Our Life in Gardens

by Joe Eck

  Our own membership in the galanthophiles was pretty much assured about eighteen years ago when a friend in Philadelphia offered us a single bulb, just twice the size of a garden pea, of one of the rarer species, G. reginae-olgae. It was collected on Mount Taygetus in 1876 and named for Queen Olga of Greece. Her snowdrop has the very curious (one might almost say perverse) determination to bloom in autumn with the falling leaves, and not in spring when a snowdrop should. It is otherwise nearly indistinguishable from the far more common G. nivalis. Unfortunately, my friend was unable to share with me the even rarer G. reginae-olgae subsp. vernalis, which blooms in spring alongside any common snowdrop, there for only the very learned to recognize (or take on trust). That one is still a lack here.

  Otherwise, we really cannot be said, snowdropwise, to suffer, largely due to the offerings of Mr. Hitch Lyman, proprietor of the Temple Nursery in Trumansburg, New York. He is the only purveyor in this country of snowdrops “in the green,” a term that must be carefully explained to anyone seeking the rarer snowdrops. Most spring-flowering bulbs—daffodils or tulips, for example—are usually planted in autumn when they are dormant and may be conveniently shipped, usually from Holland. Snowdrops are shipped this way too, though they do not like it, and only the sturdiest forms will survive such treatment. They are all best acquired just after they have flowered and while still in active growth. This makes them a completely undesirable commodity to the large growers, who are geared to supplying dormant bulbs in autumn like supermarket onions. That leaves a niche, however, for the Temple Nursery, which offers the rarest and most beautiful (and sometimes culturally the crankiest) snowdrops in the green, within days of their flowering, each wrapped carefully in a damp paper towel and accurately labeled. So from Mr. Lyman we have bought dozens of bulbs, almost all of which have settled into the garden without a backward glance toward home.

  The most common snowdrop—here and everywhere—is G. nivalis (“nivalis” means “like snow”), but it is not to be scorned, for sheets and sheets of it blooming happily in shaded places make for joy, a different kind of snow. It is native to central Europe but has naturalized wherever people have gardened, to the extent that it often marks the cellar holes of deserted farmsteads now deep in the reclaiming woods. It is easy to grow, asking only a humus-rich, woodsy soil and part shade. In our Vermont garden it grows beneath old sugar maples mostly along our front walk, flowering over bare ground that will later be occupied by hostas and ferns. It is unusually prolific, and so it is the one that grows most readily if you must buy dried bulbs and plant them in the autumn. One cannot have too much of it, under trees, beneath the bare shanks of shrubs, or wherever it can be planted.

  Here, among the masses of G. nivalis, grow rarer forms of that species and others. ‘Flore Pleno’ is easy to recognize, for though it has three outer tepals, at least a dozen green-tipped inner ones form a heart-shaped bundle within. Though it hardly possesses the grace of the plain common snowdrop, there is an old-fashioned charm to its puffed-out hoop petticoat shape. Being a double, in which the fertile parts of the flower have been modified into extra “petals,” it sets no seed, though for that same reason it lasts a very long time in flower. It can be divided quite easily, and it freely produces offsets from each bulb. Another vigorous and much-treasured nivalis cultivar is G. n. ‘Viridapice’, which has, in addition to green tips on the inner tepals, hairline brushstrokes of green on the outer tepals as well. While some snowdrops need to be looked at carefully to discern their particular distinctions, ‘Viridapice’ catches the eye easily. But within the group of single snow-drops heavily marked with green, the most subtle and wonderful is perhaps G. nivalis ‘Virescens’, which originated at the Vienna Botanical Garden in the late nineteenth century. The outer tepals appear to be completely washed over with the palest green, though very close observation reveals thin, dark green stripes expanding outward into a sort of green fog.

  Galanthus nivalis ‘Sandersii’, which is elusive because it is so difficult to grow, displays a queer yellow wash both on its inner and outer tepals and on the ovary, the rounded structure like a tiny pea that tops all blooms of galanthus. ‘Sandersii’ is said to flourish best in soils that are acid, though all snowdrops seem to thrive in the somewhat acidic woodland soils of our garden, ‘Sandersii’ among them. However, it has been very slow to increase, and we never see more than two or three strangely yellow nodding bells from our original single-bulb purchase some years ago.

  Doubling in any flower, but especially in something so naïvely elegant as a snowdrop, always requires a stretch of acceptance. Still, in this case we value the double snowdrops because they make a difference in the display at a time when there is little difference to be noted elsewhere in the garden. Among the doubles the most engaging is G. nivalis ‘Blewbury Tart’. The spelling makes clear that it has nothing whatsoever to do with blueberries, it having been discovered in the churchyard of Blewbury, Oxfordshire. Nor has it anything to do with pastry, the tart part referring to its extraordinary habit of lifting its outer tepals upward like an immodestly raised skirt. It is impish and adorable, with all its parts shaded by dark green stripes so close together that they seem a solid field of color. Perhaps all snowdrops should really be looked at with a magnifying glass, but this one especially so.

  Of all the snowdrops we grow, however, G. ‘S. Arnott’ is the star, both for beauty (even at a distance) and for reliability. A very robust cultivar, it is tall (up to eight inches) and substantial. It is also almost the first snowdrop to open. It pushes out of a bed of myrtle, Vinca minor, with which it has seemed to have no trouble competing for many years, just outside the living room windows, always the first sure sign of spring. Its large, opalescent pearls open to expose a deep green heart-shaped stain on the inner tepals. We have seen a foot of snow weigh down the fully opened flowers, and still they stand proudly upright when the snow melts away.

  If snowdrops were roses, the small differences that make them special would be obvious and appreciated by all. But they are very little flowers, and that is no small part of their charm to those of us who preserve the fascination with tiny things that all children have. You need to get close to them—an easier thing perhaps for children, who are nearer to the earth than we are. But for adults, a tiny arrangement of snowdrops on a desk or dining table might be the best way, where then the various shapes and forms and the minute gradations of green or chartreuse or yellow can be more easily appreciated.

  SORBUS ALNIFOLIA

  THOUGH OURS IS A LARGE GARDEN, many of our favorite things are planted near to hand. Lilacs and roses cluster beneath one bedroom window, and our oldest stewartia grows beneath the other. Our one precious Ilex opaca crowds against the foundation of the living room below one window, sheltered both by the winter shade thrown by the house and the warmth of the basement wall. The bright yellow culms of Phyllostachys aureosulcata ‘Spectabilis’ enjoy a similar protection and brush against each other, creating what the Japanese call “the sound of silence.” The beautiful soft pink hybrid magnolia called ‘Leonard Messel’ overhangs the kitchen door. And across the face of the house are three deciduous hollies, I. verticillata, which are as old as it is and have grown into muscular shapes like small trees.

  Because our house is small, that leaves only one aspect, out the upstairs bathroom window, and it is dominated by one of our most treasured small trees, important enough to share a place in our affections even with the stewartia or the magnolia. The tree is Sorbus alnifolia, the alder-leaved or Korean mountain ash, and we see it every hour of the day, every day of the year. Best of all, we look into its crown, close to its leaves and flowers and fruit and somber winter bark, not as if the tree stood out in the garden but almost as if part of the room we are in.

  We were in pursuit of S. alnifolia from our first year here. We had read Donald Wyman’s enthusiastic description of it in his Trees for American Gardens. In those days, we had room to plant trees and we intended to plant a great many. We then fo
und a living specimen at Harvard University’s Arnold Arboretum in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, and our enthusiasm was fixed. Sorbus alnifolia was definitely on our list.

  But despite Wyman’s praise, the tree was little known then and rare in nurseries. Even Weston Nurseries in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, which supplied us so many wonderful trees and shrubs in the beginning, did not list it. That seemed odd, for there was little question of its hardiness (as, for example, there was about Stewartia pseudocamellia, on which we took a chance anyway). Sorbus alnifolia originates in a very cold part of Korea and is rated as hardy all the way to Zone 3. Eventually, however, we found the tree offered by Wayside Gardens in South Carolina, which made a specialty of the rare and unusual, always at a hefty price. We bought the tree from them, of course, though years would pass before the wisdom of that purchase became clear. What arrived that spring at the post office was just a little sapling barely two feet tall and as thin as a pencil. However, its very smallness was a piece of luck because of where we intended to plant it.

  Our garden was taking shape in the shadow of an old New England hardwood forest. Many of the trees, mostly ash, beech, yellow birch, and maple, were perhaps a hundred years old or more, but because they had grown close together for all their lives, they rose straight and tall, with no lower branches anywhere closer to the ground than thirty or forty feet. The woods needed to be brought to the ground, needed the under-story that is often lacking in old woods this far north. But their interlacing root zones made it impossible to establish well-grown small trees with large root masses of their own. A sapling, however, could be tucked in easily among those roots, and so we planted our sorbus almost at the foot of a great sugar maple that towered above the ash’s puny self. We really do not remember giving it any special care those first years, either because memory has failed us or—more likely—because it didn’t need much and grew quickly. Now, and for a long time, it seems always to have been a stately tree perhaps thirty feet tall, with a trunk measuring thirteen inches in diameter and a wide-spreading crown still comfortably below its much older companion.

  The two have existed in perfect harmony, but they never seem so suited to each other as in October, when both are dressed in autumnal blaze. Against the scarlet orange of the maple, the ash’s simple, toothed leaves turn from darkest green to butter yellow and then to orange, then a tawny brown. A spectacular display of fruit accompanies this steady change of foliage as October advances. Each of thousands of pretty white flowers arranged in puffs that covered the tree in May will have formed into corymbs of coral fruit shadowed red beneath a powdery, dusty bloom. In most years, the fruit is not with us for long, since a host of birds—jays, robins, cardinals, and chickadees—descend on the tree, making its crown even more alive with color. If the flight path of the robins lies directly over us, they can strip it bare in a week. But if not, the much less voracious birds find something for themselves all winter long, even in the shriveled, dark brown raisins of fruit that may cling almost until spring. And even in winter the tree is beautiful, and somehow noble, its thick trunk supporting a crown of secondary branches. Both the trunk and older branches are smooth and gray but dotted over with straw-colored lenticels, forming a pattern like the skin of a snake.

  Over the years, so much in a garden happens by accident, or with a vague hope that somehow things will fill the expectation formed only in the mind. But in any older garden, there may be successes so striking that the gardener himself cannot imagine having foreseen them and can take no credit for what seems essentially an unexpected gift, a happy accident that occurred beyond his best-laid plans and wishes. Our S. alnifolia seems that to us now.

  STEWARTIAS

  THE STEWARTIAS ARE IN FLOWER as they always are here in July, but this year they are more full of bloom than ever before. Each tree—there are six in the garden—is weighted down with flowers, four-inch-wide, six-petaled blossoms of silken white crepe cupped around a center of golden stamens. The slender branches are so burdened, in fact, that they bend at unaccustomed but still graceful angles away from the trunks and spent blossoms, complete and not shattered into single petals, fall every few minutes while marble-round buds are still swelling. The littlest tree, planted on the bank of the stream, is the least floriferous of all. It has been there for only three years, though it flowered shyly at four feet, and now, as a gangly adolescent of perhaps eight, it is still sparing of its flowers. But the four trees that give structure to the lower hillside, two on each side of the winding fieldstone path down the center, have hundreds of flowers apiece. And the oldest, which grows behind the barn and just below the bedroom windows, may have thousands, more, it seems, than any twenty-foot tree could bear. When we look down on it at dawn and at twilight, we can count a hundred on one branch. In the depths of the summer night, the spent blossoms can be seen to drop silently from shadowy black-green leaves like falling stars. Most particularly then, silhouetted against the gray wood shingles of the barn roof, each open white flower glowing in the dark, it seems like a tree in dreams. But in the morning, clearing away the spent blossoms is reality.

  So little is really known about stewartias. But in our experience at least, as trees grow older they blossom more abundantly. Our oldest tree was planted five years before the barn was built in 1983, and moved the year after, when we were able to extend the garden in that direction to create a quiet courtyard on two levels. It grew before that in a little bed beside the kitchen door, where many treasured plants began their lives, but now occupied by a wonderful and weirdly contorted Magnolia ×’Leonard Messel’, which came finally to stay.

  Our first stewartia was small when we planted it out of a nursery can and still hardly six feet tall when we moved it to its present home. It accepted relocation with barely a whisper of complaint and has since grown on from strength to strength. Now one can catch glimpses of it over the barn, even from beyond the front yard. In its almost thirty years of life here, even the severest winter has not harmed it, and it has never failed to flower in July, each year more than the year before. We love it, for that and for many other reasons, not the least of which was the prediction we received in the beginning from many well-meaning friends with great gardening sophistication, that no stewartia could possibly live in the cold hills of Vermont. It seems they were wrong.

  Stewartia pseudocamellia in fact comes from the colder regions of western China, and has been grown in European gardens since the late nineteenth century. Wherever it has thriven, it has always been recognized as a great aristocrat. So it is curious that when we first began to garden here, it was still a rarity, not so often grown by home gardeners, and certainly not written about. But we ourselves had seen the magnificent old trees at Arnold Arboretum with their man-thick trunks of mottled cream, beige, and dull orange. In the beginning, we did not see them in flower. Flower is not always the reason for growing something. The stature of those trees and their mysterious beauty were enough to cause us to try one here. But as young gardeners we were cautious, or perhaps cautious in a different way from the way we are now. So we looked into books.

  We found no mention of the tree in our bibles of that time, Josephine Nuese’s The Country Garden or Thalassa Cruso’s Making Things Grow Outdoors. Other bedside companions—Elizabeth Lawrence and Vita Sackville-West—had nothing to say, though Donald Wyman did, for the tree has been at the Arnold for a century, and as its director, he had much praise for it in his Wyman’s Garden Encyclopedia. Like so much else in Wyman’s , however, S. pseudocamellia was listed as hardy to Zone 5. That is where the Arnold Arboretum is, and so many beautiful shrubs and trees were tested there and subsequently designated as “hardy to Zone 5.” Still, we were willing to take risks, and over the years that have inevitably followed, we have found that hardiness ratings are always to be questioned. Or at least tested. Often, they are hobgoblins to unadventurous gardeners. But our oldest stewartia gave us courage early on to stretch the hardiness ratings generally listed for all woody plants grown in
American gardens. Our stewartias appear to be as happy here as in their native land, and in fact bring that land here, since almost nothing we can imagine except the place itself (which we have never seen) looks quite so much like western China as our old stewartia in full bloom against our weathered barn, here in southern Vermont.

  But wherever stewartias can be grown, they are beautiful in all their parts and at all seasons. The flowers really are like camellias, fragile, two-inch-wide blooms of the clearest silver and gold, though each lasts only a day or two and then litters the ground like summer drifts of snow. Bloom here begins almost always on the last day of June and extends for the month of July, the last flowers opening even into early August on shaded branches where they develop slowest. Then, in autumn, there is no tree more brilliant in leaf color, starting a deep burgundy red in branches exposed to sun and shading from there to scarlet, pumpkin, and yellow, all the colors of autumn borne together, and always later than the great trees of the surrounding woodland—the maples, beeches, ashes, and birches. When the leaves have fallen, there are the trunks, always part of the general beauty, but then so prominent and muscular, mottled over with warm taupe and buff and cream, smooth to the stroke of the hand, irresistible in winter, in snow.

  A tree must be loved by any gardener. Trees are something for all seasons—in bud, flower, leaf, twig, bark, and trunk. Trees are companions, and one can even hug them, if need and desire and their presence through a significant extent of time justify that demonstration of affection. But in any garden, some trees are visitors and some are guests. Stewartias are true love, and anyone who can should therefore plant one. In the early years, their presence in the garden should be thought of as a courtship, not a settled romance. For they are not for all places, soils, and cultural conditions. We have had good luck here in southern Vermont, where, though winters are cold, our soils are deep, slightly acid woodland loam, and moisture is abundant. But even for us, and as with any other potential love affair, a certain amount of courage was required.