Phalaenopsis. Growing orchids in your home can be rewarding.
1. Ionocidium “popcorn 2. Cypripedium Acaule (native pink lady slipper 3. Oncidium 4. Phalaenopsis
Paphpedium, Miltassia ‘Miltonia x Brassia’, Dendrobium
I still have the books my mother bought in her quest for garden knowledge. I’ve bought many more in my adult life as they are a wonderful source of inspiration.
My best friends for the vegetable garden are “how to” books letting me know the onions are ready to harvest when their green tops have toppled over and to pull the garlic when the browning stems are tilting toward the ground. I have books on tending perennials and books on herbs and annuals. They are all an inspiration.
When we are on the road and have the time I like searching out antique and junk stores for old garden tools, often sturdier than what is manufactured today though I have not been able to bring them into the garden, I just like looking at them and thinking about the hands that used them many years ago and the gardens they might have helped create. I also hunt for old terra cotta pots, especially small pots to start seeds in. They don’t retain moisture like plastic, but they look fantastic and you don’t toss them in the landfill when your plants have grown!
Some of the best inspiration comes from visiting gardens open to the public whether personal or private. I have often buy plants or put together color combinations I have seen in someone elses garden. The Garden Conservancy, http://www.gardenconservancy.org, publishes The Garden Conservancy’s Open Days Directory, A Guide to Visiting America’s Best Private Gardens.
In the early winter I look forward to the arrival of seed and plant catalogues that I keep for reference and to drive a gardener crazy with want.
Dean Riddle’s Catskill gardens are amazing. I was blessed to be given the opportunity to photograph them for the greatest garden magazine in the world, Gardens Illustrated.
Wonderful whimsy, exuberant color, Dean Riddle’s Catskill Mountain garden made me smile.
Dean Riddle creates extraordinary plant combinations.
Brookside Farm is a place one can easily fall in love with. I had been warned of its bucolic charms — a pair of Red Devon oxen and a handful of horses grazing in meadows dotted with white drifts of wildflowers, a pasture flowing downhill to a dark mysterious pond fed by the Tiasquam River, and a beautiful house and outbuildings graceful with history.
I had come to see the gardens and was met by Maria Sercander, who has been working Brookside’s gardens for 11 years. Hilary Blocksam, Brookside’s landscape and architectural design director, farm manager, and all around chess partner told me how the current owners, Wendy Gimbel, a writer, and her husband, attorney Douglas Liebhafsky succumbed to the charms of Brookside Farm when they first saw it in the winter of 1981.
Maria propagates many of the annuals used in Brookside’s gardens. Sometimes she buys from local nurseries and recently she has been bringing in one of her favorite annuals, lisianthus, from Johnny’s Selected Seeds.
When you ask Maria what her favorite plants are she answers right away, “allium” and pauses “trillium” and then she gushes, “I love the paeonias, we have a lot of doubles, an old, old variety, a light pink with a white center. We have a lot of “dinner plate” hibiscus, a deep maroon and a bright pink. They are gorgeous. What else do I love?” She laughs, “Oh, I love everything. I adore lupines, snapdragons, cosmos.”
Ruth Kirchmeier, Martha’s Vineyard woodcut artist and gardener
When I met Ruth Kirchmeier I didn’t know she was a woodcut artist but thought she must be a sculptor of tall columnar things, her garden suggested so with upright narrow hollies and yews. I imagined her hands chipping away at stout totems of wood. I had the medium right but the art form wrong, instead of totems she chips away at flat fields of pine, cutting into wood visual scenes close to her life such as a simple vignette of her dining room where a forsythia filled vase placed on a red runner radiates with the sun’s energy.
“I don’t see the difference between making a woodcut and making a garden, you need the skills to cut the wood and make a garden , the same things go into it, placing things so that there is depth and interest and a certain desire to go around the corner and see what’s happening.
House plants are welcome winter friends finding places to reside outside come summer. A topiaried myrtle came to Ruth by way of her dealer, Hermine. “She has a small gallery nearby, Hermine Merel Smith Fine Art, one winter she asked me to look after her myrtle and I nurtured it and shaped it. When I brought it back, she asked if I wouldn’t like to keep it permanently.
Favorite flowers for a Cape Cod garden include hardy roses, Guara, and ‘Cotton Candy’ Supertunias.
To my Puritan New England eye, coleus has a always been a bit too exotic — red-dressed flamenco dancers edged in flames of green and white. Looking up the Latin name I came across another common name, Flame Nettle, and indeed, these are “hot” plants.
Winter gardening in a sometimes sunny window. A tiny cress sprouted just days after planting.
What inspires this gardener most when days are endlessly gray or bitterly cold? An array of colorful seed catalogues helps but even better is the smell of fresh potting soil and holding a handful of seeds.
Each January as the days begin to get longer, I’ll dig out a couple of wide-mouthed terra cotta pots, give them a scrub, and fill them with a good germination potting mix. I always have left over vegetable seeds from the previous season and make it a point to set aside peas, arugula, cress, and mache.
I’ll poke 1/2 inch holes two inches apart around the top of one soil-filled pot and pop in peas. Placed in a south facing window, with luck they will sprout in a week and as they grow I’ll snip off the twinning pea tendrils, I don’t expect to actually grow pea pods – just the tender shoots – good in a stir fry, mixed in a salad, or gracing the top of a ham and cheese sandwich.
This pea was planted only four days ago and is a delight to my winter weary eyes.
I’ll also pot up cress – Vermont’s own High Mowing Seeds, has one called Persian Broadleaf Cress, a specialty green. They describe it as “2-6 inch long, dark-green leaves with tiny teeth around the margin and a mild cressy flavor…a delicious and nutritious green.” I’ve planted cress the past couple of winters and snip it long before it reaches six inches and add it as a final touch to salads or sprinkle it as a nourishing garnish on a bowlful of creamy cooked homegrown cannelloni beans.
Seeds of Italy is a favorite seed company for their endless variety of greens and chicories (not to mention eggplant, tomatoes, peppers, and the most wonderful beans). They also sell packets of garden cress – in Italian “Crescione Comune”. Seeds of Italy is my constant source for arugula, another easy to grow green that will brighten up the seemingly never ending days of winter and my need for freshly grown greens.
Crescione Comune from Seeds of Italy or Persian Broadleaf Cress from High Mowing Seed?
I’m going to experiment and try my hand at English Watercress I got from Renee’s Garden. Renee says “watercress is a cool weather crop”. Rooms away from our wood burning stove are cool (maybe too cool). I’ve filled an old bowl with garden gravel chips (you can get at Agway or any other gardening center) and will put potting soil on top. Watercress likes moist soil and I hope, with careful watering, to keep a mini reservoir within the gravel at the base of the soil.
Tip: If you don’t have any terra cotta pots stored away for the winter, not to worry. I’ve planted up a mini garden in used plastic containers — whether they once held yogurt, salad mixes, olives, etc. Save the tops to cover your newly planted seed to aid in germination. As soon as the seeds sprout, remove the top. Poke a couple of drainage holes in the bottom of the plastic containers to keep your seedlings from getting soggy — and place your mini gardens on top of an old cookie sheet with sides, or a foil or plastic lined cardboard box – the idea is to keep moisture from overwatering from destroying the windowsill or table beneath.
Recycle used salad mix containers and turn them into windowsill winter gardens filled with fresh growing greens.
The Goods: Seed catalogues can be an endless source of entertainment when you have the winter doldrums. Yes, you can look at them online, but I find it more exciting when they arrive in the mail and have something to hold in my hand and savor with my eyes.
Seeds from Italy
My all time favorite company. They supply packets of seed illustrated with a detailed photo of the product. I want everything from this catalogue and over order every year wishing I could clone myself to plant all the yumminess they supply. They have many varieties of salad greens; bitter chicories (delicious with lots of olive oil, garlic, and sprinkled with hot pepper flakes); endless varieties of beans — pole, bush, snap, fresh shelling beans, and drying beans; tomatoes, cabbage, kale, the list goes on.
Fruition Seeds
A new company with a mission to grow the best organic seeds for our northern climes. I’ve bought a few packet of seeds from them and passed them on to Chance for the school’s salad garden. Fruition would love feedback and how their seeds grow in our hills and valleys.
Seed Savers Exchange
A catalogue I source from readily and is filled with mouth-watering eye candy. The company is a non-profit with deep roots in seed heritage.
High Mowing Seeds
http://www.highmowingseeds.com
Vermont’s own. Their catalogue is loaded not only with goodness but multiple tips on growing.
Fedco Seeds
My good friend, Newbury neighbor, and fellow gardener, Mary Durfee, swears by Fedco, not just your ordinary seed company. An old New England company they not only sell an endless assortment of veg, flower, and herbs but you will also find Moose Tubers (aka potatoes), soil amendments, fertilizers, tools, books, and through http://www.Fedcoseeds.com/trees fruit and nut trees, berry bushes, perennials, bulbs, and ornamentals
Renee’s Garden
Renee’s offers many varieties of vegetable, herb, and flower seed for the garden. I like their seeds as they come with detailed growing tips printed right on the packet of seed.
Brown’s Omaha
A tiny catalogue for onion sets and sweet potatoes. I have been ordering from them for years and have gotten a kick watching the progress of the Brown’s three girls grow as they are featured on the cover of the catalogue each year.
Happy Winter Gardening!
We’ve been making forays into Vermont’s pastoral countryside and have been thrilled to find wild “organic” apple trees growing along many a roadside.
We spied this huge, lone apple tree on our way to Walden Heights Nursery, Vermont growers of heirloom apples and other unusual orchard fruits. We noticed nary a blemish on the deep red fruit polished to a high shine by wind-whipped leaves.
In less than four miles from our home we have collected a sampling of very edible fruit in colors ranging from red to green to yellow or a mix of all three. The most beautiful apple we have found so far is a tiny and fawn-colored with a lipstick-pink blush.
In the past before we sampled apples from the wild, we would wipe off fly speck, tiny black dots – and no, the dots do not arise from flies but are the result of fungal disease especially prevalent in Vermont’s apple orchards as our summers and falls become more humid and wet.
We found two abandoned orchards with trees still producing fruit on Cobble Hill within the lands of The White Mountain National Forest of New Hampshire.
Most orchards spray fungicide multiple times to prevent things like fly speck and sooty blotch – but we don’t have to worry about eating chemicals with our wild finds in hand and we don’t even bother to wipe off the spots and dots, instead biting into the apples to determine if they are tart, sweet, spicy, or too sour to eat.
One of the tastiest apples we have discovered so far is in a meadow adjoining ours. The apples are gnarly from the pecks and bites of piercing, sucking insects but all they need is a trim around the insect-damaged flesh and they are a delight to eat. We wonder if they are possibly an heirloom apple variety as they have many attributes for home use – the flesh is sweet, tart – firm but juicy. They are yellow overlaid with crimson stripes and were ripe some weeks ago.
The apples we dubbed “the meadow apple” looked rough but had exceptional flavor and were added to a succession of excellent dishes — a harvest stew of rabbit, a veal stew reminiscent of my Great Grandmother Booth’s French Casserole of Veal, and a fragrant, spicy venison chile.
The “meadow” apples have held up well in cooking and have found their way into a rabbit stew made rich by the addition of butter, good olive oil, a cider reduction we made and put up last year, lots of vermouth, good white wine, carrots and tomatoes picked from our garden and roasted before being added to the stew. There was an ample amount of the excellent fragrant sauce left over from the rabbit and it was reincarnated as a base for a veal stew.
The organically-grown veal came from Winsome Farm in Haverhill, NH just across the Connecticut River from our Newbury, VT home. The tender bits of newly-harvested meat were caramelized in a super hot oven and were added to the sauce as were more “meadow” apples, our own heirloom tomatoes and slowly sauteed onions, little red potatoes from one of our favorite local farms, Peaked Moon in Piermont, NH, and as more liquid was needed to keep everything moist the last half of a bottle of red wine.
This abandoned orchard in The White Mountain National Forest will provide food for wildlife and a taste of the wild for those lucky enough to find apples in season.
As the stew was put to a simmer and the aroma filled our home, I wondered what else I could cook with wild apples and rummaged about in the freezer pulling to the front items of goodness needing to be cooked before the freezer put the burn to them. A goodly-sized package marked “stew” put a smile on my face as I silently thanked our friend Tom Kuralt who generously shared venison he had taken during a hunt last year. After thawing the rich, wild meat it was browned, like the veal, in a hot, hot oven then added to a base of homegrown tomatoes, onions, lovage, peppers, and garlic with the addition of carrots from Newbury’s own 4 Corners Farm and cut up chunks of wild apple. Cumin and dried chiles from Oaxaca — Pasilla and Chilcosle — added heat and hints of clove, anise, cinnamon and smoke. Homemade corn tortillas completed the meal!
All of this yumminess has us giving thanks to the early settlers of Vermont and New Hampshire – the apple trees they planted years ago produced a mixed blessing of progeny to inherit the wild.
In the Gulf of Maine, where sky meets sea, lie the Isles of Shoals, haunted with graves of Spanish sailors and tales of pirate gold. The islands have names that give them shape — Smutty Nose, Duck, Hog, and White (an acre of stone topped at the pinnacle with light). Poet Celia Laighton Thaxter’s life on Appledore Island inspired her writing and her lifelong connection to the island’s terrain. Her flower garden, celebrated in her book An Island Garden, drew visitors to the island until a fire destroyed the property. A century after she started her garden, John Kingsbury of Cornell University and a team of volunteers found the remnants of her sanctuary and re-created her summer garden, a floral oasis in the rough, wind-whipped terrain.
Celia Thaxter’s century-old garden on Appledore Island is gaining new life through the dedication of volunteers and the interest of visitors. The summer tours are almost always sold out and the education and family programs at the Shoals Marine Laboratory are popular.
Social Climbers — roses rule in Linda Wood’s Rhode Island garden where they linger on lichen-studded stonewalls and gallivant up granite pillars.
Linda Wood has planted two dozen rose cultivars in her backyard paradise including a David Austin ‘Mary Rose’, ‘The Fairy’, ‘New Dawn’, a David Austin shrub rose, ‘Constance Spry’, ‘Zephirine Drouhin’, Rosa ‘Excelsa’, ‘Fair Bianca’, and ‘The Pilgrim’.
Jane Booth: New England Gardens 