by Joe Eck
Various other bamboos have followed, some for ground-covering purposes, such as the golden-leaved Pleioblastus auricomus (Arundinaria viridistriata), or the silver-leaved P. variegatus, or the most elegant Sasa veitchii, with green leaves that develop straw-colored margins in winter. We particularly treasure S. palmata, not for groundcover but for its broad, dark green leaves borne on slender canes that reach four feet before the heavy foliage bends them gracefully into arcs. Though climate changes probably mean they could all survive without protection, we take no chances and still cover them with evergreen boughs for winter.
The only other plant we grow that might qualify as a danger to the planet is the giant Japanese butterbur, Petasites japonicus var. giganteus. It is gigantic indeed, with single, rounded, grass-green leaves as much as thirty-one inches wide, each on a stem as much as five feet tall. When crushed, the stems emit a pleasant celerylike fragrance, and they are in fact a vegetable in Japan, where the plant is called fuki. We are culinarily adventurous, and so we have tried preparing it in every imaginable way and found it consistently nasty, though there may be a technique we do not know. Its leaves, however, are a treasure, offering a startlingly tropical look to a northern garden, though in fact the plant is hardy to Zone 4. In early spring, just as the ground has thawed, it produces beautiful yellowish-green flowers, tightly packed in a cob and surrounded by a neat little rosette of pleated, yellow-green leaves. It is the first perennial to bloom here and provides early forage for bees. Probably no other plant in the garden attracts more admiration, or—in the case of our challenging visitor—more scorn.
Certainly it is not a plant to establish without the most careful thought. It travels vigorously underground by thick, quick-growing fleshy white stolons that spread outward on all sides of an established plant. In the wrong place, such as in a wetland or beside a large lake, it could quickly cover acres. It has in fact completely colonized a boggy, rocky area about fifty feet wide each way at the top of our garden, where nothing else will grow. But we watch it very carefully, and two or three times in a summer, we yank it back to the area it is meant to occupy. We have seen it grown in other gardens confined by underground barriers such as those used for running bamboos, or surrounded by grass where wayward plants may be mown down. It might also be sited in a moist, semishaded place surrounded by dry ground, for it will not travel into dry soils. It is superb in a large pot or planter that shows off its architectural magnificence. And, so long as one confines oneself to plants originating from a single source, there is no fear of seed, for petasites is dioecious, each plant and all the plants it vegetatively produces being either male or female. Obviously, it takes one of each to produce viable seed.
Beyond all the precautions we take, we probably have no defense for a few of the plants we grow. They are a tiny fraction of the hundreds of genera and species that flourish here, including many endangered natives, such as the beautiful lady’s slipper orchids, Cypripedium in several species, and many rare ferns. But in a larger sense, gardening, like agriculture itself, has always depended on the dissemination of desirable plants. Though the flora of North America is rich, all our gardens would be poor things without the contributions of the great plant explorers of the last three hundred years, whose primary interest was in contributing to human pleasure the beauty of the plants they saw in faraway places. A wonderful side effect of that concern has been to ensure the survival of species that were on the edge of extinction and have never since been seen in the wild. Still, there are sins on their heads too. We could wish that theirs—and ours—were the greatest of humanity’s many insults to the planet.
THE ROCK GARDEN
AND PLANTED WALLS
SEVENTEEN YEARS after we built our house, we decided to build a greenhouse and potting shed at the bottom of the garden—more like a conservatory—that would provide winter storage for all the tender potted plants we had accumulated and at the same time put a full stop to that end of the garden, just as the poultry house and pig house had at the top. But to construct that building, we needed flat land. And as no land in southern Vermont is flat except when it is made so, a gentle slope had to be cut into a much sharper one to steal the earth on which the new building would sit. The result was an ugly precipitous gash that oozed water. In any housing development, such a slope would have called for elaborate drainage and the establishment of “lawn.” But we had read enough on alpine gardening to know that instead of the eyesore it seemed, our slope was a treasure. A natural scree.
In that way, a rock garden was given to us by a necessary alteration of the land. It only required the setting in of huge lichen-encrusted granite boulders, laid down in natural-seeming ridges, each half or two-thirds buried in the ground as if they had been exposed by centuries of erosion. We laid a fieldstone path that wandered through this brand-new out-cropping, and at the bottom created a natural bog. That, too, was an unexpected gift, as were the frogs and dragonflies that soon showed up there. In our bog we planted candelabra primroses (Primula ×bulleesiana and P. japonica), irises, rushes, and other bog plants, all as if they had come of themselves.
While we were creating the rock garden, the greenhouse was constructed, and from the first day that it was completed, it was wonderfully rich with possibilities that would increase the scope of our garden life. Though the land all around was wounded and raw, from experience we knew that we could fix that. The building is a long rectangle measuring approximately fifty feet by twenty, and a little more than half of it is greenhouse. The rest is a utility building, which first was used to store things for which we could find no other place. It then had a brief history as extra plant space lit by a horrible halogen grow-light we hated and feared, the sort used by people who grow marijuana indoors. Finally, it has come to be a simple but satisfying place to serve lunch or dinner for larger groups than the house can accommodate. It has a beautiful old brick floor; a view into the greenhouse where thick bunches of muscat grapes hang in summer, the produce of a single old vine in a huge clay pot; and even a snug bedroom tucked into the eaves, where little windows open tonight breezes and a view of the rock garden, just opposite. From the house far above, the sun glinting off its shingled roof was just what we had hoped to see, perhaps for a longer time than we had realized, or even had occupied this land. Visitors who are new to the garden often say, “Who lives down there?” We do, much of the time.
But some sort of serpent waits in every Eden, and in the case of our magical little building, it was this: The siding was pressure-treated, but we ran short of funds at the end, and the last section to be sided was the front, below the windows of the shop and the barn-sash windows of the greenhouse. They were sided with bits and ends left over from the back and two eave sides, short lengths that initially looked just fine, especially when the rather sick green of the pressure-treated pine was covered by a charcoal-gray stain. But the little sections lacked enough length to hold them firm, and they began to warp, to the point that between them one could actually see inside. This is not a desirable thing in any greenhouse, and certainly not in Vermont in a howling winter blizzard. The obvious solution—had we had the money—would have been to rip off the bits of siding and use proper lengths, restrained from buckling by nails all along their extent.
We didn’t have the money, and therefore—as so many times before in the making of this garden—we had to consider the problem as an invitation to creativity. Ingenuity is not always a good solution to a lack of funds, and in certain dire necessities, it does not serve at all. But in gardens, we have often been surprised by how frequently ingenuity can come to the rescue, sometimes offering solutions far better than could have been bought for ready money. A perception crystallized that, like most of the lessons one learns in life, was simply the realization of what we had known for a long time. At the risk of sounding pretentiously like the great Frank Lloyd Wright, we could even put it in a maxim: The best of all garden effects are made out of difficulties that initially seem impossible to su
rmount. It may be true that economical contrivance meant to solve a problem in the garden results in some of its greatest charm. In the case of our faulty greenhouse siding, it was so.
Our solution was to cover the faulty siding with sheets of marine plywood to just below the windows, flashing the top with copper to make it look dressy. Against the plywood we built planted walls, all across the long south face and west gable end. The east gable end that faced up the garden and toward the house was sided early on, with proper lengths, and so did not need this treatment. That, as it happens, was a lucky thing, because no view of the planted walls is offered from above. They come as a complete surprise, visible only when one has descended the rock garden path and come around to the face of the greenhouse.
The construction of a planted wall differs from that of a free-standing dry wall, for the wall itself is a veneer over a core of earth, or to be more accurate, of sandy, reddish clay and coarse pebbles called “bank fill.” It is ugly stuff, normally used only in road construction. No gardener would want it except for this purpose, since the species established in a planted wall are not greedy feeders, and in any case should not be treated too kindly, lest they grow rank and coarse and die out.
The process is easy, though it requires thought and some physical strength. A first course is laid about six inches below grade, as level as possible, and bank fill is packed inside and under it. Then a second course is laid, taking care to jump the joints of the first, so that no two layers of stone abut each other in the same place to create a fault line or seam. For stability, it is also good to lay a “deadman,” sacrificing the fine distance one might get from a handsome long rectangular stone by placing it perpendicularly to the wall rather than horizontal with its face.
The second course is then packed solid with bank fill, but at this point, little plants can be inserted between the stones. The root mass is flattened out gently so it becomes a sort of filling between a sandwich of stone, and good, fibrous loam is added to connect the root mass to the bank fill, into which the roots will eventually penetrate. You continue to plant as you build upward, course by course, until the wall is capped off at whatever height you want, using the finest, flattest stones for the last course. Six or so inches of good soil is laid over the bank fill and level with the capstones, resulting in a raised bed that is then planted like a little landscape, with handsome craggy rocks protruding like miniature mountains. The whole top surface is mulched with attractive gravel and random-sized pebbles, watered well, and the planted wall is done.
The effect is almost immediately one of settled age, even of significant antiquity. And that effect increases as gray lichens come, and the plants spread out across the face of the wall, working their way into crevices where they were never planted. Sometimes amiable weeds also appear, ferns and columbines and filmy, yellow-flowered Corydalis lutea, which, once it is growing anywhere nearby will always find any wall that contains earth enough for it to sprout in. Unless the wall falls down because of some construction flaw, its beauty increases each year for a very long time, requiring neither fertilizer nor weeding nor even watering except in very dry periods. For stone acts as a sponge, storing water and then releasing it when soil dries out. In any case, one does not want plants in a planted wall to flourish too much, swamping their neighbors. You think you cannot have too much of Campanula poscharskyana, especially when its starry bells of light blue are borne in profusion in mid-summer. But you can, when it has completely overwhelmed some precious rarity.
Planted walls are a curious bypath of horticulture, one that is seldom practiced deliberately. The effect is more often the result of accident, when the decayed mortar of ancient masonry allows pretty plants to seed themselves among stones or bricks, their roots in cool moisture while their crowns bask in the hot sun among sleeping lizards. Actually, a large number of beautiful plants find such a situation a wonderful place to grow. Most common are the valerians, armerias, aubrietas, dianthus, drabas, saxifrages, mossy phloxes, sedums, and rock campanulas. Sempervivums, sometimes called “hens-and-chicks” or “houseleeks,” are always happy in such conditions, and of them alone there are enough species and varieties to furnish an ample planted wall. But to all these one could also add rarer ones—dryas and moltkias and even rock daphne—and in shaded old walls, little ferns and mosses, rare corydalis, and the much-coveted Ramonda myconi, which looks like an African violet and will grow only in north-facing rock crevices, but is hardy to Zone 5. Any walk through the streets of an old town or long-settled rural landscape will offer examples.
It has been said that before the restoration began on the Coliseum in Rome in the nineteenth century, botanists cataloged more than ninety species that grew among its stones, most or all of which must have come there with animal fodder from the far-flung edges of the ancient Roman Empire. But always, wherever plants find a home among the rocks of constructed works, there is the magic of ruins, of nature reclaiming the works of humanity. Such a sense of antiquity makes one shiver with delight. It is to be sought in making a garden—much sought—and this effect was exactly what we hoped to accomplish, against a building that for all its satisfactions presented the one woeful defect that made it useless for the purposes it was built to serve. So again, the sow’s ear was turned into a gardener’s silk purse or, to move the perception from homely wisdom to the sublime by quoting King Lear, “Our mere defects become our commodities.”
ROSES
WE HAVE A FRIEND in Los Angeles who is a collector. Her house is crammed with beautiful things, not as single objects, but in rows and heaps, groups and gaggles. There are rare porcelains, Tiffany vases, tiny Chinese figurines, a whole wall of ironstone platters hung like paintings, and even a tabletop scattered with exquisite ivory back scratchers. We asked her once how she decided what she would collect, and the answer was quick and sure: “It is easy. I begin whenever I have two of anything.” Gardeners are like that too. Or at least we are, for once we come to know a genus, it is hard to keep from trying to acquire every species within it. When a genus is small, tidy, and beautiful, and one species has done well in the garden, it is impossible not to prick up our ears when another is mentioned—or stretch out our fingers.
We vividly remember seeing a geranium garden years ago at Wakehurst Place in England, containing hundreds of species and varieties of true border geraniums. It offered just the pleasure we find in collections, which consists in noting the similarities and differences among closely related plants. To our delight and amusement, it even included Geranium robertianum, the lowly biennial that springs up wherever gardening occurs. It is popularly called “herb Robert,” with two-inch, lacy, wine-colored leaves and minute pink flowers, and it grew in the Wakehurst Place garden for comparison, we suppose, but also in appreciation of its modest charm, for no geranium could ever be ugly. We always leave it to grow here wherever we can, and we have read that there is a rare white form, which we mean someday to have. Should there be a golden-leaved form, we’d have that too, though most gardeners consider it a weed.
In a garden history that seems long, at least to us, and that has occurred largely in one place, we have built dozens of collections over the years, many of which, like hellebores, geraniums, epimediums, or snowdrops, have become great passions. But we never collected roses, or thought of them even as a plant to collect at all. From the first, they have simply been elemental to our sense of what a garden should contain, as important in their special way as tall screening conifers or the yews and boxwoods that cannot be passed over in defining and weighing down internal garden spaces. A very old Italian lady once toured our garden, and when she noted that we grew culinary sage (Salvia officinalis) as ornamental plants commented, “Ah! Sal-vi-a! Un giardino senza salvia non e neanche un giardino!” which we believe translates as “A garden without sage is no kind of garden at all.” We’d say the same for roses.
And we are certainly not the first to ask why. For roses are not easy plants to grow. They are subject to a host
of ills, including mildew in high summer that turns them a disturbing powdery gray; black spot that shows first as vivid orange dots and then causes complete defoliation, leaving naked stems behind; aphids that curl and deform leaves and flowers; and Japanese beetles, which chew their flowers and leaves and, for added insult, fornicate in their blossoms. Roses are, in fact, the darlings of the pesticide industry, for of all plants commonly grown in gardens, only lawn grass produces greater annual sales of chemicals. And there is the mysterious “rose replant disease,” which for reasons quite unclear causes a rose planted where a rose has recently grown to pine away and die. That does not always happen. It mostly happens. So to any gardener, William Blake’s great poem that begins “O Rose, thou art sick!” makes perfect sense.
Any other group of plants with such difficulties would be banned from the gardens of sensible people, and for all these ills, by such people roses often are. But there is something about a rose . . . Its history as a garden plant stretches back thousands of years, to the ancient Persians and Medes as early as the twelfth century b.c., for whom the typical five-petaled flower borne by many wild species was a significant religious emblem. From then until the present, roses have enjoyed uninterrupted cultivation, even in the Dark Ages, when roses were nurtured in monastery gardens for their medicinal properties, particularly as a salve for skin diseases and to encourage the healing of wounds. Though the genus is not particularly large, comprising between one hundred fifty and two hundred species, all of them cross freely among themselves, producing an incalculable number of hybrids, to the extent that the modern rosarian Peter Schneider has remarked, “Someone has estimated that crossing any modern rose with any other modern rose will produce one of seventeen million possible results.”