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.
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’.
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.
To cover the demise of early spring foliage, plant lots of hostas in all their many foliage shapes, from heart-shaped to cupped and wrinkled. As the hostas emerge, their leaves will fill bare spaces.
There are many varieties of ferns for the shade garden including the delicate maidenhair with black stems supporting finely cut bright green fronds and the Japanese painted fern with burgundy red veins radiating to a pale whitish gray-green.
While Betsy and E.B. Wilson work with a peaceful palette, it doesn’t mean that all places shady need to be tempered. Foliage plants for shade can be a cacophony of color. Coleus are exotic annual clowns with leaves splashed in daring combinations of burgundy and chartreuse.
Rice is nice, especially when grown in Vermont’s cold climate! I was thoroughly captivated with every step of the process and was proud when I had a chance to step into the paddy and plant seedlings alongside Takeshi and Linda Akaogi.
Jane Booth: New England Gardens 