Gardens of Possibility

Marie Stella

            “We live where there is so much possibility in the landscape,” Marie Stella said to me as we stood on the deck of Beaver Lodge, her house in Ashfield, looking through the woods down to the beaver pond.  Stella has entered into most of those possibilities, using native plants, planting vegetables and fruits where a lawn might be expected, harvesting rainwater, using stone from the house site to form walls of the retention pond, and turning the oaks that had to be cut into flooring.

            All of her projects are in aid of creating a sustainable home and landscape that would use little power and other resources while protecting the environment.

            Both the house and the gardens are still works in progress because although Stella has given up her garden design studio in New York City which she has moved into her house, continuing that business, also continuing to lecture, leading garden tours and teaching.

            Her teaching has many facets from working with graduate students from the Landscape Institute at Boston Architectural College, and more informally to opening her LEED Platinum house (the only residence with that high environmental certification in western Massachusetts) to the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association (NESEA) tour of Green Buildings today, October 3^rd from 10am to 4 pm. Logon to NESEA.org for full directions to Stella’s house and many other green buildings in our area. There is no registration or fee. Just show up at the houses you are interested in.

            Through her own Beaver Lodge Environmental Center she is also offering a five weekend workshop on Permaculture Design with Eric Toensmeier, author of Perennial Vegetables: From Artichoke to Zuiko Taro, that will focus on the principles of permaculture, building healthy soils, edible landscaping, water management and much more. Weekends are spaced throughout the year; participants can join during any month.

            I expressed my own wonder at the scope of the domestic projects while maintaining a full professional work schedule, but Stella said, “I love to wake up to this challenge every day. I find it so exciting, but at the same time feel incredible tranquility in this beautiful place.”

Soil Building

            Stella walked me through the raised bed gardens on the south side of the house. She explained that these beds are filled with handmade soil. During the year that the house was being built she took the discarded sheet rock which is mostly gypsum, and laid it where she planned garden beds. She covered this with leaves and weeds, any greenery that needed to be cut, and rotted hay. After that first year she used rot resistant catalpa beams to form the raised beds, and continued filling those beds. It was a form of sheet composting.

            She added some finished compost from her old house, worm castings from her worm bin and planted winter rye as a cover crop last year.

Winter rye cover crop

This spring she turned the winter rye over with a garden fork and planted a full range of vegetables from peas to peppers without doing much cultivating. Everything did well, but the new soil layer is still quite thin so the soil building goes on. Where she has finished the harvest she has planted winter rye as she did last fall. It may look like grass now, but in the spring she will turn it over again. The green shoots and the roots decompose adding organic matter and nutrients to the soil.

Cover crops not only improve and enrich the soil they help keep down the weed population.

The wide paths between the raised beds, and indeed the whole area around the house, have been covered with wood chips.  There is no unsustainable lawn.

This sunny vegetable garden, with perennial crops like raspberries, red and black, blueberries, rhubarb, cardoons and purple asparagus off to one side, is a constant invitation to come out and be in the garden.

Vegetable gardens need sun, but they also need a steady supply of water. Our springs and summers do not often give us that steady supply. This year’s July was the rainiest July on record, and September was the driest September in many years. Stella’s answer to this challenge is a rainwater collection system.  She calculates that rain gutters on the roof will deliver 30,000 gallons of water over the course of the year to a 550 gallon cistern and to a water retention pond.

The cistern water will be gravity fed to the garden, and a solar pump will bring water from the pond to where it is needed in the garden.

There are more plans. She has the supports ready for a grape arbor. A playhouse, built in the same green manner as the house, will soon be ready for visiting youngsters. She’ll need a garage and thinks it could have a sod and wildflower roof.  Maybe a strawbale shed.

“I like there never being an end to the possibilities,” Stella said.  She knows that not all these ideas will appeal to everyone, but she is pleased that her house and landscape contain dozens of lessons for her students, as well as for those friends and visitors who come by.  “People will see what is possible and make their own choices about what they can, and want to do.”

For information about the Permaculture Design course email Marie Stella at kirinfarminc@aol.com.  If you want to visit the house today, Oct. 3, logon to www.NESEA.org website for full directions to the Beaver Lodge. 

 Between the Rows    October 3, 2009

Tours of Delight

These tours are over, but even these brief garden descriptions may be useful to others.

When I visited Mary Manilla’s garden in Hawley this week it was a ribbon of green along the stream that borders the garden. By the time the Hawley Garden and Artisans Tour takes place on Saturday, July 11, there will be a river of color along the stream as the hundreds and hundreds of daylilies in every hue come into bloom.

It is always fascinating to me to visit other garden’s and see the challenges they have conquered, like the impossibly steep slope that Manilla has invisibly terraced and filled with irises, roses, honeysuckle and I’ve lost track of what else. She explained that she wore special boots that helped her keep her footing on the slope. There are now books about arty vertical gardens, but she was way ahead of the curve.

The slope, and other areas of the garden are edged with stone walls that Manilla built, using stones that are so abundant on her site. I should no longer be surprised at the number of women who build stone walls, especially knowing as I do that wall building demands vision, endurance, enthusiasm and skill, not only strength.

Our gardens also hold our stories, and the stories of those who directly or indirectly made our gardens what they are. Manilla showed off the huge rhododendrons that grow by her balcony deck and explained that their parents came from the famous Kyoto temple gardens.

When she and her husband Jim were just starting to garden 30 years ago they saw an ad in The New Yorker Magazine promising plants for the connoisseur. They were not really connoisseurs at that point, but they found the nursery owner had been an Army officer in Kyoto after WWII. He made friends with the monks, and they gave him plants when he returned to the U.S. Later, when the temple’s rhodendrons died of a blight he was able to return plants to them to reestablish.

Manilla said she has always been fond of the Japanese aesthetic and that is apparent, not only in the planting of rhodies on a bank, as the Japanese recommend, but in the gentle curves of the beds, and the sculptural form of some of the trees.

This extensive garden was not built all at once. Trees were taken down one by one, and burned for firewood. Now there is an expansive lawn. When Jim became ill, the garden took another turn so that he could see what was going on from the deck.

For more information and tickets to the Hawley tour which includes vegetable and perennial gardens, an orchard with wind power as well as a quilt show, photographs, paintings and sculpture, call Cyndie Stetson 339-4231 or Margaret Eggert 339-4441. Tickets are also available the day of the tour at the Stetson’s Mountainside Farm at 108 W. Hawley Road. Proceeds benefit the Sons and Daughters of Hawley.

While the Manilla country garden is expansive, Ted Watt’s garden, featured on the Greenfield Garden Club Tour, also on July 11, packs a wallop of productivity, beauty and education on a mere third of an acre.

When he moved into his house in November five years ago he brought a number of shrubs, and a plan, with him. He immediately put the dormant shrubs into the ground, in an apparently random way. His neighbors have since commented that they had no idea what he could be doing, but now that the missing elements are firmly in place they can see the beautiful design Watt was holding in his mind all along.

Watt’s house is set on a typical flat suburban lot, with a little bit of space in front, two side yards and a back yard that is almost completely filled by a large vegetable garden, berry bushes, ‘enough rhubarb to feed all of Greenfield’, two peach trees and a ‘migrating’ compost pile. “I make deposits at one end, and remove compost from the other, so it sort of moves along. His composting technique is, “throw it in a pile and wait.” A man after my own heart.

His garden is divided seasonally, an idea he took from a Gertrude Jekyll exhibit he saw years ago. Jekyll was one of England’s most famous garden designers in the early 20^th century, but many of her ideas continue to inspire.

Watt’s spring garden is in front of the house, with a summer garden to the east. He has a large collection of fragrant peonies that had gone by when I visited, but I can imagine them perfuming the whole neighborhood.

The summer garden has fascinating plants like ‘rattlesnake master’ a tall eryngium that is native to the west, and an unusual rudbekia with large roundly oval leaves. “It’s a native as well, but I don’t really specialize in natives,” he said.

He has a blue and yellow combination that run through the gardens, small delphiniums with a yellow achillea, and Nikki purple-blue phlox blooming with yellow Happy Returns daylilies in the summer garden.

Salvia azurea blooms in the fall garden with a late blooming daylily. Blue is not an easy color to come by in the fall, but he also has a late blue monkshood that blooms until frost.

There are plants not often seen, the multistem shrub Ninebark in both its burgundy and golden forms, a golden cotinus, Carolina allspice, the ornamental cherry Hally Jolivette, and a voodoo lily.

The seasonal garden idea is a way to always have things in bloom together without the level of planning that requires so much experience and expertise needed to have continuous bloom in a single bed.

The Greenfield Garden Club tour features eight gardens in town as well as a Daylily Festival at Glenbrook Gardens. For further information or tickets call Debran Brocklesby 413-648-5227.

Though these two gardens and gardeners are very different, what they have in common is the delight they take in their gardens, delight they are willing to share.

July 4, 2009

The Oakes Garden of Sun and Shade

One of the sunny borders

Pam Oakes assures me that neither her house, nor the lush surrounding gardens existed in 1976. When she and her husband Gordon first walked this piece of land by a pond once used for harvesting ice, they could not even imagine where to place a house until a friend bulldozed a stand of sumac and said “Build here!”  They did and she said it is a perfect site.

            The gardens grew and continue to grow. Oakes said she never had an overarching and unchanging vision. “Lots of little visions,” she said with a smile.

            Those little visions have been spurred by changes in the landscape, some intentionally as when they decided to take down 6 pine trees, and sometimes of necessity as when a large maple died, came down and opened a section of garden to sun that it had never known.  She assured me, “If you don’t like change, don’t garden. Nature is about big changes.”

            Although there is a great deal of variety in Oakes’ garden, the lesson I took away from my visit is the power of masses of a single plant. This garden has been growing, maturing – and changing – for decades, but creating a flowery mass can begin by planting at least three or more of the same  perennial together because they quickly become a single mass.

In this garden paradoxically consistent and contrasting plantings of lady’s mantle (alchemilla), various astilbes, heucheras, cranesbills and hostas create a peaceful inviting atmosphere. The skill Oakes has gained over years of working in her own garden, and designing for others, has made it all look easy, as if those plantings were simply inevitable.

Oakes’s gardens lead from sun to shade to sun. One gracefully curving sunny border was backed by trees and shrubs. “I love big shrubs,” she said, as we looked at a huge Kolkwitzia (Chinese beauty bush) part of a tapestry of trees and shrubs including a Japanese maple, winterberries and a katsura tree.  Using shrubs that will grow to substantial size in a relatively short time, like the kolkwitzia, is another way of achieving a mass of foliage and bloom.

Michael Dirr, who has written encyclopedic books on trees and shrubs, is Oakes’ guru. He will certainly steer people who are unfamiliar with many shrubs and their needs to plants of interest and dependability.

In front of those shrubs and trees are large plantings of peonies, baptisia (false indigo), daylilies, salvia, and other perennials. Oakes loves blue and when I visited many blue flowers were in bloom including several baptisias. There was the familiar old fashioned Baptisia australis with its clear blue blossoms and the hybrid Purple Smoke, an aptly descriptive name.

 Oakes warned me that before putting in a baptisia I should be very sure about the location. Baptisia has a long tap root and doesn’t like being moved.  That was an important warning for me because I am so apt to buy a plant impulsively, plant it any old where thinking I can always move it when the good spot it deserves occurs to me.

Oakes pointed out that, for the most part, she does not have rare or unusual plants in her garden. Most of them she gets from Bay State Perennials, which is near by and has a wide choice of good plants. “When you are designing for other people you need to choose plants that will survive and thrive,” she said.

Of course, every ‘rule’ is meant to be broken. Oakes said she had never seen an actual American ironwood tree, only read about it and seen photos, but she decided she must have one.  She called the arborist C. L. Frank in Northampton and asked him if he had such a tree. “He hesitated,” she said, “and then told me he had just acquired a 50 year old ironwood that had to be moved. It had a seven foot root ball; it was quite a job driving and moving it into place in the back yard.”  That was 20 years ago. The tree with its unique trunk and spreading canopy is now a major feature in the garden.  Oakes explained that it is rarely seen in gardens because it is so slow growing.

All the gardens including productive vegetable and herb gardens, berry patches and stone walls built by her husband Gordon, will be open to the public as part of the 21^st Annual Franklin Land Trust Garden and Farm Tour on June 27 and 28^th.  This year the tour is centered on the Deerfield to Whately area and includes charming and unique private gardens as well as farms of sometimes surprising scale. As a special feature tour tickets will also include admittance to three Historic Deerfield buildings and the PVMA’s Memorial Hall Museum.

 Tickets are $20 and good for the whole weekend. For more information about the Franklin Land Trust and the tour logon to www.franklinlandtrust.org or call 413-6259151, ext. 8.

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After seeing how Oakes has used  daylilies as specimens in her beds, I want to mention a daylily sale at Glenbook Gardens (located off Leyden Road before you get to the covered bridge) on Saturday, June 20 from 9am to 4 pm. This is an opportunity to buy field grown daylilies by name, color or bloom season. Signs will be up to direct visitors to the sale. ###    There will be another sale there on July 11. A great opportunity.

June 13, 2009

Volunteers Wanted

The garden of Pam and Gordon Oakes is just one of the gardens featured on this year’s Franklin Land Trust Farm and Garden tour held on Saturday and Sunday, June 27 and 28.  This tour is a major fundraiser for the FLT whose mission is to ‘work with landowners and communities to protect their farms, forests, and other natural resources significant to the environmental quality, economy and rural character of our region.’

This year the tour, centered in  the Deerfield-Whately area, also includes admission to three of the Historic Deerfield buildings and the PVMA Memorial Hall Museum.

There is still an opportunity to play a part in the FLT’s mission, by volunteering to help staff the garden and farm sites. There is a need for people to help with parking and to answer questions. If you are interested in volunteering, call the Franklin Land Trust office for more information.  413-625-9151 or 413-625-9152.

There is also still time to buy a Tour ticket ($20) that will be good for the whole weekend, lots of time to savor beautiful gardens, surprising farms, and history of our area.