Prune Up the Hollies

Such cold weather. It never gets out of the teens in the daytime, and I wake up to single digit temperatures in early morning that make me want to pull the comforter up and have my coffee in bed.

For several seasons now I have known that the branchy winterberry hollies (Ilex verticillata) in the back garden need some work.

They need to be shaped, limbed up, and opened up a bit. Here's a great example to give me an idea of what I am after:

BB Barnes Garden Center in Arden, NC -- found on Hortitopia

I have already lopped off wayward long stems that were getting in the way or overtopping other plants. But what I really need to do is some selective pruning from below.

In my garden, the one on the left needs work. The one on the right is narrower and has been lopped over the years, but could use some finesse pruning too.

There is a third winterberry holly to the left of the shot above, out of the picture, and that needs the most trimming from below.

Winter is the time to do it, when the branches are most visible. It has to warm up a bit first, though.

I need to eliminate the branches that want to arch out and droop over. Winterberry hollies look better as upright forms.

I keep such careful track of what I have planted, but I did not record what cultivar of Ilex verticillata these plants are. I am guessing 'Red Sprite' as they seem to be smaller. I got them at Gledhill and planted four in random spots along the back of the yard in 2007 (but took one out later).

I wish I had massed mine together as they are in the photo from the NC garden center above. It makes a real impact with five of them in a stand, especially after they have been shaped more narrowly and thinned out a bit.

Because Weeds

So much of gardening in my part of the world involves getting rid of plants. Constant, vigilant, effortful plant eradication.

I live in one of the most densely populated parts of the country, but it was all hacked out of hardwood forest over several centuries and despite population pressure and sprawl, it wants to be forest again.

Not an inch of ground in southern New England tolerates being bare. It started out as vast white oak forests, and then, after the European settlers had cleared so much of it for farms, native red maples and poison ivy moved in where sunny open ground was left untended.

Now, it is the aggressive foreign-introduced plants that are moving in: autumn olive, Oriental bittersweet, multiflora rose, tree of heaven, Norway maples and other invasive competitors.

It is astonishing how quickly dirt becomes weeds becomes brambles and then becomes a shrubbery on its way to reforestation. It only takes few seasons from weeds to forest.

I get tired of hearing gardeners (myself among them) constantly complain about weeds. We read books about design, we pore over pictures of paths and seating areas, we lust after the botanical marvels we want to plant, but we spend our days taking out weeds, or fretting over not getting them out fast enough or often enough.

We garden in a state of constant agitation. We are barely in control. It is hard to sit and contemplate life in our gardens, because, you know, weeds.

I read a couple books this winter on Islamic gardens. What is strikingly different about them is that they exist for sitting, contemplating and experiencing the calm of creation.

They are not walking gardens (it's too hot there to be active outdoors), they are not even visual experiences, although they are artistically beautiful.

They are formal, enclosed spaces you sit in, quietly and contemplatively, using all your senses to experience God's paradise. They are oases not just from the harsh landscape outside the garden wall, but also spiritual refuges.

That is their purpose, and all design and plantings and hardscape and water features are built for exactly that use of the garden. You sit, you visit with people, you eat and rest in the garden. You carefully encourage flowers and trees to grow, using ingenious irrigation systems.

Balance and harmony reign.

Here, in our gardens that seems impossible.  Yes, we have benches to sit on. But our gardens are action spaces -- paths lead somewhere, curved garden beds wander, lawns exist for play areas, at least in theory.

And the constant need to pull out as many unwanted plants as you can in a day means that even when we have a bench to sit on in a quiet nook of the garden, we can't sit still.

The garden here is never, not even for a day, in balance. It is always aggressively growing toward something else.

It's not that an Islamic garden is work-free. Achieving perfect balance and harmony does mean effort -- the gardener has to irrigate and prune and plant and nurture the garden. But it is effort toward creating, and it is garden work that celebrates growing and fruitfulness.

Here our effort is toward eradicating what wants to grow. Gardening in New England involves eliminating plants and always fending off the agitation of being overrun.

Our gardens are rewarding and beautiful, but the word "battle" comes to mind more than "harmony."

After learning so much about Islamic gardens, I am struck by how different gardens in other parts of the world are -- not just how they look or are designed, but how completely differently we experience them and what it even means to have a garden some place other than my own spot on the globe.

Out of Season

Minus 1 degree when I woke up this morning. The unheated porch, where container plants are supposed to be protected while they winter over, is 25 degrees.

This is cold, but last winter was tough on many plants for a long, extended time, and the two rounded heath shrubs along the front walk were very hard hit. In early April last year they emerged from winter brown, desiccated and dead looking.

They are Erica darleyensis 'Ghost Hills' and March or April is their season to bloom with tiny pink flowers all over. But they did not bloom -- they were barely alive.

However, they went on to recover, and were tidy green buns by summer, no worse for the wear. Their complete revival was surprising.

Now this surprises me too -- they are blooming in January! This is way out of sync.

They both are covered in flowers, just covered, and looking grimly cheery on a winter day.

They look so out of season blooming under the Christmas wreaths which are still up (I'll take them down soon. I promise)

Because they were prevented from blooming while they recovered from their terrible winterburn last year, are they now confused about the season? Will they bloom as they are supposed to next April?

Erica is sometimes called winter heath, but that means they bloom in late winter, or early spring in the colder part of their range, which is what we are here in zone 5. 

I don't think it means they should be flowering so profusely while the Christmas wreaths are still up.

Injured

The warmth that was promised for Sunday never materialized and instead we got a full day of frozen fog. The temperatures forecast to be in the 50s hovered one degree above freezing all day.

Now, mid week, it is even colder, in the teens. It's so January.

panoramio.com

The day after Christmas I opened the blinds in the bedroom and was face to face with a deer standing right at the patio wall, just a few feet from the window. Deer come into the yard, but not usually so close to the house in daylight.

It was badly injured. The right back leg was torn open and bloody. Bones were visible. The deer hobbled off on three legs, awkwardly. It was a very unsettling sight.

I assumed it would die of its injury or soon be taken down by a bobcat or coyote.

This week our neighbors called to say the three legged deer was on their patio, the injury visible and the compound fracture still open. It's been almost two weeks since we saw it and it is still very much alive, very much injured, and seems to be sticking unnaturally close to houses in the neighborhood.

Our neighbor called the state department of environmental protection - Connecticut DEP -- expecting, what? That they would come out and do something? Euthanize it?  But the DEP simply said deer get injured, deer live, and there are three legged animals surviving just fine in the woods. Nothing to do.

I fret all the time about getting rid of the deer who are so destructive to my gardens. But I certainly don't want any animal to be hurt so grievously or to suffer.

The injured deer in our yards was likely hit by a car. It could have been a predator attack, but I doubt it. Broken bones indicate it was struck hard by something, and deer crossing the road around here are a constant hazard. I only pray the driver of the car wasn't hurt.

I don't know if I hope this one lives a three legged life in the woods or succumbs quickly in this cold, bitter January weather.

Bracken's Brown Beauty

It snowed all afternoon yesterday, and it was pretty to watch from inside the house. Today is expected to get very warm, into the high 50s!

The new year has started with good news and bad -- the bad is that Jim has the flu. We still haven't made it up to Mass. to see his daughter and husband for Christmas, he's been too sick to go. So our tree is still up, wrapped presents under it, waiting for the day when he can rally. It's been a long haul for him and he is miserable.

The good news is I won $80 on a lotto wordplay scratch ticket New Year's Eve.

That's never happened.

In other lucky happenings, I have long wanted to plant a cold hardy southern magnolia called 'Bracken's Brown Beauty', and I may finally have the room for it. The first one I saw was in Lee May's former garden in Connecticut. This photo doesn't show it, but the afternoon light was tickling it just so, and it was lit up and sparkling.

In youth it is open, like the sweetbay magnolia, and Lee had, of course, pruned his quite a bit for openness.

It has velvety mahogany brown undersides that give it a rich look.

In maturity this can be a big dense tree, 30 feet tall, bulky but narrow, like this very old one at Wave Hill in New York.

I spent a lot of time thinking about where to put such a large dark evergreen tree. It is narrow for a magnolia, and upright, but it does take up some room. I could not think of anywhere that it would not overwhelm. I couldn't come up with a plan to put one in my garden.

Then, in December, we had the two struggling blue spruces removed from the right side of the berm. It opened up a lot of space next to the river birch there.

At first I thought to just plant more spicebushes (Lindera benzoin), and let their wide spreading mid level woodsy look fill in the open area. I still like that idea.

But then. .  . inspiration. I could put a 'Bracken's Brown Beauty' there.

Growing in New England - Rockman50 photobucket

But wait, won't it get too big there and recreate the crowding issue that doomed the spruces?

Well, yes. Maybe not.

It won't mind shade from the river birch -- the spruces didn't cope with that, but this magnolia wants a little shade.

It is narrower than the spruces ever were, although still large. It can be pruned and shaped, at least early on, which the spruces never could.

It will counter the dense visual weight of the remaining three spruces on the other end of the berm.

It's evergreen, so it will provide the screening that the spruces did.

I've always wanted one.

I am talking myself into this.


Here is a great profile of Bracken's Brown Beauty by Louis Raymond (The Plant Geek). He is in Rhode Island, and raves about the cold hardness and ability to handle snow loads of this variety of magnolia -- but R.I. is just a teeny bit warmer, solid zone 6, and he has his against the house, very protected.

January Promises

Is it time for resolutions? Is it January 1?

Is it the time of year to make promises to myself that I will or will not keep?

Well, okay then.

Resolution #1
I will not plant so many things so close together any more. I will not crowd large woody plants and forest sized trees together in small spaces. I will not cram things in.

This resolution will be broken as soon as the weather warms in spring and I am ready to plant. I know I can keep this resolution from January until May, and I am pretty proud that I can stick to my guns all winter. Come spring, however, this promise is toast.


Resolution #2
I resolve to net the blueberries this year and harvest a crop.

This involves a PVC pipe structure covered in netting that can be removed in order to get to the blueberries. It is costly and has all the earmarks of being unworkable, therefore I am willing to try it.

Resolution #3
I promise myself I will be more patient. I will wait.

Seedlings and annuals that are planted out in the garden in early May will sulk until warmer weather arrives.

Vegetables and herbs potted up in containers in May outside will do nothing, simply nothing, until summer arrives.

May is not a gardening month.

It is a waiting around for warmer weather month.


Resolution #4
Stake the floppy things before they fall over.

I do this every year -- I wait until I am on a morning walk around the garden in mid-summer, whereupon I realize the sundrops are lying in the mud and the anemones are prostrate. Then I grab some spindly stick things and tie some thin stringy stuff around them and manage to break off most of the plant wrestling it upright.

After these efforts the floppy perennials, sticks, and strings all lie back down on the ground together.

It's not an equipment failure, although I need to invest in real stakes and strong metal hoops and real twine or something. It's a timing issue.

I promise myself I will do this earlier and not wait until everything is already too far gone to pull back upright, or the ground is too hard and dry to push any stakes into.


Resolution #5
I won't plant things that fall over.

Except big tall nicotiana sylvestris. I want that. At almost 5 feet tall it needs to grab onto something to stand up.

Not only does the big tobacco plant need a stake, but the orange blackberry lilies
behind it do too -- they lie down flat across the lawn in late summer.

And the taller dahlias, they need some stakes. And the perennials I already have that will come back will still need staking.

And the baptisia that is in too much shade and gets floppy will need some help.

And  . . . .
              . . . .  am I already breaking this resolution?

It's Gone Viral

I'm a little uncomfortable about this picture and not sure what to do about it.

In 2010 I went with my neighbors to a garden tour of several private gardens in a nearby town. I took pictures, mostly to show myself what I could accomplish in my own garden.

I don't remember now what the addresses were or the names of the people who opened up their gardens for strangers to tour.

Kit drove, so I don't even recall the driving directions to get to any of them.

I pinned this one photo to my Pinterest board to show me what my own climbing hydrangea would look like after several years. It's been a helpful picture, especially since it shows how the lower limbs were pruned up, and my own plant is starting to look like this now.

Putting it on Pinterest meant others could see it and pin it to their boards too. It's my photo, I own it, I posted it knowing others could duplicate it, and, thinking only a few if any might re-post it, I didn't mind.

But then something disturbing happened.

Hundreds and hundreds of people started re-pinning this shot. It's all over Pinterest now, and once a picture achieves a certain level of distribution, further re-pins increase exponentially. After four years, this picture is being posted constantly on people's boards.

What disturbs me is that this is someone's house. I own the photo, but it's of a private home. I don't know the people, and they don't know a picture of their house is all over Pinterest. Some day they will see it out there and will say "hey!! that's my house!"

I could remove it from my board, but it has been pinned so many times that it's now being repinned from sources multiple times removed from my original post. I've lost control of it.

It isn't particularly revealing -- it's not like the address shows or the front of the house is recognizable, and nothing even identifies what part of the country it's from.

But the whole viral posting thing is making me uneasy. I would hate to go on a garden tour and be told "please, no pictures". But I can see what the pitfalls are when private gardens and homes are photographed.

Issues

There were some issues getting our solar panels started (there was an electrical short), but they were finally fixed and the system was activated on December 11.

Since December 11 we have barely seen the sun.

Days are so short leading up to Christmas, and the weather remained cloudy, gloomy and overcast every day. There was a bit of sticky snow that covered them even after the rest of the roof melted.

It's been nothing but steely gray skies and simply no sun. Day after day.

A spot of sun on Christmas day and finally some visible sky today, but it was almost as if our solar panels had shut down the sun.

Could that be? Correlation or causation? Hard to tell.

Two days before Christmas men with chainsaws came. They took down the struggling spruces on the berm. It needed to be done, but the minute those big bulky trees were felled, I panicked. Bare space.

These are the two that came down.

Now there are no spruces flanking the river birch. The scene looks a little grim on a wet gray day.

We originally planted five dense spruce trees in a staggered row in 2005 to screen us from the road and houses behind. We added little pyramidal blue hollies in between each spruce. Later I added two big rangy river birches. And some spicebush shrubs. Over the next 9 years it all got way too crowded.

But I loved the complexity and lushness of this berm as it all grew together, and it really did screen our view. There was a brief moment a year or two ago when all the plants were in harmony, the right size next to each other.

It looked especially nice in winter. Not as crowded then as in the height of summer when the birches and yellowroot and spicebushes were in full leaf.

But plants grow. By early 2014 we had to take out the holly bushes that had been planted in between each spruce. They were too crowded.

I kept cutting back the spicebushes on the back of the berm, and I hacked off river birch branches all the time to get them off the spruces. The spruces succumbed to branch dieback in these conditions, and the two on the right were becoming bare.

Now the berm is asymmetrical -- there are still three closely grouped on the left side, but the right half of this raised area has only the river birch and some empty ground.

I think I will get several more spicebushes (Lindera benzoin) and add them to the two that I had stuffed in behind the now felled spruces. I'll make a grove of lindera, which can get quite large and spreading.

Here are the two on the back of the berm, after hacking these back for a couple years to keep them away from the spruces.

And here is one we saw at Cornell Plantations that had never been pruned.

I think these wide spreading large shrubs under the river birch will fill out the empty side of the berm. In a group they will add bulk to counter the three remaining spruces on the left, although they are deciduous and will be open and bare in winter.

They will form a middle height between the ground cover yellowroot and the tall river birch. They are woodsy, which is the look I still want for this berm. They will get big enough to screen the road when in leaf.

They are slow growers, though, which will drive me crazy waiting and I will be tempted to plant other things among them to "fill in" and then I'll have the same problem with crowding as before.

I have such issues with overstuffing my gardens.

I Think I'm Ready

Christmas cookies are baked, stuffed into tins and tupperware, chilling on the unheated porch.

This year I made the traditional anise flavored decorated sugar cookies, gingerbread men, and a new orange-cranberry cookie recipe that is intensely tart and sweet.

I made chocolate peppermint cookies (two kinds) that involved four attempts and two failures before acceptable chocolate peppermint results were produced.

The tree is up, the wreaths are hung outside, and I finally found the scented balsam candles I bought years ago.

The plane tickets are bought, the beds are made. Prodigal sons just need to arrive.

The step daughter and her husband are hunkering down -- he's recovering from surgery a few days ago -- so we don't know when Christmas with them will occur, but it will occur. Later, but it will occur. Santa says so.

Cards have been sent, donations have been made. UPS has been here every day. Wrapping paper and glitter have been strewn about, and Scotch tape has been stuck to things.

The bread machine has been retrieved from its banishment to the basement years ago, and bread is rising. Cinnamon bread, aromatic and heady and full of sweet carbs.

Blessings have been endowed and blessings have been received. All year long.

I am thankful.

I am ready.

Sounds and Sights

The other night, about 11 p.m., we were lying in bed when we heard a loud ka-bang on the metal bulkhead door that leads to our basement.

The hatchway door is right outside the bedroom wall (the a/c unit is too -- do builders think about these things when they install equipment that could be placed anywhere?)

We sprang out of bed, flipped on the outside light, and what to our wondering eyes did appear but a startled deer fleeing around the corner of the house. It had been doing something nefarious right outside our bedroom while we slept just feet away. Then it was spooked, probably jumped sideways, and its hooves clattered on the hollow metal and scared all of us.

Earlier in the week, in the daytime, we saw a buck with a headful of antlers standing very alertly in the yard. Then we saw a doe a few feet away in the meadow. For about twenty minutes we watched as she moved a little, and he followed.

She wandered left and then he did, right behind her. She moved up the slope and stopped, and he moved up the hill and stopped too. She ambled off toward the neighbors and the buck ambled right along after her. She kept moving away, then stopping to make sure he was following.

The bobcat has been around too, hunting in our yard. These photos are grainy because Jim took them through the window, from inside, but the bobcat was just twenty-five feet away from the house, at the edge of our small lawn.

There was some stalking going on, and crouching and pounce-readiness, but whatever caught his interest escaped and after a while he slowly moved on. Actually, we don't know if it's a he or a she.

The other wildlife that uses my yard has not been seen, but they leave calling cards. The coyote has not been sighted recently but it has been leaving piles of scat on the curved footbridge over my dry creek bed. Always a pile on the bridge .... use the weedy meadow, dang it, and don't make me clean the bridge off.

The black bear has been around but I have not seen it, and I hope it's hibernating now. In summer the bear left a humongous pile of droppings smack in the middle of the lawn. It was clearly a bear's work, full of seeds and berries and of a size you cannot imagine. I had to get the snow shovel out to clean up.

I like to see the wildlife around us, but not so much when they come into the lawn or up to the house. And when they clomp on the metal basement door, making godawful banging and clattering noises in the middle of the night, that's clearly too close.