by Joe Eck
None of the rhododendrons Leach especially recommended for greenhouse culture were grown on the East Coast. The plants were hardy outdoors only around the San Francisco Bay area, and so for us, that was one more reason to take our school vacations there. The classified ads in the back pages of Pacific Horticulture listed several growers of rare species rhododendrons, and we were confident that at least some of the fifty-seven forms particularly recommended in Rhododendrons of the World could be found among them.
One of the deepest pleasures gardening offers is the enthusiastic welcome gardeners extend to other gardeners who share their interest. The first nursery on our list, in Oakland, was quite small, perhaps a quarter of an acre in extent, and given over entirely to rare azaleas and rhododendrons. The young man who greeted us was startled that someone would have driven thirty-five hundred miles in pursuit of just what his nursery offered. He insisted on phoning his elderly father, now retired, to come from his home a few blocks away and meet us. For as he said, the plants before us were his father’s greatest joy, and he would relish telling us about them and helping with our selection. Mr. Lopez arrived shortly thereafter, intent, we soon realized, on sending us away with the whole nursery. But we had only a borrowed station wagon, and we had already made the resolution to buy only small plants, the more to bring home. But Mr. Lopez offered us a splendid Rhododendron fosterianum, the only one he had, which was a large plant already four feet tall, with smooth, reddish-brown bark like a manzanita. It barely fit into the car, and everything else we were to acquire on our trip would have to be packed around it. It was evident, however, that old Mr. Lopez took great delight in the idea of his plant blooming against the snow of a Vermont March, so far from its previous home. And besides encouraging him in his evident pleasure, we simply wanted it, so we cheerfully paid the absurdly small amount of money he asked. It flowered abundantly early in our first spring at North Hill, producing large, loose trusses of white, funneled flowers, each ruffled at its end and strongly scented of cinnamon and nutmeg. That scent, we soon found, was the hallmark of rhododendrons in the Maddenii group, the various members of which originate in India and Bhutan on the lower slopes of the Himalayas between 5,000 and 9,000 feet.
We took one other plant that day, not a rhododendron but a late-flowering azalea of a strain bred in Japan. Called “Satsuki,” meaning “fifth month,” these plants typically bloom in May. What makes them remarkable, however, is that many varieties produce distinct variations of color when in bloom, all on the same plant. ‘Huru-Gusimi’ had blooms of orchid pink, though some flowers were marked with rose-purple stripes, and some had white centers. This, too, was the first of a group of plants that would be added to over the years.
We took away two other important things that day, but neither was a plant. We were told to visit Nuccio’s Nursery in Altadena for the best collection of azaleas and camellias in the United States, many of which its founder, Guillio Nuccio, had bred. We were also given the name of a backyard breeder of Maddenii rhododendrons in Fort Bragg, at the very northern end of California. Since our quest was primarily for tender rhododendrons, we decided Nuccio’s could wait, and we headed north.
The small house we found among the redwoods at Fort Bragg was the home of a true enthusiast, the sort of nursery we have delighted in finding all our gardening lives. Its owner, Marge Drucker, grew everything on David Leach’s list, and she enthusiastically filled out his dry, scholarly descriptions with glowing praise of her own. Of the dozen plants we took away, our favorite has been ‘Countess of Haddington’, though not for its plant form, which is ungraceful, lank, and rangy. But in the winter garden in early April, each terminal growth produces a large, lax truss of tubular three-inch-long flowers that begins suffused in wine red and opens to a pristine white with pink stains, as if a fine Burgundy had been spilled on a snow-white damask tablecloth. And we could not do without ‘Else Frye’, much smaller in stature and more compact, with tidier trusses of white, fragrant flower, or ‘Fragrantissimum’, though it seemed in bloom no more fragrant than the others, since all three produce the same rich lily-like scent with strong nutmeg overtones.
Plants grow, of course, and our rhododendrons grew remarkably. Fosterianum increased the most rapidly and was a larger plant to start with. After four years with us, it reached the top of the greenhouse glass and so we gave it to the botany department of nearby Marlboro College. We miss it still. ‘Fragrantissimum’ gave its place to a rapidly increasing and very beautiful single Higo camellia, ‘Yamato-Nishiki’, with rose-striped white flowers, and ‘Else Frye’ succumbed quite suddenly, we think from mice tunneling at her roots. ‘Countess of Haddington’ is with us still. But one Maddenii rhododendron is hardly enough, and so we have just ordered a new ‘Else Frye’ from Roger Gossler at Gossler Farms Nursery in Oregon. We miss her snow-white, open-funneled flowers produced in great abundance just a little after ‘Countess of Haddington’. We miss ‘Fragrantissimum’ too, and probably someday soon we will locate it again as well. For though other passions and enthusiasms have come to us in the thirty years since that trip to California, we seem always to return to our first loves.
TIME
IN 1976 A GOOD FRIEND took us to visit a garden in Prides Crossing, Massachusetts. The property was large, at least for a community where any inch of land is gold. It consisted of perhaps ten acres, and every bit of it had been developed over more than forty years of constant care. The passage of so many years—years of devising and elaborating, of planting, pruning, and shaping—were obvious everywhere. ‘Old Dexter’ hybrid rhododendrons lined the long gravel drive and created a tunnel leading up to the front of the house, a generously proportioned Federal mansion from about 1780. At the back of the property was a somber theater of clipped hemlock, complete with exit wings, backdrops, green curtains, and a stone-coped elevated grass stage. Each quaint, weathered little outbuilding had its own mossed-over terrace. Salvage was everywhere; there were wooden balustrades from some old house, free-standing Grecian revival porch columns, an authentic marble Renaissance wellhead, and even—or so we seem to remember—a statue of Bette Davis as a garden nymph, carved when she was a teenaged artist’s model thereabouts. The whole effect could have been called “Colonial Palladian,” but its whimsy, ingenuity, and beauty completely avoided pretension. It was also just slightly mad. We think that was the first old garden we ever saw, or at least the first we studied with any care. Our own garden had just been started, and we were searching for lessons wherever we could find them.
The property was in the process of being sold to an energetic young couple bent on making improvements. The house and garden had simply become too much for its owner, now old and frail, and he had decided to retreat into an assisted-living facility. So everywhere there was the eerie feeling that this garden was about to become a ghost and fade from memory forever. A great veil of Forsythia suspensa lay across the lawn in dishevelment while fresh shingles were being nailed on. “I doubt they’ll put it back. It always was a bother. Birds’ nests, rats, and bats, you know.” We could only marvel at a shrub that had been patiently and laboriously trained up two stories of an antique house front for over forty years and now was doomed for its “bother.” A splendid specimen of climbing hydrangea (H. anomala subsp. petiolaris ) had reached the top of a stately beech and then layered its blooming stems outward, a many-tiered pagoda. It was also to be removed, because some consulting arborist had told the young couple it was damaging the beech. “How old is it?” one of us asked. “Oh, thirty years, I guess.” Our hearts sank a bit. We were barely that old ourselves.
When you enter our garden today, there is a large sugar maple just at the point where the path enters the front lawn. The tree was here when we came and so it must now be well over a century old. In the second year of the garden’s life, we planted a climbing hydrangea at its base, remembering the one we had seen at Prides Crossing and hoping someday our plant might inherit a shadow of its beauty. Now, visitors invariably ask,
“How old is that?” and their faces sag a little when we say, “More than thirty years.” Nobody ever guesses at the years ahead, until they have already passed.
We can, however, offer some comforts to young gardeners—or to gardeners of any age who are just starting a garden—and they are not comforts that were extended to us when we first began. The chief of them is that a major part of the pleasure of gardening is in the act of gardening itself. It’s no good to say, “I will never see this tree or shrub or vine in its mature beauty.” For simply to plant that tree or shrub or vine and see it gradually take hold, getting larger each year, finally surprising you by its size, even though you knew it first as a tiny thing in a black plastic nursery pot, this is where the real pleasure of gardening lies. Katherine White and Vita Sackville-West both oversaw the planting of large numbers of daffodils in their gardens in autumn, when they both knew they were dying. E. B. White remembered his wife, sitting in damp Ferragamo shoes on a lawn chair, pointing out locations. And Sackville-West wrote to Harold Nicolson the autumn before she died, saying she knew they had a policy of both agreeing on things, but in the case of these bulbs, she just couldn’t help herself.
And when we had the pleasure of touring Kerdalo, Prince Peter Wolkonsky’s magnificent garden in Brittany, he—then ninety-three years old—gestured expansively at a whole hilltop planted with various yellow magnolias, none taller than three feet. “Isn’t this going to be magnificent!” We hope we can claim that sort of courage for ourselves.
Many of the effects that are most impressive in a garden have probably been that way for some time. Though a gardener tells you that the yew hedge you admire is forty years old, it has probably been a successful part of the garden for at least thirty. The yew hedges in Christopher Lloyd’s garden in England, Great Dixter, are at least a century old, having been planted by his father, Nathaniel Lloyd, before Christo was born. But the job they do, of segmenting the garden into so many wonderful and surprising experiences, is one they have been doing for at least ninety years. Our own yew hedge, which divides the perennial garden from the back lawn, was set out as two-foot-tall bushes twenty-eight years ago, our first mark on raw dirt that organized all the rest. Simply to make that mark was a satisfaction, and greater satisfaction came when the bushes had grown together and formed a real hedge. And when that hedge got to the point that one couldn’t quite see over it, which was about five years after its planting, it had done the job it was planted to do.
When we remember the planting of so many things in the early years of the garden, we are led to a hard truth. You may extravagantly admire a mature garden, even your own, and love the specimens in it for the feeling of settled age they convey. But, though few tourists may be attracted, it is the expanding garden that offers the most satisfaction. To clear out an area of brambles or congested saplings, to seed down a new path or lay the stones for it, to have plenty of space to arrange plants just acquired for the garden but coveted elsewhere, to see them catch and thrive and increase . . . all these joys of gardening seem to us in many ways much more intense than the pleasures of strolling paths overshaded by rhododendrons, stewartias, or magnolias. And those gardeners who do visit a raw young garden can share in the gardener’s hopes and enthusiasms, just as we did in Prince Wolkonsky’s infant magnolia orchard, though below it lay the assured beauty of over sixty years of cultivation.
We don’t mean to minimize the pleasures of the mature garden, for if we were prone to do so, we’d obviously move on. Blankets of myrtle and drifts of hostas are wonderful in themselves and also free us from so much of the tedious weeding we used to have to do. Bulbs are everywhere, an abundance of bulbs being one of the great joys of a mature garden. We congratulate ourselves often and rather smugly on the multiplication of costly plants, even though we well know that gardening is the least thrifty of all the domestic arts. But still, when the colchicum are in bloom, perhaps five thousand bulbs in one long sweep against the conifer border, we cannot help but remember the original twenty-five, inordinately expensive (for a bulb), with which we started, patiently dividing and redividing thereafter. The initial price of the Kentucky lady’s slipper orchid, Cypripedium kentuckiense, almost knocked the breath out of us, though we knew we were going to have it, no matter what. Now, one pip has become two clumps of twenty-five each, and when its curious brown and yellow pouched blossoms open over pleated two-foot-tall leaves, we stand over it and calculate our wealth. After all, people who own real estate, or stocks and bonds, or troves of gold coins, do the same. Why shouldn’t gardeners?
We also enjoy the pleasure of harvesting, which comes when we open a bit of bare ground and need to fill it up with a good plant, and have one—an epimedium or hosta or fern—that we can split and reestablish. When shrubs have become congested and some specimen requires a new location, it is pleasant to wander through the garden, always looking for the place it can be shifted to greater effect. Mostly, however, we love to share with other gardening friends who come for lunch. We always admonish them to bring cardboard boxes. Then, a walk through the garden becomes a vital sharing. “Take some of this. It is wonderful.” Gardeners with new gardens cannot afford to do that. But it was said of Ellen Willmott’s garden, Warley, now vanished except for a mile of self-seeded Crocus tommasinianus along the highway, that “the very weed buckets were full of treasures.” We would rather put ours in the cardboard boxes brought by visitors. And we can.
But really, many of the joys of an old garden lie in the re-making of it. For when you have reached either the boundaries of your plot, or more probably the limit of your own capacities to maintain what you have, you have to go backward. That is, you have to look with a critical eye at the borders you have already developed that have given you pleasure for years and ask whether they still pass muster. In evaluating the health and beauty of the mature garden, shade is the creeping menace, for it is true, as someone has said, that “as gardeners grow older, their gardens grow shadier.” A shade garden can be a beautiful thing. But damp Stygian gloom under a spreading magnolia isn’t ever attractive. In any garden, space also shrinks as specimens mature, resulting in the loss of just that much in which you might grow something else. After all, who ever starts a garden hoping to end up with only trees and mulch?
Mastering the art of elimination may be the hardest part of gardening. But it is necessary. And really, when that aging unattractive specimen is cut down, however rare it is, the light floods in and many new possibilities occur. One goes back again to the catalogs or looks about the garden for good plants to divide, and a certain vigor returns, both to garden and gardener. In the sense of Wordsworth’s lines in “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” (“O joy! that in our embers / Is something that doth live, / That nature yet remembers / What was so fugitive!”), it isn’t a bad trade-off for the pleasures of making a new garden. Besides, eventually it is what we are given and have to garden with.
In the end, you cannot separate a mature garden from mortality, for on even the most casual stroll through it you are reminded of your own, in a tree grown to maturity or even a patch of snowdrops multiplied from one bulb into a hundred. One can learn to accept the fact that one’s own demise and the demise of one’s garden may be approximately simultaneous. Actually, that is our greatest hope, for it won’t be at all pleasant to see the garden go before we are ready to. But great gardeners we have known have told us that you can get used even to that idea. We are working on it.
VEGETABLE GARDENS
WE ARE ALWAYS SURPRISED when we visit a garden that does not have some section set aside for vegetables and fruits. If the owner is someone we know well enough, we are apt to be a little challenging on the subject, even maybe a little aggressive. Almost always we get the same excuse, offered with the assumption that it is completely convincing. “Why would I go to all that trouble, when I can buy anything I want at the supermarket?” (Or co-op, or weekend farmers’ market, or local farm stand.)
Well, can you? Do you find puntare
lle there in early autumn, for example, the stems of which you can slit and soak in ice water until they curl, and then dress with olive oil, garlic, balsamic vinegar, and lots of mashed anchovies? Will there be bunches of barba di frate, the famous salicorne of medieval cookery (so perverse because it seems to thrive only on dreadful soil), to sauté with butter and a little lemon? Can you find infant greens there, hardly out of the seed, such as you might serve as a salad topped with a perfect poached egg? Or golden celery, the smell of which is the perfect celestial idea of celery? Will there perhaps be a little bundle of multicolored carrots, some white, some gold, some red, and some orange, none longer than your finger? Tomatoes? Are they vine-ripened, and do they smell of the dust and warmth of the field and that divine odor we can only call “tomatoey”? Will there be white ones and yellow ones in all sizes, big and little, pear-shaped and round, and are some yellow-and-scarlet streaked, or as green as a grape, or flat-out ugly in their folds and bumps, the best of all for taste? Are there purple Brussels sprouts in autumn, each hardly larger than a marble, black and glistening when lightly boiled and dressed with good olive oil? And near Thanksgiving, will you see pumpkins and squash in fantastic variety, pleated and warted, biscuit brown or scarlet, dull green, celadon blue, fit for Cinderella’s coach or as long as a baseball bat?