tylerhorsley

Carpinus

2009-06-25T11:11:00.000-07:00

If ever there were a respectable, modest and seemly tree it is the Common Hornbeam, Carpinus betulus. It is composed, soigne, adaptable to city conditions and untroubled by disease, pests or outbursts of floral display. Like most things that are valued for their irreproachable decency, the hornbeam usually goes unnoticed, but Dirr judges it "one of the very finest landscape trees." Then, curiously, he says it possesses an "...air of aloofness unmatched by any plant." I'm not sure that I would describe its polish as "aloof," but once you start noticing, you fall into characterizations.

The Common Hornbeam is European. We have a nice native species that is less often seen in the city: Carpinus caroliniana. It's smooth sinewy grey bark is notable.

I was pleased to see saplings of a few other species at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Carpinus orientalis (right) is from southeast Europe and Asia Minor and might tolerate city heat better than C. betulus. The elegant long leaf of C. japonicus (center) attracted me, but Dirr, citing examples from Georgia commented that the leaves were bedraggled by late summer and "the literature has been kinder to the species that its performance warrants." C. coreana (left) has a splendid little leaf.

Of these less common forms, only C. coreana is widely available. Nurseries specializing in bonsai carry it.

Highline

2009-06-12T12:16:00.000-07:00

All praise: I had high expectations and it was better than I hoped. There’s been tons of coverage on this, so I’ll just make a few comments I haven’t heard elsewhere.
1) New York has become a city of promenades. We’ve always had the streets, then the parks that were developed along the river fronts, and now, triumphantly, The Highline. Raised to give a new and privileged view of the surroundings, winding its unforced way along the path of the old rail line, sectionally interesting, and lively with incident: it absorbs people without seeming crowded. The pedestrian development along Broadway from Times to Madison Square is similarly promising.
2) The plantings are truly interesting. Some are native (not that many) and many are unfamiliar. A shrub with little whorls of white flowers in racemes: I guessed it was Cyrilla, but when I got home and Iooked it up, it was not. Can anyone identify it? I’ve emailed for a plant list.
3) It will be interesting to see if the management lets the plants compete and sort out their own communities and successions. I dearly hope that is their approach, but I fear the public’s demand for prettiness and grooming may make that difficult. This is an experiment in the public’s acceptance of a new taste in planting. We may be moving away from the artifice of mown lawns, color coordinated bedding plants, and cultivars selected for purple leaves. Other things are possible: Watteau’s satin partygoers, for instance, made love in overgrown parks.
4) The Highline’s palimpsest promotes kind of archeological inquisitiveness. Old infrastructure is exposed. Old building juxtapose new. This is how New York is. Memories arise, of the piers, the Roxy, the old office, the old trannies, watching ice tick seaward on the Hudson…
5) It closes at 10. Some day it will be open all night, and that will be something.

6) But most of all, it comes off and all seems plausible and unforced. That is the hardest thing to do.

spring and all

2009-04-13T09:12:00.000-07:00

This is going to look a mess in a month, but now, it's heaven. These daffs, muscari and phlox are nicer in a grassy meadow than a tidy mulched bed.

English

2009-03-16T08:41:00.001-07:00

I think of April, May and June as the English season in New York gardens. In the cool sunny days early flowers like violas, pansies, ranunculus, primrose and alyssum bloom in dizzy profusion. These, combined with flowering shrubs and roses, are our opportunity to have an "English garden" that will soften the heart of a minimalist -- if he admits it or not.

So go for it. Plant window boxes with violas and alyssum. (I took this picture last month in Pacific Grove, California, where they have English weather year round.) Time is short, only a couple of months before hot weather comes. Then the cool season flowers flag and it's on to tropicals that the English envy us for.

Besides, you can't plant impatiens yet. It's pansies or nothing.

gloves

2009-03-07T13:47:00.001-08:00

Having finished a bit of yardwork on this warm, glorious day, I want to plug a product called Invisible Glove. It's an ointment of soap and glycerin that you rub on your hands and let it dry before you work. Dirt and grime then wash off easily. I originally got it for housepainting, but it's a great gardening product.

Even with Invisible Glove, you should wear work gloves too. But there are some jobs, like planting little violas from pony packs, that are easier without gloves.

I got my tube at the hardware store for $3.99. It's lasted for 2 years.

witchhazel

2009-03-05T14:42:00.000-08:00

I saw witchhazel blooming in Gramercy Square today, right on schedule, but still a surprise. It's one of the nicest things about the end of winter. The way the petals curl back around the calyx reminds me snowdrops, which are also in bloom now.
The variety they grown there is deep yellow, 'Arnolds Promise,' I think. There are several esteemed varieties, ranging from pale yellow ('Pallida') through a nice deep rusty orange ('Jelena'). All of them are nice large shrubs with good foliage and fall color.
The only fault of the witchhazels is that they tend to hold onto their dead leaves, which spoils the display of winter flowers. It's a nuisance to have to pull dead leaves from a deciduous tree.
Witchhazels are fragrant, sometimes freely so. I can't help myself from picking a flower, inspecting it closely, and keeping it in my pocket. Warmth seems to bring out the scent.
The illustration is by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the great Scottish architect and decorator.

in like a lion

2009-03-02T12:46:00.001-08:00

Yesterday I did the late winter cleanup: cut back the grasses, cut down the sedums, pruned and trained the roses. I cut the clematis down to a foot tall -- I just didn't feel like fiddling around with the brittle stems, and I don't mind if it blooms a little later.

And then I woke to a real snowstorm. Excellent. As I watched I thought how rare it is to see bright unadulterated white. In the same way that hardly anything is as purely blue as a blue sky hardly anything is as purely white as snow.

Palms

2009-02-16T13:34:00.000-08:00

I liked this planting of palms on the steps of a courthouse in Vegas. The grove was unexpected and appreciated -- the steps would have been overexposed without them. I don't think the idea would work nearly as well with another kind of tree.

Vegas

2009-02-16T13:16:00.000-08:00

I visited Las Vegas for the first time in 15 years, and it's really something. It was sometimes queesey going in this economy, but Vegas really succeeds at its own depraved game.

I was struck at the realism of the planting. Las Vegas seems ready to go to any length to realize the effects it seeks to convey; the imprudent expenditure of resources seems part of the ethos of the place. But they have conceeded to the Mojave. Everything is xeriscaped with drip irrigation systems. The exotics are saved for inside.

Everywhere I looked were responsible, interesting plantings. There was a nice pine I wasn't familiar with, the Eldarica Pine, from Afghanistan. And more palms that I remember.

Snow

2009-01-19T19:14:00.000-08:00

We've had some awfully pretty snow lately. It animates the air, and always makes me happy.

Ailanthus

2009-01-13T11:20:00.000-08:00

This little tenement garden in Chelsea is a jewel.

Those are ailanthus trees pushing up through the pavement. It’s hard to tell if they were growing in soil and someone cemented them in or if they got started in little cracks. In either case the trees are at war with the pavement. Slow, enormous pressure has buckled the earth.

And then someone whitewashed the trunks: a brilliant, touching gesture that includes the "weed" trees among the things that are seen, appreciated and cared for. And the life of the stoop goes on with garbage cans and hanging out, a place to sit, a window to lean out, a flag. Come summer there will impatiens.

Nothing here is imposed: not the plants, not the ideas, not the technique. An inspired soul reacted to what happened on 25th Street. This is what is meant by vernacular. There is inspiration for highfalutin artistic departures here, but it’s hard to imagine they would be more gratifying than the original.

Espalier

2009-01-09T05:51:00.000-08:00

I was struck by the beauty of this espaliered pear at the Cloisters.

And I thought someone could really do something with these on rooftops and terraces, where there are ugly bulkheads and mechanical installations to hide. Most fruit trees do decently in containers provided they have an irrigation system; there is plenty of sun and moving air to keep down the leaf diseases; and since roof gardens are isolated from other plants, pests are less of a problem. So it's conceivable one could grow unblemished fruit without having to spray.

Of course, the trees would need to be knowledgeably pruned lest they lose their form, but one could learn. And the more difficult initial training could be handled by the esteemed Henry Leuthardt of Long Island.

http://www.henryleuthardtnurseries.com/

I notice they list apricots, which I've never seemed espaliered.

Apartment orchid

2009-01-08T06:24:00.001-08:00

When I had 4 south facing windows and a fire escape I went nuts for orchids: I had around 50 plants. Then I had to move and found a place with a patio garden but fewer windows. My orchid frenzy had mostly run its course, so I gave most the collection away. Now I grow only a few, including this one: Oncidium x Twinkle 'White Caps'. (Onc. cheirophorum x Onc. ornithorhynchum) It blooms at Christmas with a froth of white flowers that smell of vanilla and spice when the sun shines on them.

The orchids that made the cut were varieties with a definite seasonal cycle. They go outside in May and make their growth, come in around Halloween, bloom in the dead of winter, then sit dormant till it's time to go out again. They are all small, nice looking (or at least interesting looking), tough plants. Laelia rubescens is on the verge of blooming, and I'll post her when she does.

I've also grown the Paphs and Phals that are often recommended for apartments. I've rebloomed them, swabbed rubbing alcohol on their scale infestations, stood by their gradual decline, and eventually said to hell with it.

Orchids are propogated in greenhouses, and it takes a couple of years to acclimate them to apartment living. Once they've settled in, they're easy.

Moss 2

2009-01-07T07:01:00.000-08:00

Moss also grows on the surface of potting soil that has been undisturbed for a few years. I notice it especially on potted sedums that never get fertilized. The sedum takes over in the summer, then it dies back exposing the moss during it's active winter season.

One winter Gertrude Jekyll wrote that the north side of her tree trunks were a hazy gray green and that the green of ivy and yew had receded to near black. Only the moss, she noticed, was a "positive" green.

As a tribute to Miss Jekyll I've been cultivating some moss / sedum containers. Cultivate is the wrong word because enlightened neglect is the formula. Sun in summer, no fertilizer, no supplemental water, a couple years' patience.

Moss 1

2009-01-07T06:47:00.000-08:00

You either have moss or you don't. It's hard to "grow" it, though people try. And other people who have it are often trying to get rid of it and grow lawns instead.

I've attached a photo of one of the great sights of Ainslie Street. It is an indoor-outdoor rug, sitting over a basement hatch on the north side of a house, that has been colonized by a luxurious moss.

Moss requires seasonal moisture and light. It cannot tolerate competition from other plants, foot traffic, disturbance at the roots or being covered with leaves in the winter. But virtually nothing in the way of soil nutrients is required, and it can take summer drought.

Trouble

2009-01-07T06:34:00.000-08:00

Winter rain can kill container plants. When the potting soil is frozen solid the planter's drainage hole is frozen closed, so rain saturates the soil and collects in a puddle on top. Then the puddle freezes, and the plant's crown is frozen in a block of ice. Hardy plants can take dry cold, but this is something else.

Try to tip the puddle out of the pot.

Mt Ievers Court

2009-01-06T13:27:00.000-08:00

While we're on dream houses there's Mount Ievers in Ireland. It was built in the 1730's by an architect named John Rothery of whom I know next to nothing.

Foursquare, intense and abstract, this house has fixed itself in my mind like an unforgettable dream. It looks exactly like my idea of a house, but it is as inscrutable as a mask.

In Sebald's The Rings of Saturn the narrator lodges for a few days with a family of impoverished gentry, the Ashburys, Three impractical old Irish spinsters occupy their house like refugees; they eat standing up, dry seed in paper bags hanging from clotheslines strung up around the library and work minute and intricate embroideries. I thought of Mt Ievers when I read about the Ashburys, but it took a few years for me to remember its name.

Wooton Lodge

2009-01-06T13:17:00.000-08:00

I just had to post a photo of a favorite building, Wooton Lodge in England. Built around 1600 and probably designed by Robert Smythson though no documentary evidence exists.

It was very handsomely modified around 1740. The chimneys were rebuilt at that time, the stair to the front door added and the forecourt with it's eliptical drive and corner pavilions were laid out. Very sympathetic enhancements.

I love how this building rises with such poise on a promontory that projects out into a little valley.

Key West

2009-01-06T13:09:00.000-08:00

These yuccas against a wood fence really do it for me.

I love the stiffness of the leaves. It is characteristic of yuccas from the tropics and deserts. Our native yucca flops a bit more than I like.

Green Walls

2008-11-24T13:13:00.000-08:00

What’s with the fad for plant walls? I’ve been struggling with one for months now. You can get to about ninety percent success, but the ten percent that’s dying spoils everything. After talking to experts and looking at plant walls all over town, I’ve concluded that ninety percent success is about as good as you can hope for. The bottom line is that they don’t bear close scrutiny. If you want a plant wall, just make sure it’s on the other side of the room.

The plants grow on mats of soilless medium clipped to a frame. They are watered by a drip irrigation system with emitters on eight inch centers. The installation is expensive and the ongoing maintenance really adds up. You could buy art and have fantastic cut flowers, delivered twice a week, for less.

And, honestly, I don’t get the appeal. I’m just guessing, but I think people are turned on by the displacement. A bed of pachysandra goes unnoticed on the ground, but once you start carpeting walls and ceilings with it, as they did at this Ann Demeulemeester boutique in Seoul, you are suddenly on trend. “Luxury meets Green$$$,” the headline reads. Maybe not so much as it starts dying out in patches.

I really start to lose it when buildings like this are described as “green.” Yes, there are lots of plants, but they are sustained by life support systems that needlessly consume resources. The goals of green building are simple: to diminish the human footprint on the planet by using fewer and more sustainable resources. These goals are not met by creating illusions; they are met by making a lot of modest, responsible, daily choices that add up to a kind of ethics. Inflate your tires, carpool, use more efficient light bulbs and turn them off when you leave the room. And design buildings that make those kind of choices attractive.

This is not to say that greening needs to be boring or frumpy or uninnovative. What it does need to be is effective. If the numbers don't add up, it ain't green. You can't get there by posing and making reference to attractive trends.

The fantastical "green" shown here is just BS:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/11/23/fantastic-and-visionary-d_n_145848.html

And the sooner we can decouple escapist fantasies from green thinking, the sooner we can make progress with it.

Killing Frost

2008-11-21T09:55:00.001-08:00

Tell me why I’m elated.
I pour my heart into the garden, but there’s a thrill when it’s laid waste. A chance to see things change overnight, then to start over…. I don’t know.
And it interesting to see the plants that are very tender (impatiens, coleus, cuphea, ipomoea) winnowed from the plants that can take a couple degrees of frost (abuliton, callibrachoa, lantana).

Salvia leucantha

2008-11-17T09:27:00.000-08:00

This is my favorite tender sage. Nice, fuzzy grey leaves, shaped like willow leaves, on plants that gradually gain stature as the summer goes on. Not a gorgeous plant, but presentable, which is more than you can say for most of its cousins. By October it's grown to a substantial little shrub and every twig extends an arching raceme of fuzzy purple bracts. On some plants the petals that project from the bracts are violet, on others white. The arc of the flower stems reminds me of bleeding heart, another plant I love.

This sage is hardy in California, but the plants are unwieldy after a couple years. They are best in their first fall, so it's to our advantage that we have to replant every spring.

Full sun and lean living are best. It can get sloppy with too much shade and nourishment.

tender succulents

2008-11-17T08:31:00.000-08:00

I'm making a mental note for next spring: plant sunny window boxes with tender succulents. This collection of Crassula, Echevaria, Aeoium and Sedum will stand a couple degrees of frost, but won't make it through the winter. On the other hand, it will thrive without daily watering in the summer.

To Autumn

2008-11-17T08:16:00.000-08:00

to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

High Point 3

2008-11-11T13:06:00.000-08:00

Here's another dreamboat from my trip. Once a fire station and now a beauty shop.

High Point 2

2008-11-11T12:59:00.000-08:00

I may never want to live in a house that looks like Mount Vernon, but I love the way this front lawn runs right up to the portico without any transition in the way of terracing or foundation planting.
This is incredibly hard to pull off. It works because the architecture is so good, and the relationship of the building to the ground plane is completely resolved.
Capability Brown loved this effect. I’ve also noticed it in paintings by Stubbs. Both artists are about contemporary with the original Mount Vernon, so the minimalism that looks current today is also a period look from the middle decades of the 18th century.

High Point

2008-11-11T12:54:00.000-08:00

I was recently in High Point, North Carolina and saw a house with an interesting front yard. The house was set back from the street, and a little valley ran across the yard. It was wooded, but the trees were thinned and limbed up enough to grow lawn beneath. A pattern of serpentine grass paths ran between beds of dark ivy, and patches of sun showed through the green.

Miller

2008-10-23T04:05:00.000-07:00

If you start at the Battery and walk along the Hudson, you pass through a series of terrific gardens. After the Oudolf garden at the tip of the Battery is Wagner Park, designed by Laurie Olin. A tiered lawn lies between a pavilion and the river. It’s an urban beach: unpretentious and scaled to the grandeur of the harbor view.

At either side of the pavilion are two formal flower gardens that were planted by Lynden Miller. These gardens are a good example of the current official style of public flower gardens in New York. This idiom is represented by Miller’s own work at the Conservancy Gardens in Central Park, Columbia, and the New York Botanic Garden, and it the work of others, as in Bryant Park.

http://www.publicgardendesign.com/projects/index.htm

These gardens are formal; geometric beds and sheared shrubs form compartments containing bright vignettes. Flowering shrubs and large perennials are massed at the back of the beds and a huge variety of tender annuals, bulbs, dwarf evergreens, and foliage plants are brought together to deliver maximum color through the warm months. Every corner is treated as if it were an arrangement of cut flowers, and the display is kept going for months on end.

Miller’s palette is as varied as Odoulf’s, but entirely different. Her plants are mostly tender exotics with colored leaves and vivid flowers, and her compositions rely on bold contrast. There are great things here (like Cuphea ‘David Verity’, pictured) that really thrive in New York’s summer. It’s a sophisticated gloss on the bright, old fashioned bedding flowers - petunias, marigolds, begonias.

I criticized the Oudolf garden for patchy over-assortment. His taste runs to “natural” looking meadow and prairie plants, informally composed. This creates an expectation of unified effect. Separating the plants into patches contradicts the main idea.

Miller’s plantings are even more assorted, but it doesn’t really come off as a fault. Her plants are “artificial” and the layout is formal, so different expectations prevail. The eye moves from one vivid arrangement to the next, seeking novelty, variety and diversion. It’s like walking down a city street and beholding one character after another.

All this is very much in the spirit of the tidied New York of recent years. Nice and safe, intensely maintained, ladylike.

Oudolf

2008-10-23T03:43:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, with a storm approaching, I went down to the Battery to see Piet Oudolf’s Garden of Remembrance. This kind of perennial planting, which emphasizes texture and motion rather than flower color, is spectacular in September.

The variety of plants is wonderful. This is a gardens where I’d appreciate the information gained from labeling plants more than I’d resent the eyesore of all the tags. Fortunately, the Battery Conservancy website publishes a list:

http://www.thebattery.org/gardens/gorplantlist.php

Among the standouts: Calamintha nepeta nepeta, Anemone ‘Honorine Jobert’, Agastache rupestris and A. ‘Blue Fortune’, Panicum ‘Shenandoah’, Amsonia hubrechtii, and Persicaria ‘Firetail’.

This garden hugs the shore of the battery between Castle Clinton and the water. Irregular beds are separated by gravel paths that wind through a grove of plane trees. At water’s edge, exposed to the sun and wind, is a paved promenade. Here concentric rows of raised beds and paths make a more formal edge to the garden.

The odd thing about this garden is that the planting is innovative, but the layout is old-fashioned. (I could believe that the plan is a nineteenth century relic of the ‘gardenesque’ school. The paths meander without destination and ‘specimen’ plants seem chosen to show off the breadth of the collection.)

The plane trees and gravel paths hang together as a coherent expression, but the herbaceous layer is over-assorted. Oudolf’s planting palette suggests meadows and prairies, wild places where plants mingle and mix in a continuous carpet. In this garden the varieties are separated and planted in mid-sized drifts and clumps. To me the patchwork effect is disconcertingly suburban.

That said, this still a good place to see the current thinking about perennials. But I’d like to see an edited selection of these plants, composed with greater deliberation.

Oudolf has the commission for planting much of the Highline.

Sophora

2008-09-16T12:20:00.000-07:00

may be my favorite big tree for planting in the city.

Tropical

2008-09-16T12:15:00.000-07:00

Gardeners in temperate climates have been bedding out tropical plants for a long time: coleus, caladiums, impatiens, begonias, etc. Few hardy plants offered their extended season of bloom and striking foliage. When cold weather comes, adios.
Some people are uneasy with this. I hear people express a categorical preference for hardy perennials, implying they are somehow classier. Even among permissive gardeners, there is a sense that some tropicals are suitable bedding plants and some should stay inside. But that prejudice seems to be lifting, and more and more I notice monstera, crotons, asparagus ferns, colocasias and wandering jew planted with the familiar tender annuals in our summer gardens.
In New York, with our torrid summers and reliance on container gardening, these alien plants really contribute. They are a horticultural match of the city’s human diversity.
Still there’s a time and place for everything, and I don’t think I’d work a Monstera into rose garden. For the most part they belong in containers near the house. If you have the space and winter sun, you can haul them in when the time comes.

Angelica gigas

2008-09-16T11:29:00.000-07:00

The big black Korean Angelica is a sinister curiosity. Usually you see a lone specimen towering among extreme annuals, the way castor beans were once grown.
Yesterday at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden I saw a whole colony of it. Under the shade of a big Pin Oak, its dark umbels were silhouetted against a sunlit hill of grass. Stunning and unexpected, it was the uniting element in a garden composition. Hats off to the gardeners who planted this.
I was surprise was how well these were doing under the oak, which casts almost full shade and must have competed with the angelica for water.
This plant is a biennial that I gather is a little tricky, as cultural instructions vary from source to source. I believe those at BBG have self-sown, as outlying plants were strewn around from the main clump.

Wire Vine

2008-09-10T11:38:00.000-07:00

The Wire Vine, unexpectedly, is hardy. I thought it was tropical and expected to tear out a dead crown last spring, but it was breaking growth, so I cut it back hard. Now it’s going full steam.

Wire Vine is of the genus Muehlenbeckia. I think the one I have is M. complexa. Its leaves are a rich green, and its stems are indeed wiry. Some of the little oval leaves are held out above the plant in an effervescent halo. People find this plant adorable because all its parts are so tiny and neat. They fall into the voice they use with puppies.

I’ve seen wire vine trained on topiary frames, but it doesn’t twine or cling closely. It sprawls in a miniature way and needs to be tied in. I intend to experiment with this plant. I can imagine it among paving stones, in raised containers on a terrace, or trained as bonsai. One day it might be among the workhorses of terrace gardens.

Sun, moderate water and fertilizer: no special needs. I usually see it being sold as a houseplant.

Ipomoea

2008-08-19T07:21:00.001-07:00

The rampant chartreuse vine spilling from planters all over New York is Ipomoea ‘Marguerite,’ aka the Sweet Potato Vine.

A lot of people started planting Marguerite about 10 years ago, but I can’t quite get used to her as a rank and file member of our flora. She’s a dominatrix, and her vigor has a supernatural, mutant-Kudzu quality. Still I use her in new plantings all the time because she makes a fast start and gives everyone the impression that they know what they are doing. Marguerite is a tender tropical, and fortunately she’s laid flat by the first frost.

There are a few other Ipomoeas, including black leaved ones that can be used to macabre effect. “Blackie” has a divided leaf and nice violet flowers that resemble morning glory, which is in the same genus. I’ve never noticed flowers on other Ipomoeas.

‘Carolina Bronze’ has an interesting bronze brown leaf that mixes poorly with most other plants. I’ve liked seeing it grown with Coleus ‘Trailing Red’ and the scarlet dahlia with dark leaves called ‘Bishop of Llandaff.’ It also looks good at the base of big blue-leafed agaves. Generally Carolina lends herself to sophisticated, highly edited planting schemes of foliage in muted pastels.

‘Tricolor’ is just awful. Its leaf is green mottled with white, lavender and pink.

I think we are just getting started with Ipomoea. New varieties are introduced every year, including one marketed as a more “restrained” version of Marguerite.

Feral petunias

2008-08-06T13:03:00.000-07:00

Little magenta petunias, growing from cracks in the pavement, appear all over New York in August. They are the feral offspring of hybrid petunias. The descendents aren’t as showy as their ancestors, but they have recovered the resinous honeysweet fragrance that is faint in some of the garden hybrids.

I think these wildlings can carry on like this, reseeding for years. They aren’t really a substitute for garden petunias, but in their way, they are splendid.

Four-o-clocks, nicotiana, cleomes and verbena: All are tropical annuals that seem to perpetuate themselves by seed.

Tuberose

2008-08-05T15:07:00.000-07:00

I grow tuberose for its scent on hot summer nights. The flower is white and held up on a strong stem so you don't have to stoop to sniff.

It grows from bulbs that are set out after the soil is warm. Bloom starts in July and continues through September. Unlike spring bulbs, tuberoses do not all bloom together. One bulb will bloom 60 days after planting, another 90, so there’s a long staggered season. Tuberose is tropical, flourishing in sun and heat and rich, moist soil. Put out too early in cold soil, they sulk.

Their long grassy foliage is unkempt, so I have planted them among daylilies and grasses where the leaves will be concealed. Every year I think that a 15” pot planted with a dozen bulbs would be a good idea. I have a notion that in isolation, the plant’s messiness would be less a fault, but I have yet to grow them that way.

I’ve grown both the double “Pearl” and single “Mexican White.” Both are fantastically scented, and I surprised myself when I found I preferred “Pearl” as I usually favor singles.

The bulbs can be stored inside over winter. Leave them in the ground till Thanksgiving -- they don’t usually show signs of dormancy. I lift the bulbs leaving the top growth attached, then wash the soil from the bulb and roots and just leave the dug plant outside to air dry. Their leaves reluctantly yellow and drop. When frost is expected I bring the bulbs with all their top growth attached inside and keep them in a cardboard box in an unheated room. They spend the winter like that.

Around tax day I take a look. All the foliage and dried roots can be pulled from the bulbs. Usually they have offset dozens of little bulblets that I break from the mother bulb. (These will throw up a mess of little unblooming shoots if they are left on. The bigger offsets will send up flowers.) Usually I pot up some of the bulbs and start them on a heat mat. Just as they were reluctant to go dormant, they are reluctant to resume growth. It’s usually a month or so before they break dormancy. Wait till the ground is really warm before they are planted out.

Ivy

2008-08-05T15:02:00.000-07:00

I love ivy grown up trees. English ivy is dark, evergreen and macabre. It lends an elegiac, Hubert Robert sort of melancholy to the scene. When I die, I want a grave marked with a slate headstone in a country cemetery with black locust trees clothed in ivy. Wrought iron fences, bearded iris, yuccas on a lawn that goes brown in the summer. I imagine an atmosphere of dereliction that invites reverie and mischief.

Boston ivy is another story. It is bright and glossy and shimmers in the breeze. In high summer it drapes from branches in great luxuriant swags. It turns a vibrant crimson in autumn.

Ivy does not hurt the trees. Some people get upset when they see ivy in trees, but they should realize that they grown together in nature and that a bit of ivy does no harm.

The Pegged Rose Blooms

2008-06-15T17:25:00.000-07:00

Photographed June 15, and a success.

I hoped the rose would send up flowering shoots all along the length of the pegged branches. The more vigorous shoots are towards the base of the plant. The shoots further along the stem are weaker. We’ll see if they gain momentum. It would be nice if they bloomed later and extended first flowering cycle for a couple weeks.

On the other hand, we could have pushed this rose too far.

Chinese

2008-06-09T18:33:00.000-07:00

I visited the Chinese Scholar’s Garden at the Staten Island Botanical Garden, and what a treat it was. The garden opened in 1999, and the planting is now mature.

This garden was designed and “built” (as they say of Chinese gardens) by the Landscape Architecture Corporation of China, an entity with ties to the Chinese government:

http://lac.com.cn/

Materials, workmen and expertise were all imported from China, and the results are as authentic as you could reasonably hope for. The same outfit built Astor Court at the Metropolitan Museum.

The garden was intended to be a “standing cultural ambassador” of China. I wish more countries would adopt this policy, especially France, Iran, Spain, Italy, Brazil and the Netherlands. China aced this one.

I love Chinese gardens and wish they were more influential. Westerners have been preoccupied with upturned eaves and scholars’ rocks and overlook the brilliant planning and sophisticated handling of light, space and sound. These aspects of Chinese gardens transcend chinoiserie:

1) The gardens are private, walled sanctuaries. Their relation with the world outside is minimal. Within the walls is perfected world where people live in harmony with nature. Everything within is imagined.
2)The gardens aspire to the state of landscape painting. Impressions of scenery – usually mountains and rivers – are created. (But the scenery need not be a Chinese landscape of misty mountains; it could be any vision of paradise: a salt marsh, a woodland, or a dream of Claude.)
3) Architecture is integral to the concept. As at the Alhambra or Vaux, pavilions, paving, steps, walls and pools make the bones of the garden, and these structures make a place for humans in the envisioned paradise.
4) Space and light are handled to suggest infinity. For example, a pavilion built at the edge of the garden would not be built against the outside wall. A narrow courtyard, just a slot, is left between the outer wall and the pavilion. This admits light to the back of the pavilion, and by thoughtfully planting the courtyard and placing windows in the pavilion and outer wall a layered stage scenery is created – the illusion of depth conveyed in 3 feet of space.
5) Great attention is paid to all the senses. Sounds and echoes, the feel of cobbled paths underfoot, the alternation of dim and bright spaces, dark waters and bright, scents.
6) Opportunities for seclusion, evasion, retreat and secret assignations abound.

I long to build myself a garden based on these principles in a tough, low rise, built up area, like Bushwick. I would abstain from details in the Chinese manner, and build it in plain construction of the local type. The pavilions would be adapted for the needs of my life: a public room for entertaining, a library, a kitchen and dining room, a bedroom, a bath. The remainder of the garden would be mostly water, with a limited number of my favorite plants, and all my attention directed at managing light, shade and reflection. From the street it would look like the adjacent buildings and go unnoticed.

All Praise

2008-06-03T06:31:00.000-07:00

I love this front yard.

It’s a homey essay in formality. There’s not even a nod to the Landscape tradition -- with its asymmetries and allusions to acreage and scenery -- which is now the conventional way to design suburban front yards.

Geometry, in this garden, is put to use to mark out the incremental transition from the public street to the private house: from street, to sidewalk, over the little wall, across the lawn, up the steps, and onto the porch. The layers of increasing privacy are set out as a row of parallel horizontals. Then the walk penetrates straight through them to the front door.

All the details are just right. The little cobblestone wall is inspired. The lawn lays in a quiet expanse. The paired clumps of sedum, hosta and Alberta spruce are enough to mark the path. Russell Page wrote about a garden in Norfolk where a geometrical axis was “sketched” onto the featureless terrain with four pairs of simple wooden gates. “The most desirable quality of garden design…” he said about this sketched quality. And here too the modest geometry is becoming. Formality need not aspire to the grand manner.

And the porch is good. It’s deep enough and set high and tucked back into the body of the house. You could sit on it quietly and go unobserved from the sidewalk. That’s what makes a good porch.

Nothing fancy plantwise. No showing off. No allusions to imagined topography or lifestyle. No pretense of any kind, but this garden has everything it needs for a modest house to sit on the street with composure and dignity.

Technique

2008-05-29T11:48:00.000-07:00

Someone on Metropolitan Avenue wired pony packs of impatiens to the railing of his stoop -- red ones on one side and white ones on the other. A week later he nested them in little cozies of aluminum foil. So far the impatiens are doing fine.

For almost 10 years I gardened in a community garden in the East Village. We gardened in 4 foot by 8 foot plots. In community gardens you see what happens when people have a lot of energy relative to the size of their projects. All kinds of radicalism and fussiness and magical thinking are directed at overstuffed plots. Roses, tomatoes, honey locusts, herbs and lavender grow cheek by jowl with houseplants set out for summer, rescued specimens brought in from the curb and pass-a-long plants from the ancestors.

We had a gardener who brought a thermos of boiling water to pour over a row of parsley seeds. There were people who pruned down to trunks and people who could hardly bring themselves the snip a yellowed leaf. There was a lady who enclosed her plot of vegetables in a palisade of sharpened sticks and a man who enclosed his in net covered frame that looked like a kennel. They were all, in their way, successful.

People want to learn gardening secrets. They want to dose their plants with elixirs and believe that some people have green thumbs. In fact most gardening wisdom is conventional and unsurprising. It’s in every book and all over the internet and when you think about it, it makes perfect sense. The “secret” usually is finding the wherewithal to do things properly at the right time of year.

Most garden plants, once their basic needs are met, are awfully accommodating. A lot of what gardeners do they do for themselves.

Wisteria

2008-05-29T11:43:00.000-07:00

I can pretty easily forgo planting most of the species that appear on the invasive plant lists for our area. There are sore temptations, like the Tea Viburnum. And several garden stalwarts, like English Ivy, are frankly irreplaceable.

But forgoing Wisteria is a brutal challenge. No vine matches its combination of exuberance and refinement.

I went around with the illusion that only the Japanese Wisteria, Wisteria floribunda, was invasive. (I failed to read the fine print on the Invasive Plant Council of New York State’s list.) The Chinese Wisteria, I believed, was safe and almost as good: a little less elegant and a little less fragrant, but with bronzy new leaves that set off the flowers. I took this picture of Wisteria sinensis on Fire Island to show that we can keep our bearings with invasive plants without compromising our appetite for Wisteria.

Then I double checked and found that the Chinese Wisteria is equally invasive. This a real blow because the recommended substitute, the American Wisteria frutescens, doesn’t make the same gorgeous show. It’s a nice enough vine, but I’d have a hard time planting it without feeling compromised.

Over the years I’ve shilly-shallied a bit on the question of invasive plants. I’m outraged that my beloved Black Locust is on the list when its nativity is in question. I’ve wondered about the actual harm of growing invasive plants in gardens if they are already loose in the woods. And I’ve thought the whole issue is a little misplaced because there are no unspoiled native ecosystems left to defile.

But gradually I’ve become a fundamentalist on the question. Because of choices gardeners have made euonymus and barberry have crowded the native shrubs from our woods. It was an innocent mistake, but now we know better. There are vastly complicated environmental problems that we can only begin to solve, but the problem of invasive plants belongs to gardeners and we should own it.

BTW I use the invasive plant list provided by the Brooklyn Botanic Garden:

http://www.bbg.org/gar2/pestalerts/invasives/worst_nym.html

Higan

2008-04-29T19:25:00.000-07:00

Having dissed the flowering cherries I have to put in a word for the Higan cherry, Prunus subhirtella pendula. It is really something, like a ruined cathedral hung with candyfloss.

Like most pendulous trees, it looks at home near water. I could also imagine it hanging above a steep ravine.

Taste

2008-04-29T18:41:00.000-07:00

This spring I studied the flowering cherries. I thought I should get some clear ideas about them because, in my head, the varieties mostly run together.

Then the crabapples bloomed. What a relief to be able to let go of the cherries and just enjoy the crabs. Their fragrance is as fine as the lindens, and it’s as free. In many crabs the buds are deep pink, but when the flowers open, they are white. I keep an eye on the crabapples for the day when the two-tone effect peaks.

The cherries bore me, but the crabs are a delight. I don’t know why. The extravagance of both is comparable. And objectively, most of the cherries are better garden trees: they have a tidy habit compared to the crab’s awkwardness, more disease resistant foliage, better bark and fall color. But the blooming crabs, especially the straight species Malus floribunda, are a high point of spring for me.

I think knowledge and involvement with plants only serves to sharpen these kinds of preferences. And it’s a good thing. Preferences should be exercised. Gardens holds together when there is an abiding taste behind the thousand choices that guide their creation. They go wrong when they try to have a little of everything.

Better than Forsythia Part 2

2008-04-24T14:35:00.000-07:00

I feel a little chastened about my screed against Forsythia. Last weekend I was in Connecticut, among people who love it. It looked great along the highways -- I’ll say that for it.

Still I stand by my disapproval of planting Forsythia in Brooklyn.

But say you are planting a typical Brooklyn garden, and you love Forsythia because it’s bright and early. Corylopsis (recommended after the last Forsythia tirade) is too wan and toned-down for your taste. What you want is uninhibited brassiness to go with the tulips and flowering cherries.

So plant Kerria. It’s resoundingly yellow, and, unlike Forsythia, the flowering repeats a little after the initial flush. Dirr says it’s “ideally sited in partial shade.” The leaves are neat, and the stems are distinctly green and ornamental in winter. The photo shows the double flowered variety, which is more common than the more elegant single.

Without a Greenhouse

2008-04-24T14:32:00.001-07:00

Every year I overwinter a bunch of cuttings that I take from tender bedding plants. When spring finally rolls around I wonder if it’s worth the trouble.

This sorry lot goes out for a couple of weeks of acclimation before they are planted. Their winter leaves drop so they look worse now that they have all winter, but new growth has broken and they will be fine. I plant them out when the soil is warm.

A few rules to live by during the six months they are inside:

1) Keep them alive but don’t promote growth. Minimal water. No fertilizer. They do as well in little pony packs as 4” pots.
2) Keep the terminal buds on the plants because they produce hormones that promote rooting. The cuttings will get lanky. Plant them out that way and pinch them back once they really get going.
3) Give them as much sun as you can. South windows, etc.
4) Don’t pot them up to get a jump on spring. This sets them back and even kills them.

Ephemerals

2008-04-21T19:13:00.000-07:00

I Iwas lucky to see this patch of Bloodroot. The flowers are so fragile they last only a few days -- even less in the warm weather we’ve had. So I saw this bunch at its absolute zenith.

These fiddleheads (I think they belong to the Cinnamon Fern) are covered in astonishing soft fuzzy jackets. I’ve never seen anything like it. The next day, the fuzz had broken apart and fell like rags off the unfurling fiddlehead.

Washtub Azalea

2008-04-21T18:39:00.000-07:00

Nobody fusses over this azalea, but it's been comfortable and thriving for many years. It grows in about 8 inches of soil in a galvanized washtub. Over the years a layer of decaying leaves has accumulated – I venture that is all the feeding the azalea gets. The washtub sits in front of a south facing house, shaded by a Zelkova tree.

The plant is perfectly suited to its situation so it really can thrive on neglect.

This is one of my favorite azaleas, a Kurume hybrid called ‘Coral Bells’. Its small, beautifully formed blossoms are a good, strong, warm pink. The color is about as intense as I like to see in April.

A Pegged Rose

2008-04-20T18:59:00.000-07:00

Some friends in Connecticut are lucky to have a nice bush of the rose ‘Heritage’.

Few roses have flawlessly graceful, fragrant blossoms on a bush without functional defects, but ‘Heritage’ is such a rose. Its sole shortcoming is a rangy habit. It tends to throw rampant shoots that aren’t quite stiff enough to support themselves - though it’s not quite a climber either. What ‘Heritage’ needs is a low fence to sprawl over.

In my friends’ Connecticut garden ‘Heritage’ grows beside a boulder, and so we tried the old technique of pegging the long shoots over the rock. In March we cut out everything but last year's long shoots and fanned them over the boulder. Their ends were tied with twine to pegs driven into the ground.

Pegging is a nineteenth century method that was used with the Hybrid Perpetuals. The theory is that roses tend to send short spurs bearing flowers from the portions of the main branches that grow horizontally. I’ve found this to be true with climbing roses.

Back with results in June.

Ipheion

2008-04-18T06:33:00.000-07:00

Peonies are drop dead gorgeous for a few weeks around Memorial Day. Then, if they don’t get mildew, they are decent citizens that go unnoticed for the rest of the year.

Their emerging foliage is interesting too. It unfurls with gusto. I love how it is set off here in a field of starry Ipheion.

This little bulb is perfectly hardy, leafing out in winter and blooming as the peonies break growth. Eventually the peony foliage will conceal the passing Iphieon. Like peonies, Ipheion resents disturbance. With time a few bulbs can make quite a show. So the two plants settle into a long, unexpected companionship.

Adding something for fall (anemone ‘Honorine Jobert’, say, or chrysanthemum ‘Mary Stoker’) would round out the calendar. The freshness of the fall flowers, in contrast to the patinated peony foliage, will appeal as much as their color.

Ruderal

2008-04-14T05:43:00.000-07:00

On April 10 Peter Del Tredici, from the Arnold Arboretum, spoke at MetroHort on Wild Urban Plants. I think he’s on to something.

The gist of his lecture is that urban environments create horticultural conditions (disturbed, compacted soils, expanses of pavement, urban heat island warming, etc.) that support a distinct community of plants. Cosmopolitan in origin, these plants are largely reviled as weeds: ailanthus, black locust, mugwort, bindweed, chicory. We struggle to eradicate them; even legislate against them. Instead we might recognize their possibilities for the ruderal landscape.

(Learning the word “ruderal” was worth the trip up there: “growing in rubbish, poor land, or waste places. From Latin rudera, ruins, rubbish, plural of rudus, broken stone.”)

Del Tredici is working on a book, Wild Urban Plants. It goes to the publisher in October. It sounds like Weeds of the Northeast, horticulturally considered. I look forward to seeing it.

There is a lot wishful thinking about native plants: You can earn a LEED credit by planting a community of natives on imported soil and handing it over to the maintenance man to nurse. I don’t want to discourage well-meaning gestures, but it’s hard to see how this kind of planting accomplishes much in the way of plant conservation. (What is actually needed is a whole preserved ecosystem where the plants can endure in a community of organisms they evolved with – something beyond the purview of green building.)

For urban planting we might look instead to these ruderal “natives” that are so well suited to the actual growing conditions. Del Tredici has planted meadows of yarrow, chicory, goldenrod, and bouncing bet. And the black locust is as fine a tree as grows.

I’d be interested to know if the planting schemes for the High Line consider this line of thinking. Ruderal natives are growing there already.

Little Trees

2008-04-10T13:42:00.000-07:00

Shrubs in nursery containers are cute, and people plant a lot of them. Eventually everything gets claustrophobic. Nothing can compete. It’s dismal.

You want to hack them down to size or overhaul the whole place and start fresh. But consider retaining some of the shrubs and limbing them up, creating a grove of little trees. Light is admitted and an understory of shade plants can carpet the ground below. In a confined area a miniature forest is not ridiculous. It gives a settled look. It couldn’t be nicer.

Shrubs that form nice trunks lend themselves to this treatment. Pieris is excellent because of its distinctive undulating habit. Rhododendrons, hollies, euonymus, yews, rose of sharon, mountain laurel and aucuba are all suitable. Suckering shrubs that throw up new shoots from the base – like roses, spirea, and hydrangea – are usually not.

Dotards

2008-04-10T13:40:00.000-07:00

Dotards are old trees that are decaying as fast as they are growing. They can go on like this for years -- centuries even -- and they develop fantastically gnarled shapes.

There were two old black locust trees in Tompkins Square, gnarled and full of snags, and beautiful in the way locusts always are. When the city was letting that park go to pieces these trees were neglected. Crows roosted in their dead branches; it couldn’t have been better. Then the city got things in shape. They cut out the dead wood, but nothing looked right. They cut out more limbs; then they took down a whole tree. The city was well meaning, but I think they ought to be protecting venerable treasures instead of pursuing hopeless campaigns to remedy them.

The most famous East Village dotard was the Stuyvesant Pear. Planted in 1647 on a spot that later became the corner of Third Ave and Thirteenth St, it lived until 1867. Until 1862 it bore fruit. There’s a plaque on the wall about it.

The hawthorn in the picture grows in the south west corner of McCarren Park. It’s robust, fruiting heavily every year. I’ve tried to identify it (hawthorns are tricky) and for the life of me I think it’s Crategeus viridis ‘Winter King’, which was introduced in 1955. But it seems impossible that this tree is just 50 years old.

Maybe it’s not ‘Winter King’. Maybe it’s ancient, predating the park, which was called Greenpoint Park prior to being renamed in 1909. (The pool opened in 1936.) Does anyone know how to sort this out?

Trochodendron araliodes

2008-04-10T13:36:00.000-07:00

Here’s a fantastic plant that you don't see much. It is one of the best small evergreen trees for city gardens. No broadleaf evergreen comes through the winter with leaves of comparable freshness. (These photos were taken at BBG in March.) It is happy in half sun to half shade on acid, moist woodland soil.

Slow growth, eventually to 20 or 30 feet, may have limited its popularity. (Gardeners are suckered by the promise of rapid growth, but most really handsome plants are slow.)

And then Trochodendron araliodes is a mouthful. The colloquial name, “Wheel Tree”, refers to the disposition of the stamens. It won’t catch on because nothing about the general look of Trochodendron suggests a wheel. (“Ivy Tree” might be more apt, as the leaves resemble the mature growth of English Ivy.)

I saw it once at a plant sale at the wonderful Chinese Garden in Portland, Oregon. Rare Find Nursery lists it online.

PJM

2008-04-10T13:35:00.001-07:00

PJM rhododendrons are great container plants for our area. It’s a surprise because rhododendrons and azaleas in general can be tricky in containers. In principle they should be manageable, but I rarely see happy specimens. Usually they’re just hanging on, spoiled by lacebugs.

The PJM hybrids are the workhorses of genus. Many of be best plants I see are growing in more less full sun. The bloom is a frilled, lavender-pink confection that is in poor taste but delightful just the same. After all the excitement the shrub settles into a state of handsome sobriety for the rest of the year. The leaves are small and healthy and they turn an interesting purple / bronze in the winter. Eventually the shrub builds up to about five feet.

Drainage, drainage, drainage: that’s the mantra for rhododendrons, and it shouldn’t be a problem to provide it in containers. I think it’s important to knock a lot of the potting mix out of the rootball when you plant – it’s ok to bang them around a little. Plant the crown high.
I also have a theory that the roots want to be cool. I think they do better if the container is shaded or light colored or made of wood or another insulating material. This is just my theory.

Violas

2008-04-10T13:31:00.000-07:00

The easiest, cheeriest thing you can do is plant violas in early spring. They like sun and cool weather and will bloom profusely till the summer gets hot. Their good points:

1) The individual flowers are cute as can be, held neatly above the leaves and borne abundantly.
2) They are fragrant, faintly but definitely, of violets.
3) Lovely blues, yellows, purples and bicolors. Gardeners who love blue have no comparable bedding plant.
4) And then there’s black: the variety called Bowles Black is a deep satiny purple black with a tiny yellow eye. As black as any flower.
5) You can eat them. They don’t taste like much, but a salad strewn with black violas sets a certain tone.
6) They can take spring weather. In this they are far better than pansies, which are like violas, only larger, and get weather beaten. (A general point: plants that bear smaller flowers in profusion are usually more garden worthy than plants with fewer but larger flowers.)
7) No fuss. No need to deadhead. Spring rains being what they are, there’s hardly a need to water. Just let the violas weave through emerging perennials or push them aside to plant summer bedding plants.
8) Their stems are just long enough to cut. A single rose with a couple of violas in a tiny vase is all anyone really needs.
9) When the summer gets hot violas get lanky and peter out. Pull them up. At that time of year a bit of clean up feels good.

Better than Forsythia

2008-04-10T13:29:00.000-07:00

Better than Forsythia

The Forsythia is honored April 6 at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden with plants given free to garden members. It’s a point of local identity: In 1940 a garden benefactor, Mrs. Edward C Blum, was instrumental in having forsythia declared the official flower of Brooklyn. It was “…imbued with a message of brotherhood, unity and understanding…” she said.

Forsythia is at its best grown in full sun and allowed to develop into the fountain shape it naturally assumes. The usual cultivars are in the 8 foot by 8 foot range -- too big for most Brooklyn gardens -- so they are routinely hacked with hedge trimmers into manageable shapes. Treated thus they bloom poorly; and because Forsythia is undistinguished after its April bloom, it becomes an eyesore. You see these sad plants all over the borough.

If you must have Forsythia, be sure you have a sunny spot, pick a cultivar suited to the space to have, and prune it by removing entire old branches at their base. Smallish cultivars like ‘Gold Tide’ are better suited to most Brooklyn gardens. There’s one called ‘Bronxensis’ that’s smaller still, practically a ground cover.
If your garden is shaded at all, I recommend you forego Forsythia entirely and grown another east Asian shrub, Corylopsis pauciflora, the Buttercup Winterhazel. It blooms with the forsythia and hangs its pale yellow flowers like bells from the twigs. This poised 4 to 6 foot shrub is better suited to city gardens. Its neat foliage colors gold in autumn.

Spring and All

2008-04-10T13:18:00.000-07:00

This is Crocus tomasinianus. Brent and Becky's Bulbs has them for $220 per 1000. They seed and increase if you put off mowing the lawn