Hydrangeas for All

My White Moth hydrangea

I haven’t always liked hydrangeas. As a child living in the Bronx, I saw a number of houses on our street wirh tiny yards that held a blue hydrangea or two. In spite of the interesting color and flower heads that everyone called ‘snowballs’ I did not like them.  Who can explain dislikes? And the things a child takes against are even more mysterious.

Though I rarely saw hydrangeas in gardens as a new gardener,  over the past years they have become very popular. Decorating magazines started showing hydrangea blossoms in summerl bouquets and dried  flower arrangements. Hybridizers became very busy creating new varieties. I started paying attention.

Years ago, on a garden tour, I saw a huge oakleaf hydrangea. It was enormous, resting and spreading itself in a fence corner reminding me of a granny with a generous lap. The flowers were not snowball mopheads, but had a tall conical shape I found very attractive. The oakleaf hydrangea (Hydrangea quercifolia) has a lot of advantages. It is native to the United States and so supports the local food web for birds, butterflies and insects. It is very hardy, to zone 3, and it tolerates drier and sunnier conditions than mophead varieties. In the fall the foliage turns beautiful rich colors.

New Oakleaf hydrangea

Last summer I bought an oakleaf hydrangea from Nasami Farm Nasami Farm in Whately. It serves several purposes for me. First, it is a native shrub. Second, it will grow very large and spready so that I can mulch underneath it and eliminate some lawn. Third, I will have large conical flowers for a long season that I like much more than the mopheads. Like most white hydrangeas these flowers will become tinged with pink in the fall. There are smaller oakleaf hydrangea hybrids like Pee Wee for those who limited space. Pee Wee will only grow about four feet tall and as wide, instead of having a six foot spread.

Limelight

Having planted the oakleaf variety I thought that a hydrangea hedge would do away with more lawn  than a single shrub so I planted Limelight, a hybrid that I bought on sale. Limelight (H. paniculata) can easily get more than six feet tall and have an equal spread. Just what I need for reducing lawn. Limelight is very hardy and has chartreuse flowers from summer into fall when they will become paler and then shade to pink.  Soil pH which changes some mopheads blue or pink depending on soil acidity, has no effect on this variety with its elongated blossoms. Like the oakleaf, it is tolerant of drier conditions and should be pruned in the fall or very early spring because it blooms on new wood.

Pinky Winky

By the time I planted Limelight my plant account was empty, but I need one more hydrangea to complete my hedge. Pinky Winky is a very popular hydrangea because of its large flowers which can be as much as 16 inches tall. They are pink at the bottom but keep opening white at the top. These are large hardy shrubs like Limelight, with equal tolerance for sun and dry soil. I should emphasize that any new tree or shrub should be kept well watered during its first year while it is becoming firmly established.

If you’d like a rich red flower early in the season,  Quick Fire is for you. It blooms earlier and the flowers turn red quickly – as suggested by the name.  The flowers are airier and less dense than mopheads.

Last summer I attended my cousin’s wedding held in a friend’s garden that was planted with masses of white Annabelle hydrangeas. The bride even carried a single hydrangea for a bouquet. I found these mopheads more appealing than I had before. Annabelle has been a hardy standard for a number of years, and for those who do like mopheads, a new variety is being introduced this spring. Incrediball (H. arborscens) has creamy white flower heads that can be 12 inches across. It is similar to Annabelle which has been such a favorite, but Incrediball has sturdier stems making it less floppy. It makes a good cut flower.

The surest way to succeed with any shrub or tree, is to plant it carefully. Begin by digging a generous hole.  Hydrangeas like a rich loose soil so take this opportunity to mix in a bucketful or more of compost. Check the roots when you take the shrub out of the container and if they seem compacted at all, loosen them, by raking through with your fingers or garden cultivator. Make sure that you don’t plant too high or too deeply. You can use a yardstick across the top of the dug hole to check placement.  Water the plant and hole generously when you have replaced half the soil, and again when all the soil is replaced and firmly tamped down. Keep all new plantings well watered for the first season, even those that are drought tolerant. Many plants will need less fussing in future years if they are well and healthily established.  Mulching will help prevent the soil from drying out rapidly.

It’s easy to see why you will find many hydrangeas marketed in the familiar green Proven Winners containers at garden centers. They are hardy, dependable, and give a long season of bloom. Just what we all desire in a plant. Photos of Limelight and Pinky Winky courtesy of Proven Winners.

Between the Rows   February 13, 2010

A Winter Walk Makes a Promise

Highbush cranberry berries

There is very little color out in the snowy garden. These last scarlet berries on the highbush cranberry (a native plant)  are a dramatic exclamation.

Seedcase of the tree peony

I guess I didn’t do all the necessary dead heading last summer. This seedcase was left on a tree peony, a remnant of the last season.  But look . . .

Tree peony buds

could these be buds on that same tree peony? A promise of the new season?

Lilac buds

The lilac buds are beginning to swell and shade to green.

Rhodendron buds

The buds on the Boule de Neige rhododendron leave no doubt that spring is coming.  Only 29 more days to go.

A Retiring Garden?

Bruce and Anne Aune

“The garden just grew,” Bruce Aune said with a slight shrug as we sat in his living room and looked out across a still green lawn to a neat curving border. All the perennials had been cut back, but shrubs, evergreen and deciduous, and small trees remained, providing the bones and structure of this garden.

While it is true that the garden had changed over time as Bruce and his wife Anne moved into retirement, it had not changed in ways I expected a retirement garden would evolve. The Aunes admitted that beds were still being added to the garden, but were quick to say that those beds were filled with small trees and shrubs, and hostas, which meant less work during the main part of the growing season. “We are not buying and planting, as we did,” Anne said. “We do prune, and deadhead. And we replace things that die.”

A tour of this Montague garden begins on one side of the house and ends on the other, but requires some doubling back along enticing secondary paths to see the whole. The lawn, is sunny, but beyond the deep shrub beds woodland trees throw some shade. A huge 30 year old holly, azaleas and rhododendrons remain points of interest in this season. Bruce said they have chosen a number of PJM rhododendron varieties even though the color is not their favorite, “but we love the foliage,” which turns a deep, almost bronze shade in fall.

Winterberry

A colorful exclamation point in the border was the winterberry trees, two females in full brilliant red berry, and one leafless and berryless male.

Early on the Aunes worked with landscape designer Gordon Fletcher-Howell of Amherst who assured them that there were no shortcuts to a beautiful garden. A mantra they have come to repeat many times. Repairing the lawn was one of their first improvements to the house that was built in 1990. Two hundred and forty yards of loam were brought in to provide a level lawn surface, a proper base for seeding the lawn, and enrichment for the new beds as they were laid out. Currently there are about 400 running feet of deep beds.

Bruce and Anne are both Master Gardeners and work together in the garden, but they each have their own special interests. Bruce loves hostas. His collection includes over 100 varieties of every size, color and pattern. His biggest problem is the voles who love the roots which provide just the taste and nutrition that voles need. “I’ve touched a wilting hosta and knocked it right over. The roots were totally gone,” he said.

Hosta cage

To foil the voles Bruce now plants each hosta inside a hardware cloth cage, actually a cylinder he builds to the appropriate diameter. The cylinder is buried 7 – 8 inches deep with 2 or 3 inches remaining above the ground. The protruding section of hardware cloth is painted with black car primer to be inconspicuous. Voles will only burrow about 6 inches below ground “and their delicate little feet can’t go over the wire cage,” Anne said. Thus are the hostas preserved for another season.

Rock Garden

Anne has a love of conifers and alpine plants. One of the newer sections of the garden is the rock garden with its striking stone bench. Bruce brought mossy and lichen covered stones from the woods to the gentle slope where Anne planted a variety of conifers including a dwarf Mugo pine, Japanese white pine, a bird’s nest spruce, and chamaecyprus as well as heathers and succulents. This area with its differing needle forms and textures remains interesting even in winter.

Although, true to their name, evergreens do remain green throughout the year, Anne pointed out that they do not necessarily remain the same shade of green. Some are a brilliant yellow green in the spring and early summer, but shade to a dark bronze in the fall.

Bruce retired as a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts and Anne from teaching French at Amherst High School; both continue to learn by becoming members of the New England Hosta Society and the North American Rock Garden Society. These active societies put out newsletters, have plant sales, organize meetings, letures and tours. They have also been a way to meet those with similar interests and passions.

On tours they have seen different ways that gardeners handle their extensive collection. Bruce remembered one garden with over 2000 hostas, each labeled with full information about the plant including the date planted. He recalled another garden where each hosta was isolated as a specimen and he felt it was more like looking at an insect collection.

The Aunes have chosen instead to integrate their special plants into a graceful whole. Visitors may not be aware of the rarity or unusual nature of some of the hostas and conifers, but all recognize their beauty and feel welcomed into this landscape.

The pleasure and information the Aunes have gotten from their society memberships remind me that during gift giving seasons memberships in a specialty society make an excellent present. The cost is modest, but the return is great. Most horticultural and plant societies now have websites and joining is very easy. For more information about the New England Hosta Society (www.nehosta.org) or the North American Rock Garden Society (www.nargs.org) logon to their respective websites. There are societies for many other plants, easily found on the Internet.

Between the Rows  December 5, 2009

White for Weddings

Last weekend my cousin Jay married the beautiful Juliet in a white garden designed by Robin Kramer, the owner of the house where the wedding took place. A summer wedding could ask no more beautiful setting than a white garden such as this.

            White gardens seem to have a place all their own in garden literature.  I suppose one reason is that there are so many flowers, shrubs, vines and trees that bloom in shades of white that limiting oneself to a white palette is easy to do, while still incorporating a wide variety of plants.

            Robin Kramer looked at her difficult site with its steep slopes and dramatic huge boulders and chose to limit her white palette. At this time of the year Annabelle hydrangeas, white with a slightly greenish cast, were the stars.

            Annabelles lined the steep stone and gravel stairway that led guests from the Forecourt where the ceremony itself was held, up to a grassy walk. On one side of the walk enormous boulders loomed behind more Annabelles interspersed with white physostegia (obedient plant). The ladylike abandon of the hydrangeas and airy effect of the physostegia were held in check by the low trimmed boxwood hedges.

            On the other side of the walk was another boxwood hedge that kept guests from tumbling down the steeply terraced hill that ended at the stone piazza where guests could visit in sun or shade. The terraced hill held still more Annabelles.

            Kramer said her aim was to create hospitable spaces for people to enter and enjoy. Her skill showed in the way the piazza welcomed the 130 wedding guests, but it was not a large public space. It also allowed for intimate family gatherings of four. She said she felt strongly that “gardens are about connections”. Those connections begin with childhood memories and extend into the present, the connections shared by family and friends.

            While Annabelle stars in the summer, Kramer’s white garden begins in the spring with a mass planting of white tulips, then white alliums, followed by white peonies, and finally the hydrangeas that will be attractive into the all.  All of these perennial and long lived plants are in place on the terraced slope and need little maintenance over the season.

            While I did not get to question Kramer about her maintenance schedule we can take as given the necessity for deadheading plants when they are done blooming.  If it were my garden I would also add a top dressing of compost every autumn.

            Not all of us would want to devote our whole garden to white flowers.  Vita Sackville West, the famous British gardener and friend of Virginia Woolf, described her own white garden as essentially a large bed.  It was partially enclosed and clearly delineated.

            In a January 1950 column she wrote for The Observer she described her plan for what she described as a grey, green and white garden. She hoped for success in this experiment but said, “ One’s best ideas seldom play up in practice to one’s expectations, especially in gardening, where everything looks so well on paper and in the catalogues, but fails so lamentably in fulfilment after you have tucked your plans into the soil. Still, one hopes.”

            She goes on to describe her vision, “. . . I hope you will survey a low sea of grey clumps of foliage, pierced here and there with tall white flowers. I visualize the white trumpets of dozens of Regale lilies . .  coming up through the grey of southernwood and artemisia and cotton-lavender, with grey-and-white edging plants such as Dianthus Mrs. Sinkins and the silvery mats of Stachys Lanata, more familiar and so much nicer under its English names of Rabbits’ Ears or Saviour’s Flannel. There will be white pansies, and white peonies, and white irises with their grey leaves… at least, I hope there will be all these things.”

            When I visited this garden many years ago, I also remember a climbing white rose. Gardens rarely turn out exactly as we plan them, and always change over time.

            In her book Theme Gardens gardener and author Barbara Damrosch describes a Moon Garden. I cannot find my copy, but as I recall she suggested a crescent moon shaped bed that included a moonflower vine. This beautiful vine is similar to the morning glory in form, and in habit, except that in blooms at night.

            The plants she chose were  similar to Sackville-West’s but with the addition of annuals like cosmos and white chrysanthemums.

            I can think of many flowers that have white forms, astilbe, anemones,  veronica, phlox and shasta daisies.

            I think Damrosch was aware that white gardens, or moon shaped beds of white flowers come into their own at  dusk, as the darkness falls.  In the gloaming and by moonlight white flowers can shimmer and glow romantically in the summer night.

            None of these three women mention the ease of planning a single color garden, but for me, who has trouble working with colors, the idea of a  white garden has great appeal. The white garden might be a stepping stone to a two color garden – blue and white, or pink/red and white.  Or I can remain happy with my crazy quilt.

            Gardens of every color feed the soul, but bellies need feeding too. The Belly Bus has come and gone from the Greenfield Common, but we all still have a chance to  donate surplus produce to local food pantries and meal sites.  For a complete list of these log on to the Hunger Task Force’s website www.plantarowwmass.blogspot.com. 

August 15, 2009   Between the Rows

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.

                                           ***************

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

Monday Muse

Guan Yin Mian

Midsummer Morning

   One big white peony enough

      for a bouquet.

               by Carol Purington

My tree peony blossom is pink, but it is big enough for a bouquet.  Carol’s haiku are so evocative that I must include another on this Muse Day Monday.

End of the row

   The child’s strawberry basket

        still empty.

This haiku seems to me a perfect depiction of a child’s innocent greediness and the sweetness of summer. Thank you Carolyn Gail for hosting Muse Day.

This is not only Muse Day, it is time for my Monday Report. A sad tale. My squash and cucumber plants were killed by last night’s cold temperatures. It didn’t get down to 32 degrees but the cold and wind were too much for the seedlings. Now I’ll be planting seeds, and by hurrying the planting, I have the lost the time I thought I  would gain.  Never hurry. How many times do I have to learn this?

Scintillation

Happily there is good new news in other people’s gardens. Jerry Sternstein’s 300+ rhododendrons are just coming into bloom. He had just visited the Heritage Museum and Garden, home of the Dexter rhododendron collection out on Cape Cod, but his own collection, which includes many Dexters is stupendous. Scintillation is one of Dexter’s most famous hybrids, and as you can see from Jerry’s specimen it is worthy of its popularity.

Purple Princess

Dexter’s hybrids are known for the size of the individual blossoms that make up each flower truss.

Capistrano

Jerry collection has flowers of every color from deep reds to pale shades like this yellow Capistrano.

Jerry also has a large collection of deciduous azaleas, sometimes growing with the rhodies. Local nurseries have only a small variety of the rhododendrons that are available. Jerry has bought his from a number of mail order nurseries including Rare Find Nursery, and Greer Gardens.

Other friends in Charlemont, Ray and Esther Purinton, have been encouraging a lupine field along their long drive.

Lupines bloom in shades of pink, blue and purple. Right now, most of the Purinton’s flowers are blue.

There is a lupine field in Hawley that enjoys a local fame. Another friend said when he is out picking raspberries in July, before a thunderstorm, he can hear the lupine seeds exploding nearby. That explains how lupine fields grow and continue. Self seeding just before a rain.

Don’t forget you still have time to sign up for the Sundial drawing. Just leave a comment here or on the previous posting before Friday at midnight.  The drawing will be Saturday morning and I’ll notify the lucky winner and Teak, Wicker and More.  Good luck all.

Monday Record May 26

What a celebratory weekend.  All due honor has been paid to our veterans, and even the tree peony has joined in those solemnities. Appropropriately, she is named (in translation) The Face of the Goddess of Compassion.  This year she has nine blossoms, each about 7 inches across.

Next  to Guan Yin is another tree peony, planted at the same time, about 5 or 6 years ago (the relevant journal has gone missing) but she is smaller and  will have only three blossoms this year. Fortunatley the ice  storm damaged a sheltering viburnam, but the tree peonies were spared.   I don’t know whether my other two tree peonies, one red and one white, which are more exposed will bloom this year.

The weekend has been beautiful and we’ve gotten a lot of work done, paving in front of the Welcome Platform (not quite finished) cleaning up the damaged apple tree next to the Cottage Ornee, planting new perennials from the Greenfield Garden Club sale, phlox and columbine, in addition ot moving a yarrow and astilbe from one bed to another, and weeding the Lawn Beds, but it was all done in  the midst of the fragrance of the hedge of common lilacs, some the tradition purple, and some this wonderful single white.

Beauty of Moscow

Even though we had that one ancient white lilac three years ago I bought the Beauty of Moscow, a double white that begins with fat pink buds.  I also have a Miss Willmott white that I planted last year, but it is too small to bloom. That was a gift from Jerry Sternstein, who dug up a shoot from his MW. He has 70 lilacs!

Of course, there was lots of work in the vegetable garden. I have 6 tomatoes, two each of Cherokee Purple, Paul Robeson and Volkov. I  also planted 2 Sweet 100s in the Herb Bed, along with a yellow pear tomato. Herb seedlings were planted too, parsley and basil. I stuck a few cosmos in the Herb Bed because I had extra seedlings. Pole beans and Raven zucchini went in.

Squash seedlings went in the ground. Sunshine and Waltham Butternut.  You can see the peas are doing fine.

The Cottage is Open! All swept out and set up for tea time. This is my reading corner, but no sitting and reading time this weekend. Soon.

When you enter the Cottage you can see this deep purple Ludwig Spaeth blooming in back of the Cottage. It gets a lot of shade and is a little more spindly than I  would like but I’m hoping time will take care of that. The fragrance wafts into the Cottage.

From the north windows you can see Boule de Neige and Rangoon, white and red rhodies, along with some ajuga that runs every where and a little primrose. My friend who gave it to me later said there wasn’t really room under the rhodies for primroses. She was right.

This was a weekend!  Out in the garden, and even a fabulous Gourmet Club dinner on Saturday. 28 years of serving ourselves – and we are still hungry.