Miller

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.

Tropical

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.

Ipomoea

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

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.

Without a Greenhouse

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.

Violas

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.