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.
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.
Let’s face it. Cape Cod can get downright gloomy in the winter months. Gray sky, gray ocean, even marsh grasses in mellow shades of rust and yellow moving merrily in the wind are soon beaten down by snow and rain. What’s a sun-loving, home-owning gardener to do? Plant and sculpt with winter interest in mind.
Choose specimen trees with unusual bark such as the Japanese Trident maple, Acer buergeriannum, with peeling bark offering up shades of gold, brown, and orange. Another peeler is the paperbark maple, Acer griseum, in cinnamon shades.
Plant a textured border of mixed broadleaf and needled evergreens to catch the snow — Juniperus (junipers) come in many shapes and sizes, from low and creeping to tall and columnar, and are painted in shades of pale blue-green to vivid gold. They are a perfect evergreen for the Cape as they prefer sandy soil and tolerate salt spray.
Ornamental grasses and shrub dogwoods look wonderful against a green backdrop in the winter months. Grasses such as Miscanthus sinensis will develop into a four-foot clump sending out beautiful inflorescence plumes in the fall. It is the flowering seed head that is so attractive, catching the late afternoon light and creating a glow.
Peggy and Bob Black’s Chatham garden began with a single rose bush whose thick, aged canes wind up the tall textured green of an enclosing privet hedge. The pink roses bloomed profusely, but the bush grew in an almost empty garden. “I think the old pink rose is probably Dorothy Perkins,” says Peggy. “I am sure it set the tone of what was to follow.”
Finding all-day sun where the old rose resides, the homeowners enclosed the lawn on the ocean side planting a secondary hedge of privet to protect a new brood of perennials from cold winter gusts and wind-born salt spray.
Peggy has a knack for elegant ladylike combinations of pink and white with a touch of blue or a splash of yellow to spark the overall effect. When asked about her color scheme she answers that she and Bob often sit at the edge of the garden under the pergola. “Because the color is so close to where we sit, I decided on a cooler color scheme rather than a hot one.” Peggy admits ‘Dorothy Perkins’ was an impetus for pastel colors and more roses.
Peggy’s green thumb has had training. She enrolled in the master gardener program through University of Massachusetts Cooperative Extension Service in Barnstable and found it indispensable. “I got so much out of it, I wasn’t ready to quit … that’s when I went to The Landscape Institute (of the Arnold Arboretum in Boston)” where she earned a Certificate in Landscape Design and gained knowledge in garden history and design, site engineering and construction, and the possible uses for many, many plants.
HELPFUL LINKS:
Cape Cod Cooperative Extension Service/UMass
http://www.capecodextension.org/Horticulture/
Cape Cod Home
http://www.capecodlife.com/capecodhome
The Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University, The Landscape Institute
“You must come at dusk”, was Truro author Maria Flook’s invitation to her garden. I didn’t knock at first, delaying my arrival and taking in plantings as I strode from the car. Casa Blanca lilies were in bloom, wildly fragrant, white and rising from ado where a statue of a lion lurked hidden in the gloom.
Indeed, as we emerged onto a small brick terrace, silence overcame the space. Table and chairs surrounded by a garden of mystery, a hush of plants in varying shades of soft green leaning into wine-soaked burgundy variegated ground covers, whites fringing the edges of green leaves….
“I really like white in the garden,” says Flook, yet she uses it discriminately, just a bit here or there to draw the eye out of dark shadow, to create a fragmented moment in the twilight of day.
“I really like white in the garden,” says Flook, yet she uses it discriminately, just a bit here or there to draw the eye out of dark shadow, to create a fragmented moment in the twilight of day.
“A garden to me always meant this wonderful sense of fighting against death, fighting against all the struggles that you face in your life whether it be work troubles or family troubles. If you can work a garden, you still had something, some power in the world…a bolster against the hard grim world. It is a sign of health, a health of the self.” Wonderful words of wisdom from writer and gardener Maria Flook.
The Nantucket Historical Association’s Oldest House may be a seventeenth-century jewel of antiquity, but the sweet kitchen garden at the 1686 Jethro Coffin saltbox is the apple of my eye.
Kathrina Pearl, a Nantucket Historical Association (NHA) staff member and avid gardener, and the NHA grounds crew have adopted the backyard at the Oldest House, planting a long list of period pot plants, culinary and medicinal herbs, a small orchard of fruit trees, and some berries. “The idea for the garden came from the interpreters at the site,” says Pearl.
The Oldest House nestles into the landscape at the top of Sunset Hill. It was built as a wedding gift for Jethro Coffin and his new bride, Mary. According to the NHA, it is the “sole surviving structure from the island’s original seventeenth-century English settlement.”
The hillside garden at Satucket Farm Stand in Brewster, Massachusetts bursts with blossoms. “I love the textures of greens in spring,” says Anita Anderson. “I love Solomon’s Seal and Lily of the Valley, they smell so nice.” Other spring favorites include daffodils, tulips, Bleeding Heart, and Jacob’s Ladder. Summer brings on a riot of color. “Monarda, oh my goodness, the red, a bright red. I have a deep purple butterfly bush, sedum autumn joy, tons of veronica, a blue balloon flower, astilbe in white and pink and red.”
Satucket’s cutting bed is exuberantly wild with cosmos, sunflowers, cleome, and zinnias all vying for attention. Anita has nurtured these plants from seed, starting them under lights in her basement the last months of winter. “During February I go nuts and have to mail order seeds. I really like Johnny’s Selected Seeds, their flowers seem stronger, healthier than any other supplier I have tried.”
Another favorite vendor is a local Orleans grower, The Farm. “They do an amazing job. They grow their own perennials and have great stock.”
Jane Booth: New England Gardens 