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.
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.
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.
Stately maples on town greens and back roads suddenly sport buckets when it is sugaring time
A sweet heavenly fog permeates the sugarhouse. Scent memories conjure up cotton candy and caramel apples – but I am smelling something more earthy, spicy, an aromatic sweetness that makes me hungry – not for pancakes (as it must for others) but for roasted pork tenderloin and winter squash and butter and drizzles of caramelized maple syrup.
Steve stokes the fire under the evaporator to keep up a steady boil
There is a roar and a blast of heat as Steve Glabach, a second generation sugar maker, opens the fire doors on the evaporator, a huge compartmentalized maple sugaring pan where just collected sap boils and bubbles. I’ve entered a scene from Macbeth – “double, double toil and trouble; fire burn and cauldron bubble.”
A hot fire is needed to boil sap in the evaporator pan
And toil doth the sugarmaker while the fire burns and the sap bubbles! Maple sugaring season is short and harried. Sap begins an annual dance in maple sugar trees, Acer saccharum (think sucrose), in late winter when days begin to warm while nights still turn to freezing. You can be assured that folks from hereabouts in northern New England will claim “it’s sugaring time!
Stately maple trees lining back roads and town greens will suddenly sport buckets.
Sap spouts (spiles) through the ages from hand-fashioned wood to the ubiquitous plastic
Groves of maple trees, called a sugarbush in maple sugaring terms, will be traditionally tapped with spiles (spouts) and buckets or with a modern system of tubing (pipeline) running from tree to tree and a vacuum pulling sap to a central collection point.
Traditional and modern methods of collecting sap in a Vermont sugarbush
Steve Glabach and his wife, Maria, of Dummerston, Vermont use both systems and their children, Ted and Theresa, work alongside them during the short season as do other family members, friends, and volunteers.
Gathering sap from traditional buckets
I spent part of a day following the frenzy and was exhausted watching a young volunteer crew rushing through the sugarbush gathering sap from buckets and sloshing off to fill a storage tank pulled by a tractor.
Volunteers, family, and friends empty sap collected from buckets into a storage tank
The tractor took off down the road and pulled behind the sugarhouse where a gravity fed line brought in all the watery goodness.
When maple sap is boiled down, water vapor forms and pours out of windows built into the top of the sugarhouse
The Glabachs, like many other sugar makers, use a reverse osmosis machine to assist in making maple syrup – it concentrates the sap for processing in a evaporator set over a heat source – an arch, or combustion chamber. The Glabachs use wood to fire their arch and it is the combination of wood smoke and steam escaping from the sap that smells so delicious.
“double, double, toil and trouble; fire burn and cauldron bubble”
Days are long and nights are longer during this short sweet season. The fire must be stoked to continue the boil drawing water from the sap and as the sap turns to syrup a constant vigilance must be kept to keep the syrup from burning and to draw off the syrup as it finishes.
Steve Glabach demonstrating how the syrup thickens and comes off the spoon in a sheet
Maria Glabach in a sweet-smelling cloud of goodness
Ted Glabach pouring just drawn off syrup into one of many filtration systems used in the making of syrup – a compression system that will filter out the last large bits of minerals resulting in a sugar sand.
Sugar sand – it looked good enough to eat but we didn’t try it … the “sand” comes from a final filtration of the syrup and is filled with minerals
Maria and Steve Glabach and a photo of Steve’s dad with his sugaring “team”
Steve Glabach’s father collecting sap with a team of horses and a sled
Colby is not only a friend but a trusted assistant in the Glabach sugarhouse
The Glabachs keep samples from each day they make syrup, note the different colors – light is Fancy, dark is Grade B
A few maple sugaring facts from The Proctor Maple Research Center of The University of Vermont and the Vermont Maple Sugar Makers Association
Vermont’s forests are filled with maple trees, approximately 1:4. The higher sugar content in the sap, the less sap needed to make syrup – the rule of thumb is 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. Maple syrup is good for you: calcium, manganese, potassium, and magnesium and full of antioxidants too!
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.
Jane Booth: New England Gardens 