Our Life in Gardens

by Joe Eck

  SUMMER-BLOOMING BULBS

  IMAGINE THE POSSIBILITY of eating one meal that would cure you of hunger for life. Or a room that was decorated once and for all, never needing rearranging or freshening with a new pillow or a bouquet of flowers. Then try to imagine the possibility of a garden that once planted, grew and bloomed without any further attention from you. If you can even imagine these things, then the culture of summer-blooming bulbs will not be of much interest. For most are tender in all but the warmest parts of North America, requiring either to be bought fresh each season, or, if you are very thrifty and can contrive the right conditions, to be lifted in autumn and stored through winter. They are all a deal of work for a flowering season that is hardly a month. Or less.

  But summer-blooming bulbs (which include corms, tubers, rhizomes, and other underground storage mechanisms) have become the source of great enthusiasm among gardeners. If their culture is often fairly labor-intensive, it is at least usually not difficult. The bulbs themselves are often absurdly cheap. They are dramatically beautiful in flower, and that flower comes in the dullest parts of late summer when both the garden and the gardener need a lift. Finally, summer-blooming bulbs offer a complexity of form that no other summer flowers can claim. They are, quite simply, interesting. And gardens ought above all things to be interesting, especially in summer, when one is most in them.

  Within the surprisingly vast world of summer-blooming bulbs, gladiolus have always been popular with gardeners. But the question is, with which gardeners? Mostly, they have been treasured by those whose sense of growing flowers was close to their sense of growing vegetables. (If you visited your great-uncle Otto in the summer and you admired his glads, in neat rows, you had to take home a sheaf along with some beans and zucchini.) But all that has changed now, for as part of the general reevaluation of “common” garden flowers, the florist’s glad has received its share of attention. It is true that the colors of many cultivars are brash, their forms uncompromising, and the size of their flower scapes makes them difficult to combine tactfully with summer-blooming perennials in the border. Still, even the most outrageous of them have their uses in summer gardens. They can provide an emphatic flash of scarlet magenta or lime green that can lift a banal garden composition into something interesting. And they need not be planted singly as rigid exclamation points (or, as many gardeners feel, as insulting fingers), poking up through gentle border geraniums and veronicas. A clump of five, or even seven, planted so the corms almost touch, can look more natural. And staking, which will be necessary for so heavy a fan of leaves and flower, is much easier to achieve. A peony hoop will serve.

  Nor need gladiolus seem so redolent of hotel lobby arrangements or a funeral parlor sheaf atop a coffin. For among the butterfly glads are many graceful, delicate forms, of which the best is perhaps a clear scarlet with widely spaced florets. Nice too are the so-called hardy gladiolus, often offered as Gladiolus nanus, though that is not the proper botanical name for them. For like the larger florist’s glads, they are correctly grouped under a catchall botanical category, G. ×hortulanus, that reflects the crossing and recrossing of many species. They have been selected, however, for an appearance more pleasing to many gardeners. At full maturity, they stand slightly more than a foot tall, and their flowers are borne in rather spontaneous ranks, never in the carefully regimented rows of florist’s glads. Catalogs always seem to offer them in mixed colors—of cherry red, rich or pale pink, cream or white, and often splotched with deeper shades. Get them in single colors if you can, though the mixes generally combine beautifully. As for the promise of hardiness, they are no more hardy than the larger glads, surviving winters not much farther north than Zone 7. Still, for their delicate beauty, patches of them are worth planting anew each spring.

  Beyond the familiar gladiolus there are also many pure species, delicately wild and wonderful in form and color, that any gardener should search out who likes to go back to the original sources of things. Most commonly offered—and it is very commonly offered once one knows to look for it—is acidanthera, called the “Abyssinian glad” or “Peacock orchid.” Its correct botanical name—at present—is G. callianthus ‘Murielae’, after E. H. Wilson’s daughter, Muriel, who is commemorated in many plants. It has been in gardens for a long time, having been brought from its native Ethiopia to England in the mid-nineteenth century, where it was almost immediately popular. Generally, gladiolus are plants one can take or leave, but acidanthera is practically indispensable. From corms hardly the size of a quarter, surprisingly large plants develop, first with a handsome fan of pleated, dark green leaves, and then with a graceful, arching inflorescence of many slightly pendulous clear white flowers, each marked in the center by a blotch of maroon. At twilight, fully opened flowers release a fresh, strong fragrance, rather like that of vernal primroses. And best of all, spent flowers hang in graceful fringes, never looking depressing and never requiring deadheading.

  Acidanthera is very easy to grow. Five or six corms can be planted in a quart plastic pot in early June, and grown in an unobtrusive place, behind a shed or garage or anywhere, provided there is full sun. By mid-July, handsome clumps of foliage will have developed, ready to be slipped into any bare section of the perennial garden. In August, there will be magnificent flowers in a place that otherwise would be dull and homely. Only paperwhite narcissus in the dead of winter are easier.

  Even after acidanthera one is not quite finished with the gladiolus family, however, for within it still are many wonderful summer-blooming plants, not least of which is crocosmia. It is a plant with mixed reviews, depending in part on where one lives and in part on one’s tolerance for hot colors, in this case usually a vibrant, fire-flame orange. Where it is happily perennial and self-seeds (which is to say Zone 8 and warmer), it is as common as Hemerocallis fulva is along New England roadsides, and like that plant it is scorned, though both surely give a lift to the heart when seen from a car window. Where it must be cosseted a bit, its thick fountains of grass-green leaves to three feet tall and its arching inflorescences of fifty or more burning scarlet flowers give it its own special value. Of the many cultivars available, ‘Lucifer’ is still the most vigorous and the hardiest, surviving with good winter drainage well into Zone 5. Those gardeners who grow faint at violent colors might seek out ‘Solfitare’, with soft, amber flowers the color of a Lorna Doone cookie.

  It is a very interesting fact that many plants considered until recently fairly tacky by sophisticated gardeners have experienced a surprising reevaluation and even a sort of vogue. Cannas are a case in point. Each year, along with the old standards like ‘Le roi Humbert’ (pronounced by some Leeroy Um-bert), catalogs offer forms that are softer in color and finer in form, and as one catalog puts it, “self-cleaning,” which means that spent flowers drop off tactfully to make way for fresher ones. Great excitement has been occasioned too by the elegant cultivar ‘Stuttgart’, with cool green leaves liberally splashed with clear white, and gentle, coral flowers. For a canna, it is a cranky plant, since in the full sun that most cannas enjoy it will quickly burn to a crisp. But in cool part shade, however, and liberally watered—or even with its roots standing in water, for it is semiaquatic—it adds great elegance to a group of plants that seems to have gained increasing refinement in the last few years. Still, the fine old forms, including ‘Le roi’, with its purple leaves that catch the light so beautifully, are not to be superceded. Viewed rightly, they still have great value in gardens.

  One waits for similar progress with dahlias. It is of course true that the gardeners who like them have always liked them, for their outrageous, late summer flowers the size sometimes of dinner plates, and for their generally Carol Channing forthrightness, in orange, scarlet, flame, magenta, purple, or any of those colors brushed one over another. One can easily have a fondness, frank or sneaking, for all of them. But great tact is required in combining them with other flowers in order to prevent that “Look at me!” quality they often have. It is odd
, then, that the most stylish and serviceable dahlia is in some ways the brashest of them all. It is ‘Bishop of Llandaff’, a very old cultivar with bronze leaves that stands about three feet tall, surmounted by blood-red semi-double flowers. This is the dahlia used in substantial masses by Lawrence Johnson in the famous red border at Hidcote, though until recently it was difficult to find in any U.S. catalog. Gardeners who wanted it had to beg it from other gardeners, though that has always been the way with many old-fashioned summer-blooming bulbs. Now it is more easily acquired, and the suavity of its burgundy leaves and its scarlet flowers makes it a valuable component in gardens that might suffer too much from misty-mauvey good taste.

  Though a certain boldness of form and flower may be the salvation of many a dull late summer border, not all summer-blooming bulbs are dramatic full stops. A large handful of them offer a gentler beauty, making them easier to blend into the garden. Galtonia candicans, the “summer hyacinth” of old southern gardens, is at the head of that list. Its scapes of bloom are more finely crafted than any hyacinth, standing about eighteen inches tall and furnished with many delicate down-hanging bells of greenish white. Though they are fragrant, it is their grace that recommends them, for they can be planted beneath more stolid perennials to rise above them in airy minarets. Galtonias originated in South Africa, but they are surprisingly hardy, reappearing in Zone 6 gardens. Still, for insurance, new bulbs should always be planted in early spring wherever one expects things to look dull in late August and early September.

  Another confusion with a familiar spring blooming bulb occurs in the common name of hymenocallis, an elegant South American native often inexplicably called the “Peruvian daffodil.” Though its flowers have the cup-shaped perianth most daffodils possess, it looks nothing like a daffodil, except perhaps to the myopic and from a very great distance. But certainly it looks good enough, for from a sturdy clump of amaryllis-like foliage two-foot-tall flower scapes emerge, each topped by five or so three-inch-long flowers consisting of a central cup surrounded by filamented spiderlike petals. Their plump bulbs can be expected to flower about six weeks from planting, and three or more bulbs should always be planted in one hole, to make a natural-seeming clump. In the most familiar form, the hybrid Hymenocallis ×festalis, the flower is white and very fragrant. Another hybrid, ‘Sulphur Queen’, is a clear primrose yellow. Close to frost, they should be lifted and stored over the winter as one does amaryllis, to be replanted in late spring or early summer. They are superb as cut flowers and delicately lily-scented.

  For fragrance, however, nothing among summer bulbs can top tuberoses, Polianthes tuberosa. Their heady perfume might seem morbid to some, for as Mexican natives, they are the flores para los muertos, funeral flowers. One can think that way if one must, but otherwise, they are divinely fragrant, with a power equal only to Magnolia grandiflora and gardenias. It is good that they smell so wonderful, for tuberoses are not among the most graceful of garden flowers. Their towering spikes of bloom, white in the single and pale pink in the double cultivar ‘The Pearl’, are nice enough, rising up to three feet or more in height. But by the time the blooms open at the tops, the onion-like leaves have withered away, and the general effect is of something beautiful atop something that is very shabby. Many of the larger spring blooming alliums have the same problem, and so one must simply anticipate it by planting tuberoses in and among other plants that will clothe their bare shanks. It does not generally do, however, to plant them in the bare ground in early spring, for they are slow to develop, and in colder gardens, flowers will not occur before frosts. They should therefore be started indoors in warm conditions in early spring, grown in pots, and eased into the garden as soon as the weather is settled.

  Though many summer-blooming bulbs have their greatest value in the ground as enrichments to borders, others are preeminent for pot culture. There are tuberous begonias, much loved for the beautiful camellia-sized flowers in any color from snowy white to soft and deeper yellow through orange, scarlet, and true red. Those splendid flowers look so sad when drag-gled in the mud, and so beautiful hanging heavily off the edges of a clay pot. There are also oxalis, pot cultured where they are not hardy, forming soft mounds of green or burgundy clover leaves in which the flowers nestle, white or ivory or pink according to species. Delicate achimenes are a pleasant alternative to impatiens in shade, their arching, eight-inch-long stems crowded with long-lasting, flat-faced flowers in many shades of rose, pink, purple, and white. Do not be startled at being offered twenty-five or so rhizomes for eight dollars, as it will take that many to furnish a ten-inch pot. A well-grown pot of caladiums is also always refreshing in the shaded corner of a terrace, particularly if they are the old white and green form, called ‘Candidum’, a sort of vegetable ice cube on a hot day. An emphatically tropical effect can also be had from Colocasia esculenta, called “elephant ears,” planted in a really large pot. Do not buy it from bulb catalogs, but go to Asian or Chinese grocery stores, where it is sold by the pound as a vegetable. Finally, a tub of calla lilies is always rich in leaf, beautiful in flower, and for a potted plant, certainly convenient. Most species are semi-aquatic, growing natively in ditches and in shallow, stagnant water. They grow best in pots stood in water, into which a little water-soluble plant food can be put for even lusher leaves and flowers.

  The world of summer-blooming bulbs has opened for gardeners like a vast new country. Catalogs have quickly caught this interest and are encouraging it, reminding gardeners of old plants they knew as children and of new ones they have never heard of. Among their pages are gladiolus, cannas, and dahlias, all meriting a fresh look. But there is also the delicate, allium-flowered Triteleia laxa, best in the cobalt-blue form ‘Queen Fabiola’. Ornithogalum saundersiae, the ‘Star of Good Hope’, bears three-foot-tall umbels of white, each star-shaped flower marked with a jet-black center. The deep crimson Jacobean lily, Sprekelia formosissima, meaning “most beautiful,” is as easy to grow as any Christmas gift amaryllis. There are Chinese lantern lilies, Sandersonia aurantiaca, which produce odd goldfish-shaped flowers along winding, two-foot stems, and Gloriosa superba ‘Rothschildiana’, a taller vine to three feet, with lily-like flowers of orange and yellow. Pineapple lilies, species of Eucomis, are impossible not to study when they produce their cobs of greenish, sweet-scented waxy flowers each surmounted with a topknot of leaves. Finally, there is the improbable mating of two completely separate genera, Amaryllis belladonna and Crinum moorei, which produced the bigeneric hybrid amarcrinum, a sturdy bulb the size of a grapefruit with rich blades of leaf three feet long and an intensely fragrant scape of candy-pink, amaryllis-like flowers in early September. In the face of all this unfamiliar experience, one feels like Columbus.

  TENDER RHODODENDRONS

  SO MUCH of what we’ve grown over the years has been the result of what we have gone to bed with. When our garden was only a hope and a dream and we were living in a rented house, we ended each day with a thick reference book on some aspect of gardening. We did not look things up or skip about, but rather, worked our way systematically from front to back. Though our method might sound to others a little like reading the dictionary, there was nothing that was not of interest to us. So in that way, we plowed through Wyman’s Garden Encyclopedia, T. H. Everett’s New Illustrated Encyclopedia of Gardening, and The Royal Horticultural Society’s Color Dictionary of Flowering Plants. Our reading resulted in a serial involvement with all sorts of plants previously unknown to us—cytisus, fremontodendron, ceanothus, carpenteria, even the magnificent Myosotidium hortensia, the rare and cranky Chatham Islands forget-me-not. It was an endless list, and it still seems to be continuing. (Now, of course, we would have twin volumes of the American Horticultural Society A–Z Encyclopedia of Garden Plants and start with that.)

  One of the largest, heaviest, and most scholarly of these books encouraged the most enduring of all these youthful enthusiasms. When it was published in 1961, David Leach’s Rhododendrons of the World was simply the def
initive work on that large genus. It probably still is, though when we acquired our copy in 1974 it was already out of print. We could understand why, because it is a huge book, oversized, densely single-spaced, and with not a single photograph in all its 544 pages. But it enabled us to see for the first time a whole world of plants we had no knowledge of at all, and we eagerly absorbed the wealth of information it offered, covering distribution, care, diseases, propagation, and so on. As we read, however, we realized that of the thousands of species and hybrids that make up this enormous genus, very few would consent to life in a Zone 4 garden. Of David Leach’s hundreds of recommendations, a bare dozen would be for us, and those—with a few remarkable exceptions—were not among the showiest of even the hardier rhododendrons.

  Of course, no one knew this better than David Leach himself. For he spent a lifetime creating beautiful hardy rhododendrons, producing one magnificent hybrid after another in the coldest part of Pennsylvania, a place almost as cold as where we had chosen to live. In addition to increasing hardiness, Leach also enormously increased the range of colors available, extending the predominately pink and white and purple forms into peach and clear yellow and even green.

  But in 1975, the new possibilities David Leach had created still lay in our future. We had begun to plan the house we would build the following year, and we knew that it would contain a greenhouse. No passionate gardener can survive Vermont winters otherwise. And since there was to be a greenhouse, we thought it should be attached to the house, open to the living earth, and treated as a real garden. It would be a winter garden in fact, no matter how small it had to be, and in it we would grow a whole range of winter and early-spring blooming plants forbidden to us outdoors. So we read with enormous interest Leach’s brief, seven-page chapter called “Rhododendrons for the Cool Greenhouse,” which contained these words: “the most impressive of all Rhododendrons . . . under glass produce sumptuous flowers of luxuriant proportion and delicious fragrance.” For what we had in mind, that sounded perfect.