned that the inevitable heat loss from its foundation would increase hardiness, since we knew that the species itself was reliably hardy only to Zone 7. Still, as an extra precaution, each year we bent the culms to the ground and covered them with evergreen boughs. In this way, we managed a vigorous clump with canes reaching eight to ten feet.