Eric's Pet Plants
One of the copper beeches at Yale, showing the classic bronze-red color and classic full crown.
One of the great things about having Eric with us is that his pet plants are not usually the same as my pet plants, so we all get a different viewpoint (and set of growing hints). But this time around he’s making love to one of my favorite trees.
One of my favorite tree genera, actually, since I don’t think I ever met a beech I didn’t like.
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Deep red is a magnet for the eye, says Eric, and the deep red climber called Dublin Bay is also a magnet for the nose. (Those dark edges come with maturity; they're not visible on younger flowers.)
One problem with going on vacation is that you’re not there to photograph your favorite rose when it’s at its peak, but that hasn’t stopped our friend Eric from resuming his series on pet plants with a shout-out to Dublin Bay, a real landscape workhorse: long blooming, trouble free and (unlike most low-maintenance roses) delightfully fragrant.
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Our friend Eric has again turned from his many plant charges at Yale to take another run at his home vegetable garden. And I do mean run; what follows is a drive-by “do-this” list from someone who knows what he’s talking about…and was, when he sent it, just about to go on a well-deserved vacation.
According to Eric, "The broccoli and lettuce are interplanted to maximize space and the broccoli provides just enough shade for the lettuce in the long sometimes hot days in June. Note the (untreated!) rough lumber for the raised bed." Works just as well with the red cabbage in the foreground.
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When our friend Eric isn’t managing Yale’s Marsh Garden or playing music, he’s cultivating his own garden, and – at least in this one instance – ignoring his own excellent advice. Unless he’s selling the stuff on the side or donating it to a food pantry, he has succumbed to temptation and planted too much lettuce all at once, just for the sheer beauty of it.
“Note the color and texture variation in the Larson Lettuce Bed,” says Eric. “ I prefer looseleaf and buttercrunch lettuce, but also grow Cos. But I love the salad bowl with red, green and even dark purple leaves. A very vigorous variety ‘Speckles’ is not pictured, but I’ll follow up in the fall with more.”
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Maybe it’s the Northeast’s amazingly early spring, bringing out blossoms not normally seen at this time of year. Or maybe it’s the effect of the new greenhouse, bringing up thoughts of new landscaping to go with. Or maybe Eric’s just beginning to have vacation on his mind. Whatever the reason, get ready to enjoy English gardens as well as weeping pears.
Weeping Pear, Pyrus salicifolia ‘Pendula’
“Our little tree is four years old, planted at a foot tall and doing nicely,” he said about this specimen at Yale’s Marsh Gardens.
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Here in the Northeast, as you may have noticed, spring’s gentle unfolding now seems more like a violent explosion. It used to be a slow progression: forsythia and hellebores before crocus, crocus before daffodils, delicate star magnolia well ahead of the big pinks.
Now we get the whole catalog in a rush, forced by temperatures 10 and 20 degrees above (formerly) normal. Makes me crazy, among other reasons because early beauties like star magnolia can get lost in the loud shuffle. Judging by the tone of this column, our friend Eric seems to be thinking along similar lines.
There are a score or more cultivated varieties of star magnolia, differentiated mostly by bud or flower color. The straplike flower petals give the species its name; the slow growth habit and modest size make it a great plant for cottage garden or terrace.
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Okay, this may finally do it. For years I’ve been wanting to plant ‘Flying Dragon’, a contorted dwarf form of hardy orange that’s even more gorgeous than the species, and now here’s Eric giving it the pet treatment, just to remind me.
Thorny green lacework in winter, fragrant flowers in spring, aromatic fruit and golden foliage in fall. What’s not to love?
Lack of space and lack of warmth have combined to restrain me, but if I could get one going in a big pot and leave the pot outdoors year ’round…
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It must be spring – after a string of posts from the greenhouses, our friend Eric over at Yale is moving outdoors again. But he’s still in highlight-the-underdog mode. Today’s pet plant is pretty much the Rodney Dangerfield of conifers.
Granted, Pinus rigida isn’t usually much to look at, but it is singularly resilient, and perhaps fittingly, it does approach genuine beauty just where it’s needed most: at the salty, wind-scoured seaside and on rocky slopes, where it can survive in crumbs of soil too scant for anything else.
One of Eric’s young pitch pines.“This one is only 5 years old but looking good,” he says.
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Every year about this time I get thinking it would be nice to have a citrus tree in our little greenhouse – a Meyer lemon, perhaps, or a kumquat. Not so much for the fruit, of which we would get not so much, but for the long season of powerfully fragrant blossoms. A mature plant can sweeten the air for months on end
The sweet orange in blossom over at Yale’s Marsh Gardens. Flowers are only 1 to 1.5 inches across
No way of knowing if it was the perfume that inspired Eric to choose his sweet orange as a Pet Plant, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
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I think he’s getting cabin fever over there in the snows at Yale, and that fed-up-with-winteritis is turning his thoughts to approachable old friends. On the other hand, after two serious touch-me-nots ( Tree Ferns and Cholla cactus) he may simply be thinking “approachable” as in “can be handled without injury.”
Scented leafed geraniums like the plant in the center are not only safe to handle, they're downright pleasant to stroke. Brush your hand against the velvety leaves and you release a cloud of perfume. The leaves are often quite beautiful, too. And that's it. Scented leafed geraniums bloom sparsely when they bloom at all. The flowers in the picture belong to plants from different geranium categories.
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