May Day – The Garden Bloom Season is Beginning

Van Sion daffodils

The bloom season is just beginning here at the End of the Road. At an elevation of 1700 feet, it takes longer to arrive than in the valley. Even now bloom is slow as the night temperatures remain in the 30s and we have had no rain. This bloom season I am going to try and keep a running record of bloom on the first of the month as well as the  fifteenth of the month Bloom Day, and take good illustrative photos of the plants in the garden. Van Sion daffodils have been blooming for about two weeks. This is an  old fashioned and very early variety. The ‘wallpaper’ is of scillas that bloom down by the vegetable garden. Glory of the Snow, chionodoxa, is also blooming in the laswn. I have been surprised by these little bulbs. Not only do they multiply from the bulb, they also spread seed, in slightly more distant lawn and in the vegetable garden.

Coltsfoot

Coltfoot is growing on the Rose Bank, but also along the side of the dirt  roads, glowing in the spring sun, unhappered as yet by the large leaves that will follow as the flowers fade.

I hope I will have more to show by May 15th. To see what else is (almost) Wordless this Wednesday click here.

Z is for Zinnia and so ends the A-Z Blogger Challenge

Zinnias

Z is for Zinnias. What is there to say about Zinnias except that they are cheerful, come in a whole variety of brilliant and tender colors, an array of forms from neat to shaggy. I love them. Renee’s Garden will show you some of that variety. They are great in the garden and great in bouquets.

Zinnias in the potager

The A to Z Challenge is over! I have survived and taken you on a ride through the garden from Apple to Zinnia. I’ve had fun and hope you have too. For the final Z entries click here.

Y is for Yarrow on the A to Z Challenge

Achillea “Paprika’

Yarrow is more properly known as Achillea. Achillea ‘Paprika’ is just one of a large family of flowers that are not fussy about location or soil. They love the sun and butterflies love them

Achillea ‘The Pearl’

Achillea “The Pearl’ is a slightly unusual form of achillea – or yarrow.

Achillea ‘Terra Cotta’

Achillea ‘Terra Cotta’ grows right next to my front door.  I do want to say that I have seen the same yarrows growing in other gardens and the exact hue of the color varies – which just shows the difference that our soil makes. One of those garden mysteries.

While we were living in Beijing I learned about the I Ching, a system of divination that sometimes makes use of 40 yarrow sticks, which means I could  harvest my yarrow at the end of the year and cut the stems to the same length and tell my own future. While I had enough time in Beijing to learn about the I Ching, I never learned how to cast the yarrow sticks. That would take more years.

To see what else begins with Y click here.

John Sendelbach

John Sendelbach outside his studio gallery

John Sendelbach is a man of many parts. Most recently some people have come to know him as the winner of the commission to create “Brookie” a graceful ten foot silver sculpture of a brook trout. It will be made of cutlery, reminding us of our industrial history, as well as the natural beauties of the river. This sculpture will be placed at the entry to Greenfield on Deerfield Street later this year.

Some know Sendelbach because of the stone fountain on the Bridge of Flowers, This beautiful work was the result of an amazing collaboration between Paul Forth, stone mason, and Julie Petty, then co-chair of the Bridge of Flowers committee, and himself.

Still others know him because of the stone walls and pergolas he designed and built in their private gardens, and others for the elegant metal wall sculptures that hang on their walls.

It is clear to me that all these parts reflect his sense of design and beauty in the home as well as in the landscape. But his training began when he attended Cornell University and majored in floriculture and ornamental horticulture.

He then came to the University of Massachusetts and worked toward a landscape architecture and regional planning degree. There he met Chris Baxter and the two formed Whirlwind Fine Garden Design, designing and building residential landscapes.

That business still exists, but after a visit to the Paradise City Arts Festival Sendelbach said his world changed. “I had never seen anything like that. The art world was off my radar. I saw beautiful metal and stone objects. While I had dabbled art, something suddenly clicked. I thought I could make art to sell.”

It is art he has been making ever since. “Because I was a landscape person, that is where I went with my art. I had already been building garden structures like pergolas and working with wood and stone, but since garden art has to be durable I focused on metal and stone,” he said.

John Sendelbach’s studi0

The Metal Stone Arts Gallery  in Shelburne Falls is where Sendlebach does some of his work turning old bicycle rims and washing machine drums into art. Visitors to the gallery sometimes place a special commission, and sometimes they ask for a bit of metal repair. Sendelbach can do it all.

The natural world certainly influences his art. The large stylized stone salamander and newt sculptures he created in Amherst parks make use of the spiral. He said “I think the spiral is a compelling form. People walk it, like a labyrinth. It’s a good way of getting people to engage with the art.”

When I look at some of the humorous sculptures around Sendelbach’s gallery I realize how very timid I have been about employing art in my own garden.  At the same time I recognize the truth of Sendelbach’s statement that “art is a way to bring the human element into the garden, humanity expressed through sculpture.”

He also says, “Art is a critical element in the garden. It provides a focal point for the eye, or for a stroll which may be a point of discovery as you come around a corner.”

Some of Sendelbach’s garden sculptures are functional like his unusual birdbaths, but I was taken by a little stone creature that I immediately named Joy. I could imagine coming around a corner and surprising him in his ecstatic dance, an ode to sun and flower. This little creature expresses just how I feel in the garden, rising from my knees to twirl in the sun.

Sendelbach has found his own joy in his gallery, a joy that goes beyond the satisfying work. “My experience at the shop has been a transition into the community. I’ve never had this experience before . . Art has led me to community.”

John Sendelbach’s ‘Footloose’ – or Joy

No matter how simply we begin our gardens, an element of design is always present. Will be plant a round posy patch? Will we put a row of evergreen shrubs against our house foundation? Will we underplant the trees along our property line with spring blooming perennials?  All these decisions involve questions of form, and color and function, whether we are thinking in terms of design or not.

In addition, there are elements that we usually think of as design elements while they are also functional elements. Walkways, stone walls, patios and pergolas are all design elements that can make our gardens more welcoming and hospitable.

Between the Rows  April 20, 2013

X is for Xeric – and Drought Resistant Plants

X is for Xeric. Xeric plants are those adapted to an extremely dry habitat. While the weather/climate in my area is definitely changing with periods of drought, and  heavier rains when they come. I am paying more attention to those plants that are drought tolerant, if not really xeric.

Gaillardia ‘Arizona Sun’

These Gaillardias are a wonderful perennials that have done beautifully in my garden.  After checking a list of drought resisant plants I was happy to see that I have a number already in my garden: echinops, yarrow, heliopsis, veronica, baptisia, dianthus,and perovski otherwise known as Russian Sage.

Pink Grootendorst rugosa rose

There are also a lot of drought resistant shrubs including Rugosa roses, of which I have a few, and they are tough in all weathers. Other drought resistant shrubs include the common forsythia, spirea, junipers and the wonderful fothergilla. For a larger list click here

We are all tryimg to adapt to the challenges of our weather, but adapting doesn’t mean a painful limit. We might just have to look at different plant families.

To see what else begins with x click here.

W is for Water – and Dr. Betsy

Betsy on her 50th birthday

W 1s for Water, and for Dr. Betsy our fourth child, second daughter, and Queen of Water. That actually isn’t her title, which I don’t remember, but she has been working for the Mass Water Resources  Authority for a number of years, as the scientist on the staff, although she also has administrative duties.  Why is it we parents never understand our children’s jobs anymore?

Anyway just in time for her 50th birthday celebration, she has been given a promotion and will now not only be responsible for clean water quality in Boston and environs, she will be responsible for waste water. In and out, you might say. Congratulations, Betsy.

After reading Who Really Killed Cock Robin by Jean Craighead George when she was in 6th grade she decided she would be an environmentalist. Certainly there is nothing more basic to our environmental health than clean water.  I don’t know when she really became interested in water, but when she was in the Peace Corps in Kenya (1987-1989) she was given the job of helping a mountain village get water into the village. Up to that time women had to collect and carry water from a mile away. At her birthday party her sister asked how she knew how to do things like lay a gravity feed water line and build a huge water tank. She said, “I read a book.”  Music to a librarian mother’s ears.

When she returned to the United States, she went back to Clark University where she earned her PhD in Microbiology. Her dissertation was titled  Microbiological Pretreatment of Industrial Wastewater. One of the other mothers at the graduation ceremony said Betsy’s dissertation was the only one with a title that she could understand. I understood generally, not specifically. I kept asking what she had the microbes do? She said she trained the microbes to eat the hazardous waste in the water. Do I understand how you train a microbe? No. Surely there are no whips and chairs that small.

She then served as a Congressional Fellow for Representative Edward Markey (now trying for Senator) but eventually found her way to the MWRA and I think even Sheryl Sandberg would agree she is leaning in.

All the other women in the family

Of course, Betsy is not the only skilled, talented, energetic, forward thinking woman in the family. We all gathered to help celebrate Betsy’s birthday. We drank a lot of water. Other stuff, too.

To see what else begins w ith W click here.

V is for Viola on the A to Z Challenge

Violas on the Bridge of Flowers

V is for Viola, a large family of plants that includes the johnny jump up, pictured above. Viola is also my mother’s name. I never thought it was a very pretty name until I knew that johnny jump ups, violets and pansies were also Violas. Now I see the first violas in the garden centers and in my garden as a first sign of spring. I see the happy blue blossoms and I think about a mother of three sons  looking into the blue eyes of her first daughter, born as winter approaches, and seeing spring, seeing sunny days, and joy.  Now I think Viola is a name as beautiful as the flower.

To see what else begins with V click here.

U is for Unless on the A to Z Challenge

Queen Anne’s Lace – an umbelliferous flower

U is for Unless. I was trying to find a good botanical U word, but I could locate very few. Umbel is “an inflorescence with pedicles or branches arising at the same point and of nearly equal length.” Think Queen Anne’s Lace. Ulmus is the whole family of elms, and Urtica is the stinging nettle. Stinging nettle made me think of the problems we can face when gardening. And that made me think of an alphabet book by the delightful artist David Hockney and others. The only letter of that alphabet that I can recall is the U. David Hockney’s collaboration (I don’t remember who) said U is for Unless. He said Unless is the creaking hinge of a story. And a creepy, scary hinge it is. The garden should do well this year — Unless we have a drought, the well dries up and I cannot water the garden, losing all my labor, and because all my neighbors will have dry wells too, I’ll have to drive to buy gallons of grocery story water to drink, and have to go downhill to our beaver pond to get water for flushing the toilets, and have to visit one of my children who lives where there is town water to take a shower, and have to drive 15 miles to the nearest laundromat and any tears I shed will only make the soil bad, and then the whole landscape will die, and I won’t even be able to sell and and we will become poverty stricken and what happens after that  will be just terrible —- Unless it rains and all is saved.

To see what else begins with U click here.

T is for Thoreau on the A to Z Challenge.

Henry David Thoreau’s cabin – and me 2010

T is for Thoreau, author of Walden and many many journals in which “[he omitted] the unusual - the hurricanes and earthquakes – and described  the common.”  He had always recorded the weather and the natural scene in a sporadic and fragmented way, but in July of 1852 he declared a year of observation, a ‘year’ that lasted through 1861.  Amidst the the poetry of his prose, and his record of his own responses to the world, he began a careful record of the passing seasons, noting temperatures, leaf break, frost, and blooming seasons of many plants.

I love Walden and reread it from time to time, but I have not read much in the journals. It was with some surprise that I read in yesterday’s New York Times Book Review an essay by Andrea Wulf about the use that modern science is making of the journals. “Richard Primack, a professor of biology at Bsoton University, has collaborated with colleagues at Harvard to use the observations in Thoreau’s journals as the basis for groundbreaking studies in climate change,” she wrote.

Walden Pond

What the scientists have discovered is that the average tempeature of our springs  is 48 degrees, but Thoreau recorded an average of 42 degrees during his day. Also the first flowering of 32 species of flower has moved to 11 days early. Early blooming flowers have been more affected by the change in temperatures, than later blooming flowers, but the change is undeniable.

I wrote more about Walden Pond and my visit in 2010 here.

I have written about Andrea Wulf’s brilliant and engaging books about gardens and plant and American history here in a review of The Brother Gardeners featuring America’s first botanist John Bartram and his botanical adventures, and a review of The Founding Gardeners about Washington, Jefferson, Adams and Madision here.

To see what else begins with T click here at the A to Z Challenge.

S is for Sustainability on Earth Day 2013

Tom Benjamin

S is for Sustainability this Earth Day. Yesterday I introduced Tom Benjamin who designs sustainable, low maintenace landscapes to an attentive audience at our local ‘Little e’ (not the Big Eastern Exposition in Springfield) where the theme was saving energy.  The topic was Reduce Your Lawn and Increase Your Leisure. Since I have been writing about low-mow landscapes I was interested to hear how Tom calculated the benefits.

There are many. The first benefit, according to my husband, is less of his labor. But Tom pointed out that there are 40 million acres of lawn in the US. That is an area larger than the state of New York. Most of those lawns are fertilized, dosed with herbicides and irrigated. There are financial costs to all those aspects of growing a lawn, but there is also an environmental cost. Lawns use more fertilizers than farmers, and the run off from those fertilizers wash into our water systems. In addition, lawns do not support any wildlife, insects or birds.

In addition, an hour of power lawn mowing produces more air pollution than 5 automobiles driving for an hour. And, of course, there is the  gas and oil that it takes to run a power mower.

So, the question is, if we are looking for sustainability in our domestic landscape, how can we accomplish this. First there is hardscaping, patios and walkways, but make sure some of those use permeable paving materials.  We want to keep as much rain as possible on the land where it falls.

We can plant shrubs and trees and groundcovers that are drought tolerant and will not need irrigation. More money saved.  Using native shrubs, trees and groundcovers will also support the web of life. Sustainability means supporting biodiversity. This is a big topic and  fortunately there are a number of books that can help gardeners make sustainable decisions when they begin to reduce their lawn. After the  talk The audience spent a few minutes looking at the books I had written about. Energy Wise Landscape Design: A New Approach for Your Home and Garden, by our own local Expert Sue Reed is a book that Tom uses as a text in his teaching. Beautiful N0-Mow Yard: 50 Amazing Lawn Alternatives by Evelyn J. Hadden and Lawn Gone: Low Maintenance, Sustainable, Attractive Alternaatives for your Yard by Pam Penick deliver tons of information and inspiration.  In her book The Edible Front Yard: the Mow-less, Grow More Plan for a Beautiful Bountiful Garden by Ivette Soler takes a delicious tack on reducing lawn. I also want to  mention Covering Ground: Unexpected Ideas for Landscaping with Colorful, Low Maintenace Ground Covers  by Barbara W. Ellis. All of these books will give you ideas about ways to increase the sustainability into your landscape and garden.

How much lawn do you need?

To see what else begins with S click here.