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I've been absent from gardenguides for a long time, three or four months. I had some personal matters to address, and my garden portfolio took an un avoidable back seat. But it was a fine summer and fall at the old distillery, so I added a few pics to my 2009 garden album. My container dahlias bloomed late but were beautiful; I received as a gift a great piece of statuary which I found the perfect spot for up by the well. My annual morning glories (a common plant but a first for me) did very well climbing up the cutting garden fence, and I just cut the last of the roses for my girlfriend.
But this week I got a chance visit from a woman who grew up in the house, and whose parents actually bought the distillery in the thirties and remodelled it into the home it is today! She is a very nice lady, an artist, and as we walked around the property she pointed out the myriad areas where flower and vegetable gardens were kept by her family. It was a very illuminating visit from a very pleasant person, and hopefully I will see more of her in the future.
I've recently been a poor neighbor in our gardening community. I hope everyone had a great summer and golden fall and of course, as ever, Spring can't come soon enough!
This has been the best Spring yet at the old Distillery. I don't know if it's been the cool weather here in northern NJ, or the early few days of warmth, or the fact that I captured my groundhog visitors early -- every plant looks beautiful and healthy. This time last year I was profoundly unhappy, but it's a whole new season.
First the Dogwoods. The blossoms looked so white that they almost seemed bleached. Especially at dusk they just about shone. My peony (which last year didn't bloom at all and contracted some sort of weird grey powder) not only bloomed wonderfully, but the foliage looks lush and glossy. Every Iris on the property is tall and gorgeous, with every random re-seed patch sending up beautiful purple flowers. The Baptisia I planted last year, which seemed so uninspired and disappointing to me, came back with a fresh burst of life, and great little purple-blue flowers. The Fern -- and I have all sorts of Ferns all over the property -- are rich and full of life; they always seem pre-historic.
The shade garden at the front of the house also made great strides. I added three Hellebores, which seem very happy, a 'Halcyon' Hosta, and some Sweet Woodruff given to me by a friend, which I hope becomes a groundcover. Anyone who doesn't have this groundcover plant in their shade garden should definitely try it. I also transplanted a Rhododendron from a sunny spot to the more shady roadside. My true Solomon's Seal also did well, and are blooming. I also have decided to turn the previous owner's vegetable garden into a cutting garden, so I did some hardscaping with really old bricks that I found around the property to make a sort of entryway, flanked on one side with Clematis (which is growing out of control) and on the other with some Morning Glory given to me by my mom.
I planted some Hardy Geraniums, which I am determined to grow and which, by the way, are very popular in Germany. I planted three Hollyhocks -- an old-fashioned plant -- outside the dining room windows on the brookside, and they've tripled in size in a month. The sweet-peas on the hillside are ready to burst, as are my Asian Lillies. But my real joy is seeing my Rose 'New Dawn' growing by leaps and bounds up the old chicken coop, and laden with blooms. The deep red rose arching over the garden bench, which was here when I bought the house, is just beggining to open its blooms. Last but not least, my container plants are doing great; I'm learning more about this curious type of planting every year. Outside the front door is a beautiful pot of annual Dahlias, along with old reliable Petunias and red Lantana. Indoors in containers I'm trying dinner-plate Dahlias for the first time, and they're already two feet tall. I've been a busy bee in the garden, weeding and edging and transplanting and watering and fertilizing and planting and pruning. I had a great Spring party the weekend before Memorial Day and everyone brought their kids, which was fun (and somewhat nerve-wracking). I posted some pics of my garden progress.
Happy gardening!
April has arrived in the desolate wastes of north Jersey, but only very reluctantly. I've added two new albums -- one to capture the tulips that I forced into bloom, and the other to record my long overdue roadside landscaping project. First the tulips.
Last year I tried forcing daffodil bulbs, and met with great and (frankly) unusual success, so this year I decided to try tulips, which I assumed (rightly or wrongly) would be more sensitive. I picked up about 30 Home Depot cheapos, the toughest, commando-style tulips I could find, and planted them in plastic containers full of rich soil. I made sure these plastic containers would match ceramic containers I already had. On Thanksgiving weekend, I took the plastic containers full of tulip bulbs, set them in my small carriage house garage (which gets even colder than outside), gave them each a good dousing of water, and let them sit all winter, watering periodically, but rarely, trying as much as possible to match actual weather conditions.
I took two of the measly things out on President's Day, and watered them immediately, which was a mistake, because water flowed right through the frozen soil and onto the dining room floor. Then each weekend thereafter I took in another two containers, and this past weekend I took in the last one. I think the ones with longer periods of dormancy performed better, although I was very happy with the earliest ones that bloomed. I would welcome any insight on the subject.
The roadside re-landscaping that I did this weekend (with great assisstance from a landscape contractor friend) was long overdue. The original yew bushes got severely damaged when the septic was re-done, and what remained of them was continually devoured by the voracious and shameless deer. The front of the house was in shambles. To spruce it up, and to add an element of privacy without simultaneously blocking a roadside view of the house, I selected twenty English boxwoods to serve as a hedge. They'll mature to about five feet high (potentially 6 inches a year), and deer tend to ignore them. At the driveway entrance, and serving as an anchor for the hedge, is a 10' colorado blue spruce, which will be continually impressive as it grows. But at the nursery my parents found the project's true gem -- three mature blue ice cypresses. I had never seen them before, but I was immediately impressed by them. I hope the photos capture the frosty blue color that they keep all year, serving as a complement to the blue spruce. I couldn't be happier with how the project turned out. Happy gardening!
I returned from my two- week trip to Germany and Italy a few weeks ago, but I'm only writing about it now because work has been absolutely indomitable.
The highlight of the trip, from the perspective of gardening, was without doubt the magnificent Boboli Gardens in Florence. Even in the dead of winter they were spectacular, offering stunning vistas both of the city of Florence itself, and of the surrounding Tuscan countryside. Structure is the order of the day at the Boboli Garden (as at many Rennaisance gardens), with rows of cypress and neatly trimmed boxwood framing almost every path and grotto. Broadly, the garden is essentially terraced, begginning at the courtyard of the Pallazzo Pitti, and then working its way, level by level, to the top of a hill. Each plateau has its own features, the first with an enormous Egyptian obelisk, complete with heiroglyphics, the next just a simple configuration of boxwood, the next a pond with an imposing statuary of Neptune at its center, hosting a fountain and demi-gods beneath him, until finally we reached the summit, the rose garden and small manor house, and could look all around -- behind us, the ancient city of Florence, before us, the villas and olive groves that indelibly mark the Tuscan landscape.
I admit I was overwhelmed. And we only saw about half of the garden, and all the while, climbing each terrace, there are enticing side paths and little alcoves just begging to be explored. I can only imagine what the garden looks like in Spring! Of course, just as we were leaving, the loudspeakers hidden strategically throughout the garden started barking out orders in Italian and English, that everyone had to exit the garden immediately, find the nearest exit immediately, the park is closing (and this at two in the afternoon of a sunshiny day). The reason? -- Venti, venti! Too windy. It's a subject for another day, but American logic goes one way and European logic the other way, and never the twain shall meet.
Germany also was beautiful and, I confess, closer to my heart. The topic is not related to gardening, so I will be brief. The brilliant writers of Grand Theft Auto IV referred to the Germans as self-righteous and officious. I think this is a harsh judgement, although not altogether untrue -- the German propensity for order is well known; "Alles in ordnung" is a favorite expression (Everything's in order). In the summer in Germany the sun shines from 7 am to 10 pm, and all that sun makes their plants absolutely glow, but German winters are truly depressing affairs, with short days of blank gray sky. Still, I'm convinced Germany is where I belong, in the countryside with a stove and a little garden and a quiet home.
I'm as happy as Ernest Borgnine at a $7.99 all-you-can-eat lunch buffet. Just this past weekend I had a little party at the old homestead, and it was about the most fun I'd had since WHAM broke up. Yeah, the deer and groundhogs ate alot of the staple plants (including my Sedum Autumn Joy and, beleive it or not, my peonies!!), but I picked up some autumn classics and some clearance annuals, and before I knew it the house was a regular garden home. I confess I neglected the gardens this summer pretty shamefully, but I was sweating bullets on outside construction all summer, and most days I just didn't have the energy. I'm just happy I got to spend time with my German cousins, no matter what shape the garden was in. This December we're going to Italy.
All my hopes rest upon my Rose New Dawn. It's healthy and happy, climbing one of the chicken coops (sans chickens). The Baptisia was awful. The Echinaceas got eaten. The heat assaulted my Iris. The deer had the bald and unmitigated audacity to eat my sweet peas! The only winners were at the end of summer, some magnificent hibiscus courtesy of my father. We'll see how they do. Right now I'm ready for fall. My Giants have a big game aginst the Steelers this Sunday; I love the Giants D-line against the Steelers O-line. In December I go on vacation for two glorious weeks in Italy and Germany (New Years in the German countryside!). I have declared Caryopteris to be my Spring mission -- hardy against animals, and blue of any shade is great in a garden.
Well, Grand Theft Auto IV came out at the end of April, so naturally the garden has been shamefully abandoned while I obssessively explore Liberty City in all its glory. The game is magnificent -- visually it's stunning, the soundtrack ranges from jazz, to new age, to classic rock, to modern global; the voice-over work is second to none, the talk radio satire is nuanced, insightful, often acerbic, and of the very highest caliber. Some of the writing is laugh-out-loud hilarious. The fictional NYC world is immense and paplable -- people mindlessly walking across a street while they yammer into their cell phone, cops throwing coffee cups out of windows, even an online world of junk mail and scams. And the game runs as smooth as silk. A tremendous achievement.
And even on auto-pilot, the garden looked great this spring. There was an early heatwave here in the northeast that blighted my peonies and decimated my iris -- but they looked good while they lasted. I'm trying to plant more hydrangea because of all the shade in the yard, but I'm meeting with mixed results. The tiger lilies on the hillside were beautiful again, but early and short-lived because of the heat. The real winners this spring were the groundhogs. I'm so happy for them! They stomped all over my previously magnificent fern just so they could get a few mouthfuls of the fiddleheads. Ooh, and they also utterly destroyed two echinaceas that I was really excited about. Those groundhogs are truly a delight. And the smell! And the flies love them! Their charms are inexhaustible.
The weather is very mild by me, in fact it's downright hot, almost like June. All the small Spring flowers are blooming; I don't know half their names and don't care -- they just pop up wherever they want. They're among my favorites, blooming cheerily, and in ways that other flowers in my garden just can't match.
Almost all my daffodils and Hyacinth survived the winter and are exulting in the early warmth. The flowering quince is ready to burst. Likewise for the Dogwoods. I don't care if every garden in NJ has a Dogwood -- I love them. When they're full of blooms they look like they're covered in snow. The pussy-willow across the brook is blooming. Just overnight, I found scattered like confetti little white blooms across the front lawn. Forsythia, of course, are also blooming. I know it's a little early, but I couldn't resist planting another foxglove by the potting shed, and also a couple of Jacob's Ladders for my very humble (right now) shade garden, and a couple of Blue Spruce Sedum by the brook. I'm also trying a few containers which I purchased cheaply over the winter, but I just don't think I have the eye for container planting. My Primrose survived a deer attack, and actually rebloomed. Everything's growing by the minute.
April is the cruellest month, breeding/ Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/ Memory and desire, stirring/ Dull roots with spring rain. Or something like that. What's the old maxim? "March is lovely, April's ugly"? I'm inclined to agree, although it is exciting to see everything returning to life. My Crocus survived my inept planting and rewarded me with about a half dozen blooms along the walk to the road. I posted a pic. I'm adding a border garden along the wall behind the carriage house -- I'm halfway done. The back edge will be a lining of really old bricks I found at the back of the house when I first moved in. I'm going to plant mostly peonies there, so that for three beautiful weeks in May it will be an ocean of peonies. I'm also going to try some Gladiolus, although I think it's a bit chilly by me for them. Other than that I'm cleaning out the other gardens, especially behind the dining room, and today I'll clean out (and expand) the far side of the brook garden. Also, my folks are bringing a Lenten Rose today, which will be the first contribution to the shade garden along the road side of the house. As a postscript, it looks like my Wisteria somehow managed to endure my bungled pruning -- hopefully it blooms.
I got my tool shed/potting shed organized this weekend, and boy did it need it! Spring is finally starting to show it's head here in the Northeast. Snowdrops are blooming sporadically around the property, daffodils are beginning to poke their heads up, and best of all, it looks like the crocus bulbs I planted last fall are starting to sprout. I have a long slate stone walk from the front of the house to the street, so I planted these crocus bulbs randomly between the stones. Hopefully the effect will be to accentuate the walkway with the sporadic blooms of the crocus rising between the stones. I'm also finding other bulbs popping up that I completely forgot I had planted -- I should have kept better records of what I did, but things are so hectic in the fall, I was lucky just to get the leaves up.
The house sits on a fairly mature landscape, and last year I did little except clean up and maintain what was already here, trying to get a sense of sun patterns, and just get a feel for what I could expect from the land. I couldn't resist planting a rose here and a lilac there, but it was done with great restraint. After a full year at the house, I can safely say that there is little which is irreplacable, and I have every intention of laying my hand on the property more firmly. My two main goals are to create a shade garden on the roadside of the house (the front of the house doesn't face the road, but that's not uncommon in older homes), and to significantly expand the brook garden and the garden outside the dining room. The order has been placed at the nursery, and Spring can't come soon enough.
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