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
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.
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’.
Heirloom apples and Vermont artisan cheese are a match made in heaven.
Poverty Lane Orchards and Alyson’s Orchard in New Hampshire and Champlain Orchards in Vermont offer a good selection of heirloom apples.
Please ask Jane Booth for permission to reproduce her copyrighted photographs and/or writing. Email jane.booth.1@gmail.com or call (802) 866-3329. Jane has spent a good part of her career photographing and writing about gardens and small farms for Gardens Illustrated, Yankee Magazine, Country Living, Country Living Gardens, Better Homes & Gardens, Old House Journal’s New Old House, among others and Cape Cod Home where she produced an ongoing column and feature stories.
David Tansey founded The Landmark Trust USA in 1991. He is the past president of The Landmark Trust USA and The Scott Farm and was involved in every step of revitalizing Landmark Trust USA and Scott Farm properties.
Heirloom apple pie and Vermont cheddar cheese, a perfect pairing.
It’s lunch time and poor us, all we have to eat is a fresh-baked apple pie filled with the last of the apples gleaned in the fall — Bramley’s Seedling, England’s favorite baking apple originating in the early 1800s; Northern Spy a 1800s seedling from New York; and one of my favorite baking apples – Rhode Island Greening, a colonial apple from about 1650 discovered in Green’s End, Newport where a Mr. Green ran a tavern. The farm’s cooler has been turned off since December, yet these old timey apples are still firm and have held up wonderfully in long months of storage.
Bramley’s Seedling, England’s favorite heritage baking apple
My husband, David Tansey, loves making pie and because he is such a good pie crust maker I have stayed away from the task until now. I begged him for his recipe at breakfast and parcel it together but ask him to roll out the dough as it seems too wet (he knew it was just fine).
Northern Spy, a beautiful American heirloom apple perfect for a pie.
When my mentor left for work, I forged ahead with the filling making things up as I went along. In the refrigerator I found the balance of a small bottle of iced cider from the Monteregie region of Quebec and used it to moisten peeled apple slices letting them mull around in the sweet scent of concentrated fermented cider while I fiddled with the dough. Just before topping the pie I realize I haven’t added any flour or sugar to the mix of apples and sprinkle a tablespoon of each over the mound of slices. Simple.
Calville Blanc d’Hiver, the classic French baking apple has a crown shaped base. It is my absolute favorite when baking a tarte tatin.
The pie, much to my delight, is a success. My husband admires the way it looks it from the time he arrives home for lunch. Admires it more when he tucks into a slice. And says all things yummy when I suggest he try a bite with a piece of Grafton’s clothbound cheddar attached to his forkful of apples and crust. We are both beaming. The cheese adds a sharp tangy crumbly bite cutting into the sweet sureness of apple, flavors melding into a taste sensation. We try the same effect again with a creamy cheddar from Shelburne Farms, not as sharp but just as nice with the pie. Tasting the clothbound cheddar again I tell David the cave-aged mushroom mustiness would be an excellent foil to the carmalized sweetness of a tarte tatin made with Calville Blanc d’Hiver, a fine French cooking apple dating to 1598. We vow to do just so when the new crop of apples are ready for harvest.
So many heirloom apples to pick from – indeed what variety to put in the pie.
Please ask Jane Booth for permission to reproduce her copyrighted photographs and/or writing. Email jane.booth.1@gmail.com. Jane has spent a good part of her career photographing and writing about gardens and small farms for Gardens Illustrated, Yankee Magazine, Country Living, Country Living Gardens, Better Homes & Gardens, New Old House Journal, and Cape Cod Home where she produced an ongoing column and feature stories.
David Tansey is the founder of The Landmark Trust USA and past president of Landmark and The Scott Farm. He was involved in every step of revitalizing Landmark Trust USA and Scott Farm properties and loves using heirloom apples when he bakes a pie.
http://www.projectnative.org
“Nobody is a better landscaper than nature,” states Raina Weber, dirt-streaked and beaming from her Housatonic, Massachusetts, native-plant nursery.
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.
