Our Life in Gardens

by Joe Eck

  We always regret this harvest but treasure the bundles of supple twigs that will later be used to stake perennials and line the rows of bush peas in the vegetable garden. Among the most vividly colored selections of S. alba we grow, S. a. var. vitellina is a brilliant, varnished yellow and called “the eggyolk willow” for that reason. Salix a. ‘Chermesina’ is yellow with a fine orange overlay, and S. a. ‘Britzensis’ is a rich, cinnabar red. Just when the witch hazels bloom, on the edge of winter and the cusp of spring, these willows are at their most beautiful. We’d regret cutting them except that it is precisely that time of year when the willows valued for flower begin to appear.

  The first to bloom here is always S. alba var. caerulea, the cricket bat willow, a twelve-foot-high shrub that grows at the edge of the bog below the rock garden. After many years, it has produced trunks thick enough to suggest that it could possibly be fashioned into plausible cricket bats, though we would still be sorry for the player who had to resort to ours. Its value here is that its tiny, silvery blue-gray buds begin opening on any mild day in January and remain attractive for almost four months until April gives us other flowers to cut for indoors.

  We have a special fondness for S. chaenomeloides, which is perhaps the largest-flowered willow we grow, or at least the largest-budded, for it is the unopened furry flower catkins that are valued. Even before they appear, each is covered with a prominent pink-purple bud scale, varnished rather like something that might be done to nails in a fancy salon. They split apart in February, to reveal catkins more than half an inch long, of a beautiful silvery white. If we were marketing this willow in an exclusive mail-order catalog, we would christen it S. chaenomeloides ‘White Kittens’, for that is the effect it suggests. It is a large shrub, ten feet across and as tall, which means that it offers plenty of cuttings for vases indoors, from February into early April.

  Of the willows we grow for flower, however, the most dramatic is not silver, or mouse gray, or white, but black. Salix gracilistyla ‘Melanostachys’ is in fact the blackest flower we know. Most black flowers are really deep purple, including the famous black hollyhock and the brilliantly named Louisiana iris, ‘Black Gamecock’. Why one should even want a black flower is a bit of a mystery, but if one does, then this willow is as close as you get. Close, at least, in the beginning of its flowering, which starts in late February when its catkins first emerge and a spangle of black is vivid against lime-green twigs. When warm weather finally arrives toward the beginning of April, each catkin becomes gilded over with gold, beautiful also in its way. Like many willows grown for flower, the black pussy willow is not a particularly graceful plant. Ours is about eight feet tall and very stiff of habit. Still, it is one of the treasures of our garden, hard to pass by without staring when it is in flower, and beautiful in a vase, particularly when combined with the tawny-brown witch hazels that bloom about the same time.

  The last of our willows to flower is a weeping form of the common goat willow, S. caprea ‘Pendula’. A whole swarm of these appear to be in commerce, usually marketed as the Kilmarnock willow from the place in Scotland where it was first found. It is a male willow, with gray catkins that quickly produce pollen-laden golden anthers in spring. For some reason, it is usually grafted on other willow stock at a height of about five feet. All of this group would creep upon the ground as abject shrubs, but if a central leader is chosen and staked upward, grafting is unnecessary, and a fountain of growth can be achieved just by training the plant. That is the way we have treated the female counterpart of the Kilmarnock willow, nicely named ‘Weeping Sally’, which is now a cascade of thick, congested growth that bears silver catkins each April. Like all willows it is easy to root. So we have also used it as a free-form espalier against a section of our stockyard fence and even as a sort of vine on one of the supports of our pergola. Its pendulous habit of growth makes it interesting anywhere and lends it to many uses.

  One does not think of willows being grown for their leaves, but several produce very beautiful foliage that is unlike any other shrub or tree one can grow in northern gardens. The finest of them all is S. alba var. sericea (sometimes argentea), the silver willow that grows as a rangy, messy tree to as much as forty feet in swamps and wetlands from Zones 4 to 8. But if it is brought into the garden, and pollarded as a multibranched specimen at about ten feet, it is distinguished at all seasons. Treated this way, it never develops a large trunk. Our oldest tree, given us by Marshall Olbrich at Western Hills Nursery over twenty years ago, has a trunk circumference of only twenty-three inches, but it branches at shoulder level into a craggy candelabra of thick limbs, each of which terminates in a fist of dense, twiggy growth. In early summer, its fine, silver leaves offer beautiful contrast to the soft pink and white antique roses that grow beneath it, and in winter, after the previous year’s growth has been cut to within two inches of its thick, knobby knuckles, it offers a picturesque effect common enough along the streets of Mediterranean cities, but rare in New England gardens. In fact, visitors to the garden mistake it for an olive tree, for the resemblance to the “olives of endless age” in Greece and Crete is strong. We have thought often of creating a mock olive grove in Vermont, and if we had the land to do it, we would. Nothing would be easier, as pencil-thick stems always root when they are stuck into moist ground in early spring.

  One other willow is treasured here for its leaves and also because it is fancifully assumed to look like something else. It is the rosemary willow, S. elaeagnos, which could as well have been called the “lamb willow,” from its Latin name and the gentle effect it has on the landscape. We have only one tree of it, given us as a cutting by Linc Foster shortly before both his death and the death of his beautiful garden, Millstream, in Falls Village, Connecticut. Ours grows in swampy ground just at the base of the rhododendron garden. It has produced a thick-trunked, slender-branched shrub to about eight feet, though it leans over the terrace there, and seems inclined to lean more, to the extent that this year we have had a Japanese tree brace fashioned, a crutch to prop it up in its old age. Willows do age quickly. We hope that someone will give us similar attention, when it is time.

  We have never counted the species and varieties in our collection of willows. There are alpines in the rock garden, none of which tops two feet. Our favorite is certainly S. lindleyana, which has no common name, but which we would call the “thyme willow” if we had the power to coin common names. It is a creeping thing—we guess not more than an inch in height—though it has coated the top of the large boulder over which it grows with many stems, mahogany red when they are bare, but covered with brick-red catkins in spring and glossy half-inch leaves in summer.

  We do not know whether our plant of S. lindleyana is a male or a female, though we do know that the difference is determined by the precise color of the catkins, which are reddish in the male, and more silvery in the female. In willows—as in kittens—it might somehow be important to get that straight. But generally, and with any willow, there are no disappointments. All of them quickly become dear to you, whatever their sexual identity.

  WISTERIA

  LIKE SO MANY THINGS in our garden, our oldest wisteria was an accident. About fifteen years ago, we were planting a garden for a new client in the Soho section of New York. It was a beautiful, quiet neighborhood then, not the circus of thronged tourists mad to purchase anything and the gaggle of shops that cater gleefully to that desire. Our client had renovated the upper two floors of a five-story building, previously some sort of small factory, and the top floor had a glorious, sun-drenched terrace. Across about half of it, a pergola had been built to provide some shady sitting space, and on that pergola we were asked to plant vines. A four-foot-deep planter ran the length of the terrace on three sides, the building wall enclosing the fourth, through which French doors gave entrance from the master bedroom. We thought the root containment the container provided would be perfect to get the most bloom out of a wisteria, which we could see—in our minds’ eyes—glorious i
n new spring sunshine, dripping with fragrant flower. A wisteria would also provide the desired shade quickly, maybe in as little as a single season, and so that is what we proposed. White, we thought, would also be more sophisticated than the usual purple or lavender.

  Our suggestion was accepted, and we located a Wisteria floribunda ‘Alba’ that had already spent some years in a nursery pot, giving it an interesting gnarled and muscular structure that we thought beautiful. Much more important, it had already begun flowering in the nursery. In fact, it was blooming when we bought it. But our new client (she never had the chance to become simply “our client”) changed her mind suddenly and wanted climbing roses instead. We thought climbing roses might be difficult in that situation, with the frequent sprays against black spot and aphids and other diseases dripping all over her pretty, chintz-cushioned white wicker furniture. We also pointed out that she had bought the wisteria—or at least we had with her deposit money—and we didn’t think the nursery would take it back, it now being after Mother’s Day and all. Still, she was adamant in her demand for roses.

  “And the wisteria?”

  “Oh, throw it away! Put it on the street. Someone will take it. I think it is ugly anyway.”

  This helped us accept the idea of planting roses, which we did. And we brought the wisteria home to Vermont. It was essentially free for the hauling, and besides, we reasoned, it had been insulted and needed someone to love it.

  Fifteen years ago, we knew a great deal less about the climate in which our garden is located than we do now. We certainly also now believe that the world has gotten warmer in just about that space of years, from causes almost too painful to consider. But at the time, we believed the books and climate maps, which assured us we were in Zone 4. So did our more experienced friends who gardened in warmer places and who seemed to need to say, “You won’t be able to grow anything but Christmas trees and some moss!” We couldn’t yet shut them up by mentioning meconopsis, the fabled Himalayan blue poppies that we grow to perfection. Those were still in our future, as were a host of other “tender” things rated to Zone 5, 6, or even 7 that now grow here. We had read that W. floribunda, though perhaps slightly hardier than its Chinese relative, W. sinensis, still tolerated winter cold only to a warm Zone5. We knew we had occasional bouts of minus 30 degrees because we had already endured a few. So perhaps when we brought it home we did not do such a kindness to this wisteria, after all.

  At that time, we were avid readers of the White Flower Farm catalog, which came then only once a year, around Christmas, and seemed to us the positive cutting edge of horticultural sophistication. It was touting its standard wisterias then (at a price), and it may be still. They were all straight of trunk and mop-headed, but with tops naked of leaves, positive fountains of spring flower. They were even recommended . . . for pots. Of course, ours, the one we bagged, was not straight of trunk, but leaned a bit to the side. But we liked its giant bonsai look, for though it stood about six feet tall, it still conveyed the sense of age and experience and hard-won grace the best bonsai possess. We even knew at the time that wisteria was a choice subject for dwarfing in Japan, for we had pored over those books too and had learned that though the structure of trees could fully develop as miniatures, the flowers and fruit would be of normal size. We saw pictures of eighteen-inch wisterias on polished wooden pedestals with flowers almost as long. So there were other and even more interesting possibilities than planting our wisteria next to a sugar maple or beech and hoping for the best.

  Early that autumn, we splurged on a clay pot, actually a heavy-walled square tank about sixteen inches across and as high. It cost a mint and weighed a ton, and the end of that autumn began one of our many close-down rituals in preparation for winter. We have no memory whatsoever of where both pot and plant—or tree, for that is what it is—were stored in the beginning. After the lower greenhouse was built, the wisteria could be lifted onto a dolly, rolled through the garden to the drive, loaded on the pickup, and driven down to spend a winter in the “shop,” then little more than a glorified attic on ground level, cement-floored and full of garden clutter. But even at the 45 degrees maintained there, it would bloom sometime in early March, encouraged by the increasing warmth of early spring days and even, perhaps, by its own internal clock. For spring is the time wisterias are supposed to bloom, and it stubbornly adhered to that belief, even when we left the doors open a bit on cold days for a proper chill.

  We’ve done better by it, since. For once it rooted in its pot, we found that it could be grasped firmly by its trunk and lifted out, and pot and tree could be moved separately into a corner of the winter garden, now left specially blank for it. As they both weigh about the same—which we calculate to be about eighty pounds—that cuts the total weight pretty much by half, and we can still manage that. The tree now drips its glorious flowers before our eyes in March, just across from the open double kitchen windows above the sink. At that time, washing up after lunch is a privilege to be fought for.

  Luxuriant leaves quickly follow, dark green, pinnate, made up of twelve to fifteen oval leaflets and arching out palm-fashion into a dense head that covers the twigs, leaving only the gray trunk exposed. We let it do what it pleases, shortening only the wayward, questing shoots of vine, until the weather settles and it is time to move it out for the summer. We keep it in luxuriant growth by timed applications of water-soluble fertilizer and almost daily watering, for there is now a great deal of tree for relatively little pot. Pruning can be a little more severe in summer, cutting back to a bud or two above last year’s flowering growth.

  When our wisteria stands in pride on the back terrace all summer long, we think it almost as beautiful as when it blooms in March. The trunk has curved more through the years and thickened to measure about three inches in diameter. Our four cats seem to find it the tree of preference as a scratching post, and though we discourage that, it always happens when our backs are turned. They seem to do it no harm, only striating the handsome gray trunk a little more.

  It is well known that wisteria flower most freely under abuse, and the literature recommends violent root pruning and frequent hacking back of top growth to encourage abundant flower. We have no choice in the root-pruning part, for every three years or so we must lift the plant out of its pot and sever about an inch of root all around the sides and two on the bottom, to be replaced with fresh Pro-mix. We find the best way is the Japanese way, picking and scraping at the root mass with a chop-stick until white hairs hang all about, and then clipping them neatly with sharp scissors. So far, we have not found a recommendation that encourages the family cat to sharpen her claws.

  But everything we have done, most of it either from necessity or by accident, seems to have worked, resulting in what we have come to consider one of the great treasures of our garden. Our wisteria tree is now a longtime occupant here, just as surely as the cats or dogs or geese, with its own needs and its own diurnal requirements.

  We cannot say how the roses have flourished in Soho or whether the furniture survived their requirements. Probably both have been replaced a dozen times or more by now. We do not know, for we were terminated just after the roses were planted and the offending wisteria rejected to its own fate. Sometimes, in gardening, the luckiest things happen.

  XANTHORRHOEA

  QUADRANGULATA

  WHEN WE TAUGHT SCHOOL YEARS AGO, a colleague gave us a large box of old gardening magazines he had found while cleaning out his grandmother’s attic. They dated from the 1930s and ‘40s, and were different from contemporary gardening magazines in almost every way. They were small in format, with few ads and fewer illustrations, all of which were of course in black and white. Their tone was spontaneous, informal, and direct, making them seem more like good garden conversation than publications. A regular feature was a contest in which readers were encouraged to send answers to a gardening question. The question we remember most vividly was “What is your oldest potted plant?”As relatively young gardeners,
we were stunned by many of the answers. One gardener still possessed her great-grandmother’s potted camellia, which several Januaries back had survived the collapse of her sunporch roof and had achieved its hundredth year. Another said she had nurtured the same cyclamen for forty years, though she had had to cut off a shoulder of its corm to fit the pot. Plenty of people seemed to have inherited octogenarian Christmas cactus, proving our already-formed conviction that they could live in boring parlors for a very long time, and of course there was the inevitable jade plant with a trunk grown to a remarkable girth. But now, many years later, the very odd thing about having been gardeners for so long ourselves is that we would have our own ready answer to that question.

  Most gardeners have pet potted plants, things they have tended for many years because of Grandmother or an impulsive purchase in the supermarket or sometimes just because some plant has hung around for so long. In our case, a chance visit to the Los Angeles County Arboretum saddled us—endowed us, we should say—with a great potted ox of a plant that we now consider one of the finest things we grow. It is Xanthorrhoea quadrangulata, bought as a wispy seedling of three or four slender, grass-like leaves twenty-seven years ago. Since we knew nothing about the plant at the time, we can’t imagine why we picked it out from the meager offerings for sale. Certainly we had no idea about its great potential beauty, its ultimate importance to our gardening life, or its very great rarity.