landscape and design
Juniper in winter garb
Beautiful big snowstorm on Sunday, not predicted but not minded. Glittering blanket smoothing the world, nowhere to go but a chair by the fire and nothing to do but read and try not to eat leftover cookies – until it was time to shovel a foot of it off the driveway.
Today it’s still bliss-productively white, white white everywhere. Including in my head where after Sunday’s catalog wallow I’m looking eagerly ahead to spiffing up the white garden
A corner of the white garden (in Maine)
and that brings us to the story of my adventures with Fragrant Angel,
'Fragrant Angel'
in all respects except one an enormous improvement over good old White Swan.
White Swan
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Just a little reminder it’s not going to be winter forever.
First, though, present time. Here’s my perennial shopping list ( with source links) of good gifts for gardeners.
Membership in The Garden Conservancy is on that list without further explanation and at this point none may be needed. But just for the record: after starting small and being exceedingly Northeast-centric, the Conservancy is now saving significant gardens all over the US and offering benefits almost everywhere. Just the ticket for garden-loving friends, regardless of skill level or actual possession of garden.
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Over in Connecticut, our friend Eric at Yale’s Marsh Garden has lifted his eyes from his greenhouse’s travails and fastened them on the ginkgo trees. Herewith his overview of the ginkgo’s unique place in the plant kingdom, its fascinating history – and its worthiness in the garden.
Ginkgo biloba, a late-bloomer in the fall color department
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As we get ready to fire up for Thanksgiving, I’m reminded how lucky I am. Not many cooks have a huge wood-burning outdoor oven, but thanks to my loving ( and very handy) husband we have two, one in New York and one in Maine.
Bill built the Maine oven so the process could be filmed, so in a way I can thank The Three Thousand Mile Garden for that one. But that one never would have happened if the New York one hadn’t came first, and although Bill did of course build it the ultimate thanks there should probably go to his childhood.
There were several outdoor bread ovens in the neighborhood where he grew up, including one at his grandmother’s place. He never forgot the bread – or the fact that the ovens were home built – so when I started making wistful noises about how nice it would be to have one they fell on receptive ears.
Next thing to be thankful for: he’s a man of action. And that goes not just for building the ovens but also for providing instructions. You too can have one of these things, not without a bit of work and not instantly, needless to say, but very very inexpensively and it ain’t rocket science, either. Here’s his step by step how-to:
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This week, my friend Eric over at Yale has his mind on disappearances: the original completion date for the new greenhouse, the promise of post-construction peace and more worryingly, several rare cactuses stolen by someone who obviously knew just what they were after. But thanks to a glitch he will describe ( and fortunately for us) he also found himself thinking about bananas.
The banana at Marsh Garden
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Or, Pruning spring-blooming shrubs that grow as thickets of svelte trunks and slender stems, because although they have their differences they all behave pretty much the same way.
Forsythia in thicket mode
Flower buds form during the summer, mostly on one and two year old wood, so the standard advice is “prune right after bloom.” That way there’s maximum time for next year’s show to get itself together.
But after years of following that advice I started doing something that’s more fun and just as good or better from the pruning standpoint: making big bouquets. Read More…
The big snow in Britain is making so much news I got a little worried about my long time penpal Roger Phillips and all the nifty plantings in Eccleston Square.
No problem, quoth he:
“Yes big snow last night the largest fall since 1963!
Here are a couple of shots, the Hamamelis ‘Jelena’ was great.
Hamamelis ( witch hazel) 'Jelena'
Plus a view
Eccleston Square covered with snow
All the kids are out there making snow men.
Love Roger
Given that I’ve always wanted one and never had a place to put it, I wish he hadn’t reminded me about ‘Jalena,” a cross between Chinese and Japanese witch hazels. It not only has those spiffy winter flowers but also sports some of the most brilliant fall foliage to be found. (When you find it on the tree; autumn storms often knock it all down.)
Pictures by Roger Phillips
Years of garden observation have given me a firm belief in 4-S ( Spare the Shears, Spoil the Shrub), but I still don’t do all that much pruning. Sometimes it’s because there’s simply too much else to do (see the original Heap, a spiraea of monumental untidiness) and sometimes it’s because the pruning is Bill’s department (see Fruit Tree Pruning Time).
But sometimes it’s because I’m reluctant to mess with something gorgeous, even when its increasing gorgeousness starts causing traffic problems.
This is one of the junipers that came with the house. That angled object over on the far left is the edge of the greenhouse. Between them is – theoretically – a path that’s 3 feet wide. Between them is – actually – a gap of about 13 inches.
You can see why Bill warned me that if I didn’t get it out of the way he would lop off all offending branches in a straight line.
But here’s the thing about juniper pruning; Read More…
to catalog plant lust. Always useful to remember they have to be interesting in context.
The Black Pearl pepper is in a tall urn that’s set in the middle of a clump of Artemisia Silver King. The sedum is good old Autumn Joy.
Useful things to remember:
* Heavy leaf fall must be raked from lawns or the grass will be smothered.
* Chopped leaves make terrific winter mulch for shrubs (whole leaves can pack down and suffocate roots). They also make ideal all-purpose compost after they’ve decomposed. Leaves can be chopped with a lawnmower if you don’t have a garden chipper/shredder.
* Chopped leaves rot more quickly than whole ones but still take quite a while to compost unless mixed with a nitrogen source.
* Grass clippings are very high in nitrogen.
Thing to do:
one-shot mowing and leaf sweeping
Mow with the bagger on. Read More…
