Twilight Time

In May, more than a hundred
varieties of annuals awaited containers.
Double-click on any image to see
the slideshow at full-screen size.

From the middle of May through the end of August they are the ambulatory roving ambassadors of the garden.  Our containers filled with mixed annuals line the driveway, get massed and un-massed depending upon what is in bloom, fill in holes in beds where perennials have passed, and bring bright splashes of color to our deck where only containers can thrive.

At the height of the season, a
grouping of more than a dozen
containers are massed

The containers are inexpensive, single-season experiments for plants trying out for a permanent place in the garden scheme.  This year we welcomed back coleus ‘Big Red Judy’ for a triumphant return while deciding that a lobelia Laguna Sky Blue bloomed and passed far too quickly to be put on the ‘repeat’ list.  We discovered Kangaroo Paw (anigozanthos) and it immediately earned a gold star for its bloom-till-it-hurts attitude while fragrant nemesia (nemesia aromatic) became a staple in half a dozen containers.

More than a hundred different cultivars of annuals went into the creation of roughly thirty large container gardens.  Another twenty containers have fixed specimens – a loropetalum, a cape plumbago, a crape myrtle and an acuba, for example – that we overwinter in the garage because the shrubs (some now seven or eight years old) are not hardy to zones 5 or 6.  Our water garden plants, too, are overwintered; trimmed severely and placed in a bank of basement windows where they will hang on for seven long months.

By the end of September, the
annuals are fairly well shot

But come the beginning of September, the annuals are spent.  They have spent the summer on steroids; continuing doses of plant food to force blooms and heavy trimming to encourage branching.  By the middle of September, the sun no longer climbs directly overhead and, after the autumnal equinox, daylight shrinks at an alarming rate.

In each of the past five or six years, a September frost has provided a final answer to the question of ‘when should we take apart the containers’.  This year, while temperatures dipped into the upper thirties several times and frost nipped at our vegetable garden, our containers emerged in the morning unscathed.

Ballast that made pots lighter
is removed and cleaned for
use next year

Today was the day we chose to bring the container season to a close.  In a several-hours-long marathon, I placed containers in a cart and brought them, assembly fine fashion, to our ‘potting’ area.  There, Betty ruthlessly yanked out entire plants or broke off tops.  Depending on the size of the pot, either she or I dumped the pot into one of our transplant beds where she methodically tore apart roots, salvaged ‘ballast’ material for reuse next year, and spread the spent potting mix over the bed’s base of topsoil, where I then dug the two planting mediums together.  By next spring, the bed will feature well-aerated soil enriched with peat and vermiculite.

Containers await cleaning

Tomorrow, we begin the second part of the process: cleaning the containers with a mild solution of bleach to ensure that no insects overwinter with the pots that will hibernate in the basement until next May. Those that are destined for the garage will be inspected for both tiny hitchhikers and insufficient room for root growth.  By the end of the week, only a handful of the 50+ containers that were in the garden at the peak of the season will remain on view.

This container will
stay in place for the winter

Two of those will be a pair of cast iron urns that, at present, contain a vigorous coleus ‘Alabama Sunrise’, perennial strawberry (with fruit), and a calibrochoa ‘Lemon Slice’ that has been in continuous bloom since the second week of May.  When that hard frost hits, the coleus and calibrochoa will be taken out and evergreens will take their place.

If this sounds like a lot of work, it is.  But the time elapsed in taking down this part of the garden is a fraction of the weeks that are spent finding and assembling the right plants each year that make this a special part of our garden. 

Why You Should Never Let a Plant Go to Waste

The container garden of the year was never supposed to be one.

Start with the container itself.  For six years, it held a series of evergreens.  I say ‘series’ because there would come a point when either the evergreen grew too large for the pot or the evergreen needed to be pressed into service because a deer had ravaged an in-ground one and a replacement was needed.

Last year, the
container held an
arborvitae.  Note
the patina.

That was the case this past spring.  Scant snow coverage allowed deer to forage in our outer sidewalk bed, leaving one side of an arborvitae badly mauled.  When we pulled its replacement from out of the container, we found that the terra cotta had cracked in several places.  If not for a metal band around the top and the container mix and tree roots pushing outward, the container would be in several pieces on the ground.  We put the container aside to be disposed of.

April turned to May and container gardens were assembled – more than 60 in all.  At the end of May there were some leftover plants, including three torenia ‘Purple Moon’.  Here’s how Andrew’s Greenhouse describes the annual:

NEW! TORENIA fournieri. The Wishbone Flower is a leafy plant with small, dark green leaves and a plethora of lipped blooms, each with a wishbone-shaped marking. Flowers remind me of snapdragon florets. Low maintenance plants that are self cleaning; that's right, no deadheading! Does best in consistently moist, well-drained soil and partial to full shade.  'Purple moon' This fast-growing, long blooming trailer bears loads of large dark violet flowers. 6-10".

The container in late July.  Note
the change in patina.

Betty had purchased the torenia at Andrew’s thinking she would use them in a container program.  The day before she was to give the program, she noted that the plants had only a few insignificant blooms.  She set them aside in favor of a different plant.

At the end of May, nearly all other containers were filled and Betty was ready to call it a wrap.  As usual, I thought that every plant ought to find a home.  The torenia were now flowering nicely and starting to trail.  There were also several caladium bulbs that were beginning to sprout leaves.  I hauled out the broken container, put the pieces in place and gave Betty an expectant look. 

In return, Betty gave me one of her ‘why are you doing this to me?’ looks, but gamely filled the container.  She placed the caladium in the center and the torenia at the corners – as simple an arrangement as you’ll ever see.  We placed the container under an oak tree, principally because of the shade requirements of the caladium.

By mid-September, the torenia had
trailed down the side of the
container.  The flowers are prolific,
the plant self-cleaning.

What happened next was a joy to see.  The torenia quickly grew into a dense mat and began trailing down the sides of the container.  The caladium began putting up dozens of leaves.  Although the purple of the torenia did not play off of anything in the caladium, the overall effect was quite pleasing.  In the meantime, the green patina on the terra cotta container became vivid and multicolored, and the trailing flowers accented the effect.

Through July and August, the container continued to astound.  We kept the container well-watered and the torenia kept growing, producing large numbers of flowers.  Best of all (from my point) the flowers are ‘self cleaning’ – when they’re spent, they drop off rather than needing to be dead-headed.  The caladium’s leaves became ever more numerous and the height-to-container-size ratio was just right.

Chilly weather had taken its toll in the past week or so, but Betty and I agree that, hands down, this was the best container she created this season.  Which proves the adage, never let a plant go to waste.

The Class of 2012

That's me at Great Dixter, providing
scale to one of Christopher Lloyd's
container garden groupings

You can blame it in Christopher Lloyd.  No, not the mad scientist of Back to the Future; the other Christopher Lloyd, who made Great Dixter a ‘worth-a-journey’ garden in East Sussex.  Betty and I were there in May 2004 and it was on that day that Betty fell in love with container gardening.  And, not just pots with multiple kinds of flowering annals in them, but the idea of massing containers to create portable landscapes.  That’s me, at Great Dixter, providing scale for one of Lloyd’s compositions. (Double-click on any image to see it at full-screen size.)

This container is on our back
deck, and consists of coleus,
supertunias, a red grass and a
flowering maple.

And so each year we observe a ritual around our garden.  In early May, we go into our basement and retrieve maybe a dozen beautiful large pots from our collection.  We place them in the turnaround of our driveway.  Betty then goes off in search of annuals and perennials to fill them.  She creates a dozen exquisite containers; they are sited according to their color and texture.  We also pull another dozen plant-bearing containers that we have overwintered in our garage (a subject explored in depth in ‘The January Thaw’).  These containers, too, are placed around the property.  Once those two dozen containers are completed, Betty pronounces herself satisfied.  She is done for the year.

There are more than a dozen
containers in this grouping,
providing a seamless transition
between our driveway and a
perennial garden.

But there is more to the ritual.  When she is done I point to the leftover annuals and perennials that were not used in the creation of those containers and say it is a shame that we can’t have a few more.  After giving me her ‘why do you do this to me’ look, we go down into the basement and pull up a few more pots. 

At the same time, Betty does roughly six container gardening presentations for garden clubs and civic organizations (not including two at the Boston Flower & Garden Show this year).  Each demonstration requires that she put together five such containers.  She purchases more plants plus the lightweight pots that she uses for “road work”.  Inevitably, she brings home a few pots that she later judges to be “too heavy” or “not right” for her demonstrations.  She inevitably buys more plants than she will need for a demonstration in order to have exactly the right 'look' for the containers in her demonstration.  Oh, and she will go to sales when quality garden centers such as Andrew’s, Weston and Russell’s start marking down their plant.

Containers, many using
succulents, soften the sidewalk
and vary its width.

I will bring the preamble of this piece to a merciful conclusion:  right now, there are 61 containers scattered around our property.  Christopher Lloyd would be proud.

There’s a loropetalum that appears to have settled into its container for a long, happy life.  The acuba we purchased in Maryland last year quickly outgrew its container and, in the process of re-potting it, Betty found a daughter shrub which now has its own pot.  Our crape myrtle and Cape plumbago also are thriving in seasonal glory; Zone 8 shrubs summering in a Zone 5B world.

On the front porch, five containers
provide a mix of formal and
informal elements.

But it is the mixed containers that are the ‘wow’ part of the collection.  Now that July is here, they are in prolific flower and visitors can see what Betty had in mind when she first started putting plants together two months ago.  We are still mixing containers to provide height and texture contrast.  A water garden – actually, a four-container water garden – was completed just  this morning.

At a driveway turnaround, five
containers mix annuals
with shrubs (the acuba and
hydrangea).

These portable gardens provide bridges to our ‘permanent’ gardens, softening buffers for sidewalks and driveways, and focal points to pull the eye to corners of the garden that might otherwise escape attention.

They require maintenance: flowers need to be deadheaded just as in any garden; ‘thugs’ need to be trimmed back less they take over.  And, on hot summer days, each container can take a gallon or more of water to keep roots cool and damp. 

This container, likely in its last
year of use, mixes caladiums
with a prolifically flowering
vine.

And, finally, some containers are
there just to draw the eye to
corners of the property.

And in the End...

The gardening season drew to an abrupt close last evening as snow began falling in Medfield.  Through this strange autumn of never-ending rain, we had escaped without a frost – something that can happen as early as mid-September and that almost always occurs before Columbus Day. 

This year, though we’re down to under ten hours a day of sunlight, nighttime temperatures stayed mostly in the 40s.  The result was scraggly annuals that were too tired and light-deprived to bloom, but green nonetheless.  But because they had not been hit by frost, we left in place several containers that were foliage-centric, including one I highlighted in September.

The first snow of the 2011-2012
season spelled the end of this
container.  That's New England.

Well, all that’s over.  The photo at left is of the same container, taken last evening as wet, heavy snow overspread the area.  And, naturally, there’s a forecast of a couple of inches of additional accumulation for the weekend.

We’ve spent the past three weeks preparing the gardens for this event.  The perennials have been cut down and, in some cases, divided (or given the heave-ho as in the case of bearded iris).  The compost bins are overflowing and barrels of diseased plant material have gone to the dump.  With the exception of some beds in the rear gardens, we’re ready.

This morning, though, I realize that I’m never fully prepared for the onset of winter.  Even though November is just a few days off, I keep expecting to eke out another week of pleasant temperatures; or at least to not have to bundle up just to go out and get the newspapers in the morning.  Last evening was a reality check.  This is New England.  Get used to it!

A Great Autumn Container

Back in May, Betty put together some 50 container gardens.  Some contained a single specimen (a hydrangea, for example) but most consisted of from four to seven different cultivars, principally annuals, designed to provide spring and summer beauty around our garden.

It's like having something from a
Mediterranean villa on the back deck...

By September, nature takes its toll on most containers.  ‘Thugs’ take over, crowding out better behaved plants, leaving lopsided designs.  Those plants that cannot take summer heat (Lobelia, for example) wither and die.

But some containers come through the season in fine form and, occasionally, a few get even better with the passage of time, as though created with September in mind.

One of those containers has been on our back deck for the past four months, improving with age.  The dominant or ‘anchor’ plant is a coleus, a Proven Winners ‘Dipt in Wine’.  The tag said it would grow 20 inches to 36 inches; this one seems extraordinarily happy at the lower height.  Above it are a pair of plants to provide the correct height proportion for the container.  One is a Proven Winner cape mallow called ‘Slightly Strawberry’; the other is a Talinum ‘Limon’ with beautiful green-yellow foliage and a spray of tiny ‘berries’ in an airy halo.  At the base are two accent plants, a pink begonia and a Dianthus ‘Ideal Select Violet’.

The container looked great in May and terrific through the summer months.  Now, with cooler weather, it looks like it belongs in a Mediterranean villa.

No Focus Group Has Approved These Flowers

The Wall Street Journal recently published a fascinating article about an ‘annual arms race’ between Lowe’s and Home Depot to produce the most appealing plants for shoppers and the lengths to which each chain goes to in order to maximize market share.  One paragraph from that story jumped off the page to me:  it said both Lowe’s and Home Depot utilize focus groups to winnow hundreds of promising new cultivars down to the handful that will show up in the stores’ garden centers.

Let me play that one back:  the cultivars you see in the Big Box stores are the product of focus groups.

Metrolina Greenhouses, which provides
annuals to Lowe's and Home Depot

A focus group, for the uninitiated, is a panel of consumers created by a research firm to assess reactions to new products or concepts.  ‘Ordinary’ people are put in a room and asked to view and rate commercials, prospective product names or packaging design; or taste soups, barbeque sauce or colas; or… say which flower appeals to them more.  Do you find this flower offensive?  Which color is more soothing?

I suppose that’s why I don’t shop for flowers at Big Box stores.  I don’t want my choices limited by what a focus group determined was the most ‘cheerful’ daisy or the ‘friendliest’ shade of impatiens.  In fact, I don’t want either those impatiens or daisies in my garden.

Andrew's Greenhouse is not quite as
large, and focus groups don't
appear to be involved.

The catalyst for bringing up an article that appeared on April 27 is that Betty and I went shopping for flowers on Saturday.  We ventured 170 miles round trip (with gas at $3.89 per gallon) in order to purchase some $200 of annuals (and a few perennials) from Andrew’s Greenhouse in South Amherst, Massachusetts.  Why?  Because we wanted plants that would cause people to sit up and take notice.  We wanted plants that would ‘pop’ in containers.  We wanted plants with sizzle. 

It took two hours of meticulous comparison to find the annuals we wanted (or, to be completely truthful, that Betty wanted because she is the one who designs the containers into which these plant will go).  We grouped cultivars looking for memorable color arcs and juxtaposing flower and leaf sizes and shapes.  We endlessly examined individual plants seeking the one with the most buds and the best conformance. 

Part of our haul from Andrew's. 
 It will take abouttwo weeks to put together
 the first dozen or so containers.

Andrew’s, of course, does not sell every annual offered by every seed company or propagator.  I would judge the number of offerings at about 500.  But every cultivar is described in glorious detail in Andrew’s catalog and the plants in the retail greenhouse were grown on the premises, ensuring a disease-free purchase.  (You may recall that the ‘late blight’ that wiped out most of the northeast’s tomato crop in 2009 was traced to seedlings shipped to Big Box stores from southern greenhouses.)

Yesterday evening, Betty began the process of assembling those purchases into containers.  (Each container may be reconfigured half a dozen times and even a ‘final’ container is subject to editing.)  The beauty of what we purchased became evident as she worked when the unusual bumped up against more common annuals to create a garden in a pot that will grow more interesting as the plants grow together.  Not everyone would care for our choices.  Anyone with the same group of plants would do the containers differently, that is the beauty of individuality.  A beauty that I would believe is harder to imagination when all the plants have won the focus groups’ award of “least likely to offend”.

The Early Autumn Container Garden

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a container garden planted in May will, by the end of summer, be a sad-looking vestige of its spring glory. Sometimes, though, a lot of pruning and reasonable choice of plant material can yield a container that holds its own right into the autumn.

As noted in previous posts, Betty created something like fifty container gardens this spring. Some of them are necessarily ephemeral: lobelia is going to disappear with the summer heat no matter how much water and shade it is given. Salvia is going to get leggy. Also, some plants are thugs and will take over a container, relentlessly pushing out less aggressive specimens.

But some containers come through the season looking terrific. These photos, taken today (September 8), are of gardens that went through a torrid July and August yet survived looking, if not exactly like grown-up versions of their May incarnations, at least attractive. They were kept well watered and were pinched back regularly.  Double-click on any of them to get a full-page photo.

There are a pair of cast-iron urns by the front door that greet visitors. The dominant plant in the containers is a coleus ‘Pele’, a slow grower that never bolted. The terrific grass is a pennisetum ‘Fireworks’ that is still of a manageable size after nearly four months. The fragrant nemesia ‘Sunsation’ is somewhat the worse for wear but the strawberry vine that cascades down the side of the urn has looked great all summer. As a tip to container gardeners, Betty offers the advice that there should be an insulating layer between the metal of the urn and the soil inside it.

Many containers were moved over the course of the season, most often to fill in holes in various flower beds. One such is visible directly in front of the urn. There, a strobilanthes ‘Persian Shield’ provides a dramatic burst of purple and black, augmenting a heliotrope ‘Fragrant Delight’. At the base is a nice fringe of Dusty Miller (Senecio cineraria). As an aside, on the steps to the right is a light green and very fuzzy plecanthrus. Early in the season, it became home to a large frog which created a pleasant (to a frog) damp hidey-hole in the plant’s root mass. We’ve left it alone all season. The frog is still happily ensconced and doesn’t mind being periodically doused.

If I kept better track of tags, I could more fully identify the plants in the other containers pictured. One of the highlights of the garden is the grouping of five containers (at right) that soften a corner of our home. There’s an arborvitae ‘Berckmans Golden’ in a tall terra cotta pot. A smaller, identically shaped container holds a coleus ‘Kingswood Torch’ and a ‘Marguerite’ sweet potato vine (Ipomoea). Three more pots offer a variety of accent plants ranging from succulents to a trailing, nicely scented petunia. The vine behind the containers is a clematis ‘Virgin’s Bower’ that blooms in September.

Well-contained Enthusiasm

I was at the Chelsea Flower Show a few years ago, standing in a queue for drinks. Directly in front of me in line were two gentlemen, both silver-haired and attired in gray, chalk-stripe suits that spoke of both good tailoring and good breeding. They said little during those few minutes I was behind them, but one sentence continues to ring in my ears with a clarity undiminished by time.

“Penelope,” one of the men said to the other, and then paused for just a moment before continuing, “has a £100 a week perennial habit.”

He said this with neither anger nor regret in his voice. It was a statement of fact; tinged with opinion only in his use of the word, ‘habit’ in describing Penelope’s voracious gardening budget. I swiftly did some currency conversion in my head: at the then-current exchange rate, Penelope was buying up $182 a week worth of salvia, astilbe and hosta.

When I returned and handed Betty her drink, I related what I had just heard and I said, “Don’t ever again fret over what you spend on gardening. You will always be a rank amateur.”

We had a pounding rain here overnight and one of my jobs this morning was to empty saucers from the various containers around the property. Saucers with water in them mean containers can become waterlogged, which leads to root rot.

Somewhere along the way, I began counting the containers surrounding our home. I found 52 and am not certain I got them all.

Now, one or two are just for show – unplanted behemoths that are in perennial beds strictly as focal points. Some others are long-term homes to plants that we overwinter, such as a beautiful burgundy loropetalum or the stone planter given by Betty’s garden club that is home to a fern that returns majestically every May.

The core group of containers – medium and large terra cotta, glazed ceramic or high-quality foam ones – numbers about 35. Betty has been diligently planting them for the past month, filling them with an amazing array of mostly annuals but also including perennials, tropicals and a few shrubs; none of them common.

Those containers are scattered around the property, bringing color to otherwise bare areas of asphalt, concrete or rock. Some are awaiting permanent assignment, such as a large, colorfully planted pot that will sit atop a clutch of prominently visible daffodil greens once those greens have started to yellow later this month.

There are multiple containers along the sidewalk that will fill voids in the perennial beds as June bloomers pass. There are six containers on our deck, turning an otherwise drab structure into a colorful annex of the garden below it. Two matching metal urns are overflowing with color on either side of the front door. Large containers bring drama to the spaces between garage doors and still others fill an awkward, dark corner.

Does this count as a ‘container habit?’

Hardly. And, were it so, then I would be the principal enabler. Betty takes me plant shopping at her peril. I’m the one saying, “Don’t you want another of those?” And, at container sales, I’m the one piling the cart to overflowing, with Betty ordering me to put them back.

It isn’t even a container obsession. Rather, it’s an appreciation for what can be wrought by mixing plants of differing heights, bloom size and color into a small space, and then massing the resulting containers into a pleasing arrangement. It’s art using a different palette and medium.

So, to the gentleman at the Chelsea Flower Show, I say, “Hooray for Penelope.” I hope that she, too, is still creating art of a different kind somewhere in the U.K.

Overwintering Pots, Redux

Sometimes, a photo says it all.  Back at the end of January, I noted that we were overwintering a large quantity of containers with well-established perennials.  In the ground, such perennials would be expected to come back as a matter of course each year but in pots, their survival (not to mention that of the pot) was much less assured.

Beginning with the January Thaw, I've carted our containers outdoors on warm days, taking them back in at twilight.  There have been roughly ten days in February and March when the temperatures rose to at least 45 degrees and another spell of such weather (along with some rain) is due this weekend.

Does it work?  The picture at left is worth a thousand words.  Here are four of our perennial containers taken this afternoon.  There's perennial salvia and snapdragons, dianthus, and a hydrangea that's leafing out nicely.

These containers (and 25 of their brethren) will continue to come out on warm days until spring is firmly established in early May.  It will be an interesting comparison to see how these flower versus their in-ground cousins and the new perennials we buy for the 2010 season.

I'll try to continue to photograph this foursome ever few weeks.  The trick, of course, is to remember to a) keep them out of direrct sun while their foliage is tender and b) not to forget to bring them in at night.  Temperatures here are still reliably below freezing every night.

The Jungle Moves Indoors

I write these words a few days before Christmas with a large, unruly bougainvillea brushing the top of my head. To my right are lush orchids and more bougainvillea. I’m not spending the holidays on some exotic Caribbean island, however. There’s a foot of snow outside and the temperature is in the low teens. This tropical jungle is in my own home.

From May to early October, the gardens around my home sport a profusion of containers and our porch and deck are awash in greenery and flowers. This year there were more than forty container gardens ranging in size from 14-inch pots to 30-gallon behemoths. In our screened porch, dozens of individual plants were arrayed on trays and benches. On our deck, more containers and heat-loving tropicals provided color into September.

But when overnight temperatures dipped into the 40s, the tender plants began migrating indoors. The tropicals were the first to make the move, followed by hardier succulents, cyclamen and herbs. As annuals succumbed to frost, the containers that bore them were washed and stowed in the basement. The property has been bare of containers since early November.

Indoors, though, is a Noah’s Ark of the plant kingdom. They crowd in front of every window, especially those with a southern exposure. I share my office (above) with a rack of sun-thirsty plants plus two hanging bougainvillea. (You can see them in the topmost photo in their 'summer quarters'.)  The aforementioned orchids are in the hallway where there is a triple window. There are half a dozen neomarica, better known as walking iris, that were cut from a mother plant in late summer. They will grow through the winter, and be given away in the spring. Down in the basement where a bank of ground-level windows allow in feeble sun, a magnificent papyrus – rescued from our water garden – stands four feet tall and brushes up against the ceiling. Nearly a dozen spathiphyllum, commonly called the peace lily, are scattered around the house. There seems to be one in every room and all of them are currerntly in bloom.

It is out in the garage, though, that the extent of our plant asylum becomes apparent. Betty mixes perennials and annuals in containers, often with dramatic results. When she pulled apart those containers in October, many of the perennials showed well-developed root systems. She made the decision to winter over the best of the plants.

However, we do not have a greenhouse. What we have, instead, is a large, well-insulated garage that stays above freezing and has a large, southwest-facing window. There, up against the glass are huddled more than a dozen containers. There is an enormous, cattail-patterned concrete urn where a fern is going through its dormancy period. A white Italianate container holds a now-well-established trailing herichrysum petiolare, otherwise known as a licorice plant, that has found its hibernal equilibrium. Various salvia, verbena, and gaura have been sharply trimmed back but are holding their own and seem poised to survive a New England winter.

Logic says we should consider our plants disposable; chuck them into the compost pile as we do hundreds of annuals. But logic isn’t the be-all and end-all of gardening. Strange as it may seem to some people, many of these plants are old friends. The bougainvillea over my head (which also sheds leaves onto my keyboard) is more than a decade old. I know it well. Come February it will bloom a pale purple, much to my delight. The bracts will linger into late April. I could no more imagine leaving it out on the porch to freeze than I could do such a thing to our family cat. (Then again, plants never have ‘accidents’ on Oriental rugs.)

Being sentimental about a plant is, in my view, a very good trait. They bring us pleasure and prod our senses. They invoke memory. Sharing a window with a bougainvillea is a small price to pay for the reminder that spring will come again.

Big Red Judy

Big Red Judy died last night. She froze to death, succumbing to a merciless New England autumn that saw pre-dawn temperatures at our home fall to the upper twenties. She was, by our guess, about six months old.

Big Red Judy was a coleus, a Proven Selections specimen that came to us in a four-inch pot from one of our forays to Andrew’s Nursery in late April. We were attracted by its brilliant, crimson foliage and large leaves. Even before Big Red Judy got home, Betty already knew which pot she would go into: a massive white one with bas relief garlands and swags (fortunately made of foam). Big Red Judy was accented with some trailing light blue flowers and was awarded a highly visible spot at our driveway turnaround (that’s her on the right in mid-July).

Her dainty companion gave up the ghost with the heat of August but, by then, Big Red Judy was so large that she no longer needed an escort. She was soon twice as wide and twice as high as her container, but the foliage just kept looking magnificent.

Her lone problem was that she tended to topple in the wind. In late August, Big Red Judy was moved to Rock Garden 4 where she occupied a space left vacant by the annual mid-summer disappearance of a Dicentra spectabilis, an unusually large bleeding heart. There, protected from the wind, Big Red Judy attracted even more attention from visitors, a lone burst of color in a bed that is relentlessly green at that time of the year. She was the first thing your eye saw from the deck and she glowed in the late afternoon.

Starting in the last week of September, we began bringing annual-bearing containers close to the house in the evening, shuttling them back out to their customary positions only when the morning temperatures rose above 40 degrees. That way, we figured to keep our thirty-plus containers going for another month. It worked, up to a point. Several brushes with frost were successfully avoided.

This morning, though, there was ice on the turtle bird bath. I went out to inspect Big Red Judy. Her leaves were limp and drooped, a sign that the water in the veins of the leaves had frozen. A few leaves at the bottom of the plant were firm, but it was clear that her time was passed.

We buy annuals in New England with the full knowledge that we will be able to enjoy them for six months or less. We keep them on a diet heavy with fertilizer because we know there is only season to admire their flowers, color, or texture. But there is also always next April. Big Red Judy has earned a place in our garden repertoire, along with other coleuses like Inky Fingers and Alabama Sunset.

And that’s one of the joys of gardening: meeting old friends every Spring.

A Double-Header in the Bronx

New York City is 210 miles from my home and, on a Saturday morning, it’s a leisurely three-hour-and-change drive. This past Saturday, my wife and I spent a beautiful day visiting two old friends – Wave Hill and the New York Botanical Garden. Both are in the Bronx, which causes people’s eyes to bulge (you went where?!). These two gardens are must-sees for anyone who is serious about horticulture.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Wave Hill is that it is there. You walk from a modest parking area around a bend in a hedge and there, before you, is a vista that ought not to exist. A vast lawn stretching hundreds of feet sprinkled with specimen trees, a magnificent pergola studded with plants, and a vista across the Hudson River to the 500-foot-high Palisades that is unchanged from two centuries ago.

But then Wave Hill has an extraordinary history and enjoys unusual support. Located in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, it began, in 1843, as the ‘country estate’ of a grandson of a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Theodore Roosevelt lived there for two summers as a boy and Samuel Clemens was a resident for two years while the property was owned by a wealthy publisher. In 1903, a financier purchased Wave Hill and began acquiring adjacent properties, ultimately assembling 28 riverfront acres. The property passed to the City of New York in 1960 and is run today as a city-owned ‘cultural institution’. But it is hardly an impoverished institution: as of their last annual report, Wave Hill held cash and marketable securities valued at $21 million.

The Great Lawn, with its flights of eminently movable, tall-backed wooden chairs, is the dominant feature when you first see Wave Hill. This is Riverdale’s ‘front porch’, so to speak. Dozens of people read books and newspapers or chat with friends, oblivious to the stunning backdrop. If there were no gardens, Wave Hill would be worth the visit, just for that glorious view of the river and the high-rise-free cliffs beyond.

But there are gardens. Imaginative ones large and small. The pergola is a study in the use of containers. It is a riot of colors and textures and much of it is provided by dozens of containers holding everything from full-grown fruit trees to cascading, flowering vines. In another part of the park is a monocot garden – one comprised entirely of plants such as grasses, grains, banana plants and taro that produce a single leaf from each seed instead of the more prevalent two – which in turn surrounds an aquatic garden. It is intelligent in its design and intriguing in its execution. There is a flower garden – tiny for so large a park but packed with hundreds of annals and perennials. The layout is a formal grid but plants spill over into walkways producing a glorious jumble. There is an herb garden and an elliptical garden, each a fascinating space. Perhaps best of all, there is a container garden filled with Alpine plants. The containers – concrete cubes mostly – would be plug-ugly except for the riot of tiny plants they hold and the imaginative arrangement of those cubes. They stack upon one another and spread out line an Alpine meadow. It is a wonderful space.

I have been to Wave Hill perhaps half a dozen times and each visit brings something new to explore. On this visit, for the first time, I explored a woodland trail that tacks down the hillside toward the Hudson. It brought me by an unmarked, half-acre-sized swatch of land that appears to have been given over to seed-eating birds. It is a mass of Rudbeckia, Vernonia noveboracensis (New York State ironweed), Solidago, and Echinacea. Every garden should offer something new with each visit. Wave Hill never disappoints.

The New York Botanical Garden may be the most exquisite public garden in the U.S. It is lavishly endowed and continually being renewed. Its horticultural staff has the funds to Do Things Right and its marketers continually dream up events to pull in the crowds. Every public garden that has ever bemoaned poor attendance needs to send someone to the Bronx to see how it’s done.

Seeing NYBG properly takes days. We had a limited itinerary: to see the Rockefeller Rose Garden in its summer glory and take a walk through the Rock Garden looking for ideas of how to improve our own.

During the interminable rains of June, multiple rose specimens were hit by fungal disease and the NYBG staff belongs to the when-in-doubt-rip-it-out school of floriculture. Seeing several linear feet of mulched, empty beds is startling in such a garden but a wise move on the part of those who tend the garden. The signs promise a return of new specimens. But the color of everything else made those empty beds almost unnoticeable. If there is a scheme to the arrangement of rose varieties in the garden it escapes me. It’s just a wonderful, formal space that no home gardener could or should ever try to replicate. It’s the reason why there are public gardens. It’s the reason why you have to see the New York Botanical Garden.