Gardening ... in December

I was just griping on the GardenWeb New England forum, because I dropped by a local nursery yesterday and fell for a couple of hardy camellias. Now what? I asked - plant them, hold them in my inhospitable (to plants) house, or try keeping them in the old drafty garage? Well, I split the difference and planted one, a 'Pink Perfection' that was already nicely budded up.

Now don't get me wrong, I know camellias are iffy here on the Cape. I've tried them before and lost them, one at a time. Even if they survive, sudden temperature swings can blast the flower buds, too. The one I haven't planted yet, 'April Remembered' blooms later in the year, so it's probably safe. The winter-blooming varieties need to be in evergreen shade, so they don't jump the gun when the sun warms them on sunny winter days.

The new hardier varieties have turned out to be a mixed blessing for New Englanders. My sister grows them beautifully in her Long Island garden; she has some in bloom pretty much all winter. It pains me that I can't do that here, which I guess is why I keep trying.

Now, to the point of this post. At last. Having to get outside and plant that darn camellia was such a boost. While I was outside, I got back to the fall cleanup I'd done so quickly and haphazardly back in November. The weather was amazing - a bit of sun, no wind, and temperatures in the 50s.

What was left to do? I'd left a couple of ornamental (read: unplanned, inappropriately placed, volunteer) asparagus plants standing this fall, and they had collapsed in the recent snow. There's one on the east side of the house, in full sun, in what would be the foundation planting in any normal garden. The second is to the west of what's left of the lawn, next to a little cedar arch that supports a couple of clematis; this one is, I think, the older of the two - maybe 10 years now since it appeared. The conditions are approximately the same for the two specimens, with some afternoon shade, normal garden soil. So, I ask you, why was the one out front full of gorgeous red berries? It turns out, these are Asparagus officinalis is dioecious; the individuals are either male or female. Who knew? I guess they're close enough, even with the house standing between them, for pollination. Here's a more detailed description:

The asparagus inflorescence has been variously referred to as pseudohermaphrodite male and pseudohermaphrodite female (Kerner 1897*, p. 299); dioecious, rarely hermaphrodite (Knuth 1909*, p. 464); dioecious, sometimes changing to monoecious (Hexamer 1908); normally dioecious (Jones and Rosa 1928*); and dioecious (Hawthorn and Pollard 1954 *). Intergrades from strongly pistillate to strongly staminate have been observed (Jones and Robbins 1928). In their early stages, the flowers are similar, with both sets of sexual organs present. Later, however, one set usually aborts, leaving a "male" flower with an outer and inner whorl of three stamens each, or a "female" flower with a three-lobed pistil and three-locule ovary, and the other parts rudimentary (fig. 45). Both kinds of flowers have nectaries at the base of the corolla. The individual, whitish-green flowers, from one to four in each axil, are pendulous, bell-shaped, about one-quarter inch long (the male is slightly larger than the female flower) with a characteristic odor (Knuth, 1909*, p. 464). They are freely visited by honey bees and other bees (Norton 1913, Jones and Robbins 1928, Eckert 1956, Pellett 1947*, Jones and Rosa 1928*).

In cutting back one of the asparagus, I had to trim the clematis that had entwined itself around and through the giant ferny foliage. The one in the foundation bed led me into a weeding frenzy, digging out the Muhlenbergia shreberi, or nimblewill, the warm season grassy weed from hell. And that led me to see that the hellebores were starting to bud up, and many to show signs of fungal infection, so I got into stripping the leaves to minimize the chance of damage to the new growth.

All in all, a wonderful day in the garden, a rare treat in late December.

Is it Spring yet?

The January thaw came a little early this year, and I wasn't ready. Not that I couldn't find my gloves and wheelbarrow, but I wasn't ready emotionally. I haven't been cooped up in the boring house nearly long enough yet, haven't gotten so stir crazy that I felt a driving need to get up to my knees in compost. In fact, the compost pile hasn't even frozen yet, and I've been out there turning it just about every week.

It was warm enough to spend some time surveying the shrubs, finding crossed branches, water sprouts to be cut back, and sections that are overhanging some paths too much. These can cut back any time now that the plants are dormant, but I like to wait until March. There should be some nice days that month, among the cold, windy, dreadful ones, and by then I'll be desperate for some kind of garden work. Saving this chore for later will also help keep me out of trouble with my favorite on-line plant suppliers.

Just today I found a link to a great source of shade plants - it's the Naylor Creek nursery. Not a fancy site, and the catalog is in PDF, but they have 19 different Rodgersias. I'm hooked.

The Garden in Winter

This is not about Rosemary Verey, or about form made visible by the disappearance of foliage, or about subtle colors and interesting bark or berries. This is about weeds; those pernicious winter weeds that, believe it or not, are out there setting seed as I write.

OK, it's technically not winter yet; some guy in a suit says winter starts near the end of December. We've already had many nights in the 20's here on Cape Cod, though, and that makes it winter in my book. So why are there weeds out there, not just green and growing, but actually blooming, and setting seed?

I usually leave all my perennial clean-up chores until Spring; I remove the leaves of peonies as soon as I can after the first frost, to lessen the spread of fungus, and cut hosta leaves soon after they turn brown, because they tend to turn mushy and become hard to deal with in spring, but I leave everything else standing (or laying down, more likely) over the winter. This not only provides some food and shelter for birds and other animals, it increases the survival rate of many perennials. It's well documented that sub-shrubs benefit from keeping their branches through winter, but many herbaceous perennials do better with this treatment. Gaura, chrysanthemum, marginally hardy coreposis (like the lovely pink bi-color Sweet Dreams) are much more likely to survive winter if left uncut.

On a few nice days, I've been out working in the gardens, clearing out maple leaves to allow some of the still-green plants, like pigsqeak (Bergenia cordifolia), lilyturf (Liriope muscari and L. spicata) and various gingers (Asarum europaeum, A. magnificum, etc.) to show. Some of my hellebores are starting to bud up, and I like to make sure they're not being swamped in those heavy, wet leaves. The stinking hellebore, Helleborus foetidus, has its flower scapes fully developed, and will be opening soon; Christmas rose, H. niger, will follow soon after, and is especially prone to damage from damp leaves and lurking slugs, who seem to love the flower petals. The Orientals, or H. x hybridus, are so variable that there's no point talking about when they'll bloom; I've had them in flower in every month of the year, including the summer months. I don't know for sure what determines their season, but they're certainly most welcome in late winter.

One of my new beds is planted pretty sparsely, since it features Nandina domestica and Schizachyrium scoparium 'The Blues' - Little Bluestem Grass, three of each, bought from Lazy S's Farm as tiny starts. They'll need the space I've allotted them, but for the time being there's a lot of bare ground in that bed. Well, there was a lot of bare ground, or rather bare pine bark, when I left town in October. On returning, I found this new bed awash in a sea of cute little Cardamine hirsuta, a.k.a. hairy bittercress. (Photo credit: Virginia Tech Weed ID Guide).

I first spotted this dainty little charmer about a year ago, in that year's new bed, out by the street. A friend was looking over the new garden, and mentioned what a darling little hitch-hiker it was. The leaves really are a nice fresh green, finely cut in a small rosette, and it has a very cute little white flower held on a somewhat wiry stem, well above the base. Cunning, and I don't mean that in the sense of charming, rather in the "Botany of Desire" sense of clever, scheming, evil Plant Will.

Late Fall

A full day of leaf shredding has the 3-bin compost system full to overflowing. What a great feeling to have that done. Plenty more leaves will be falling, have fallen, since yesterday, but the rest will just have stay where they land, or maybe they'll blow across the street into the neighbor's yard. Or maybe the bins will settle down a bit and I'll be able to fit some more in... they seem to do that at this time of year.

I once wrote that I have the most complicated and inefficient compost area in the world. There's the 3-bin set-up, made of scrap lumber, that is intended to be filled from left to right, with the material turned to the right as it ages. Well, there's always more material waiting in the last bin when the first bin gets full, so there's a stand-by bin that I use for finishing the stuff - one of those round plastic bins that's supposed to allow you to add rough material to the top and remove finished compost from the bottom. Yeah, right, that might work in some alternate universe, but not in New England. Off to the side, there's a tumbler, for kitchen scraps. Also called a batch composter, it's the only way I know of to use food scraps and not end up feeding rodents. The tall aluminum legs can't be climbed, but even so I've had to nail hardware cloth (like fine-gauge, rigid chicken wire) over the larger openings to keep the critters out; apparently rodents are good jumpers. This unit becomes hard to turn as it gets full, so there's a holding bin for cooking batches of the stuff that's come out of the tumbler. That's one of the square plastic units, and it's wrapped all around with hardware cloth and set on thick concrete blocks to deter rodents. I can dump the tumbler into that about three times before it's full, adding a layer of dry garden waste on top of the slimy vegetable waste. Off-loading the tumbler is probably the messiest job in my garden; sometimes the olfactory sensation is less than fabulous; in other words, it stinks.

My compost system gives me more than free soil supplements. It's the only place to work when the ground is wet, and I happen to like the workout I get turning these bins full of shredded leaves and grass clippings. Of course I often put in material that should go into the trash; I'm a Yankee, though, and can't bear to toss out weeds or small branches that might eventually make good compost. So, my compost has lots of seeds and bits of viable roots in it; wherever I use it I get a fresh crop of Verbena bonariensis, lambs' ears, rudbeckia, coreopsis, and assorted salvias. Also dandelions, crab grass, and the new bane of my existence, Nimble Will. If you're not familiar with that grassy weed, just consider yourself lucky.

More on compost coming right up...

Back in the Swing

After missing most of the fall season traveling, I had a chance to start catching up today. Leaves to rake, lawn to mow (not much lawn left, luckily), and some of the spent perennials to cut back. I got most of the peony foliage into trash bags - a few of those still need to be cut back - and most of the overly aggressive Verbena bonariensis, Eupatorium purpureum (Joe Pye Weed), Antirrhinum majus (snapdragon), and Malva alcea volunteers cut down to the ground, run through the chipper, and put into the compost - where they will make great top-dressing and (no doubt) many new volunteers for next year.

Being away from my garden during part of our short growing season is no fun, but it gives me a chance to catch my breath, repair my aching back, and take stock of what I have done and what I want to do with my little in-town garden. This time, it also gave me a chance to see some great city gardens in Charleston, SC, as well as the fantastic Galapagos Islands (though only briefly!) Walking around the old section of Charleston, I was really struck by how much beauty gardeners can create on a small plot of land. I noticed that in many yards, the areas used for parking cars double as garden space. There's no blacktop in sight, the paving materials are aged and the paving looks somewhat haphazard: very different from what we see in New England.




My own driveway is stone, and it's always sprouting weeds. An informal arrangement of pavers seems like a great alternative.

Another benefit of traveling: I appreciate the relatively minor problem insects present in northern climates. This fellow came aboard our ship when we were in Panama; the grill he's clinging to is a 2 inch wire grid:



He's got to be about 6 inches long, in the grasshopper family, I think he's a Tropidacris dux, or Giant Grasshopper. Can you imagine gardening with anything this size chomping on your plants?


Anyway, great to be back in the garden after five or six weeks of work on a ship!

Design Challenge

What does your garden say about you? That's what I've been thinking about, after hearing a talk by New Egland's most famous designer, Gordon Hayward. It's much more fun to think about this, instead of bemoaning my lack of design sense. I often notice people walking by my home, looking at the front garden, and I'm trying to imagine what they're seeing. Looking at the garden myself and trying to relate it to the lush design that I've got on paper isn't working especially well for me, so this is my new approach.

There's a wide garden bed I've built along the street; it runs across most of the front of the yard, but a section still needs to be dug out and planted to complete the picture - I'm waiting for the eventual demise of a large Norway Maple, the last of 3 that dotted the front yard when we moved here about 15 years ago. This bed intersects 2 paths that lead to the house - a wide old concrete one that goes to the front door and a smaller brick one that goes to the music studio. Between the bed and the street, there's a brick pathway that delineates a gravel parking area.

In this long bed, there's a young tree, a Liquidambar styraciflua f. rotundiloba, seedless sweetgum, backed by a white-flowered Hydrangea arborescens that I've nicknamed Dolly Parton - a more descriptive moniker than its actual name, Annabelle. This section of the bed, which will be the central section once the garden is complete, has a small boxwood hedge along the street side, about 12 small Green Velvet boxwoods at about 18 inches high. They're backed by a wide-spreading Fairy rose that seems to have bloomed all summer despite the drought we suffered here on the Cape. At the southern end of this section of the bed is a Franklinea altamaha, blooming now in September with camellia-like white flowers with yellow centers.


Other large plants, in the more southerly section of the border include a Hamamelis x intermedia 'Jelena' that flowers in March, and a variegated Elderberrry, Sambucus nigra 'Madonna.'

Every square inch of space between these larger plants is filled with a riot of perennials, temperennials, and annuals: cottage pinks, campanula, perovskia, wild thyme, coral bells, Siberian iris, sedum, thrift, day lilies, and more.

What does this garden say about its gardener? I suspect, above all, that it reveals a high tolerance for chaos. It also shows that the gardener likes a challenge and is willing to try something new - maybe too often.

So, what does your garden say about you?

A Different Kind of Winter

Because it's been so mild, I'm still working in my garden, although it's almost January. So, I'm doing things that go undone in a normal year; deadheading all the hydrangeas, adding mulch to the shrub borders, removing more and more fallen leaves, cutting back Siberian Iris, weeding, and thinning this year's crop of Verbena bonariensis seedlings and other volunteers.

All this time in the garden has given me a chance to watch closely as the different varieties of hellebores came into bloom, starting with the green-flowered H. foetidus, or Stinking Hellebore, then pure white H. niger, or Christmas Rose, and the many colors of the common H. x hybridus (aka H. orientalis) or Lenten Rose - still no sign of blooms on Corsican Hellebore, H. argutifolia. I saw Winter Jasmine (Jasminum nudiflorum) forming flower buds, seemingly at the very start of cold weather, and have watched it blooming for several weeks. The heath (Erica carnea) is almost too brilliant in its shades of pink and purple, though the demure Springwood White variety tones things down a bit. While the new plants come into flower, a few die-hards are still blooming. Fairy Rose is still loaded with pink flowers, a single, low-growing campanula is still going strong. The last of the snapdragon volunteers has just finally given out, after months and months of bloom.

I'm also seeing things about certain plants that I didn't know before, mostly good, some not so good. The persistent, tough, dry leaves of Lady's Mantle (Alchemilla mollis) are an unsightly surprise. The more pleasant sights include the wonderful dark burgundy of the few remaining leaves on Oakleaf Hydrangea (H. quercifolia), the dainty early growth of Columbine (Aquilegia species) and Sedum Spectabile Autumn Joy, and the way the fallen leaves of my seedless sweetgum (Liquidambar rotundiloba) retain their wonderful glaucous burgundy color and shine for weeks.

It's been fantastic to be able to spend whole days outdoors, and I wonder if my garden will be different next year because of this added attention.

I'm sure there will be fewer volunteers and weeds to deal with next spring, and that's good. And there may be more time for the fun parts of gardening because more chores were taken care of during the winter. But I wonder if there will be plants that don't do as well because they didn't really like being cut back, or deadheaded, or raked clean of protective leaves.

And, maybe, I will be a slightly different gardener next year, because of my new appreciation of my garden in winter.