Fences, Liquid and Otherwise

Imagine for a moment that the third grade from your local elementary school stopped by to visit your garden – not just one class, but the entire third grade. Now, imagine that they all simultaneously upchucked in your garden. Tossed their cookies. All 200 of them. Got that imagine firmly in your head?

You now have an idea of what it is like to be around a fresh application of ‘Liquid Fence’. My apology for the graphic nature of the preceding paragraph, but the Internet does not yet have (at least not to my knowledge, anyway) a smell-sharing component and, if Steve Jobs is working on such an app, he would best put Liquid Fence on the ‘we-don’t-want-that-out-there’ list.

I write all this because, at seven o’clock this morning, Betty applied Liquid Fence to our garden. It took two gallons of spray to do everything. Early May is when the garden truly comes alive with hundreds of hosta and all manner of other tender shoots breaking the surface. These ‘tender shoots’, in turn, represent Sunday brunch at the Four Seasons for the local deer and rabbit population.

Bambi can eat a couple of thousand
dollars worth of plants in an hour.

After a few hours, the Liquid Fence dries and, to us humans, the smell becomes almost undetectable. To deer and rabbits, it remains not only detectable but extremely unpleasant. In my observation, even two weeks after application, deer walk up to a tasty plant and then walk away. (There are multiple brands out there that contain the same basic ingredients – putrescent egg solids and garlic. We have also used Bobbex with similar results.)

Liquid Fence and its ilk are not cheap. We buy gallon-sized jugs of concentrate that yield 16 gallons of sprayable product. That gallon jug bears a price tag of $126. At retail, those two gallons of spray cost $16.

But $16 is roughly the cost of one very nice hosta or two attractive perennials. In our yard, one deer could, in an hour’s time, munch through several thousand dollars worth of plants. In the case of our neighbors, each year the deer come through their yard and ‘lollipop’ a pair of very expensive evergreens grown in containers. Each spring, their landscaper replaces those evergreens at a cost of, say, $300 for the pair. The Liquid Fence starts looking cheap after a while.

This is a deer clearing a five-foot
fence.  As you can see, it did
so with room to spare.

At this time of year, because plants are growing rapidly, we will spray every two to three weeks. Come July, we’ll slow down to an application every month. We’ll spray once in November then let snow cover do the work over the course of the winter. That November application will fairly well empty out the gallon of concentrate.

The alternative is a deer fence. From a standing start, a deer can easily clear a three- or four-foot fence and nearby is a photo of one jumping over a five-foot fence. So, things called ‘deer fences’ are netting that rises eight to ten feet. They must encircle a property to be effective, which means your driveway now will have gates. The cost? A website called ‘Deerbusters’ offers a kit consisting of stakes and 100 feet of seven-and-a-half-foot fencing for $259. On that basis, deer-proofing our two acres would cost right around $3100. You can buy a lot of Liquid Fence for that kind of money.

Spring Rituals

I laid the soaker hoses for our hosta garden this morning. It seemed the perfect day to do such a chore because in the past week almost the hostas have all emerged from their winter slumber. But burying soaker hoses wasn’t the ‘spring ritual’ I had in mind. Rather, the annual ritual is trying to match hosta plant markers with the shoots coming out of the ground.

Our hosta walk in season.

Fact: No one has walked in the hosta garden since late October when our final task of the season in that part of the property was to firmly push the steel and aluminum markers into the soil next to the remnants of the plants. We were conscientious in our efforts because we have a lot of different hostas in our garden – close to a hundred named varieties. Each plant has a marker and each marker has one of those labels with the variety printed out on clear plastic tape. (I know what you’re thinking: I need a hobby. Well, this is my hobby.)

Exactly why we go to the trouble of making labels is unclear, except that now, when we visit a nursery, we can resist buying a hosta ‘Lakeside Cupcake’ because we already have one. We know we have one because we made a label for one last year. Except unless we think what we have back at home is ‘Lakeside Cupid’s Cup’ or ‘Lakeside Cup Up’. Which means we may well go home with the hosta anyway because it’s so darn cute.

This is what our tags are
supposed to look like.

Fact: Back in October, every hosta marker was in exactly the right spot. Fact: For much of this past winter, the hosta garden was under two or more feet of snow. So, please explain to me why, this morning, there were dozens of plant markers lying loose in the hosta beds?

Betty says the rational explanation is that the ground freezes and thaws and pushes the markers out of the ground. I could buy that theory if the markers were adjacent to the plants to which they belong. I happen to know for a fact, though, that hosta ‘Mohegan’ is a giant brute of a plant that hugs the foundation of the house (and may yet push the house out of the way in order to accommodate its version of Manifest Destiny). Why, then, is the marker for hosta ‘Mohegan’ in among the ones for the cute little miniatures twenty feet away? And why is there a pile of five markers?

Personally, I blame the squirrels and the raccoons. (“Hey, neat plant marker. I think I’ll pull it out and put it in this pile.”) More likely, knowing the raccoons in our neighborhood, the markers are used in lieu of poker chips. (“I see your ‘Francee’ and raise you a ‘Kabitan’ and a ‘Whirlwind’.) That might explain the piles of them – raccoons abandoning poker night when they’re called home for dinner and to do their homework. Their homework being their endless but fruitless efforts to break into our composter.

We have not created a 'Golden
Tiara' tag in probably ten
years.  Yet one turned up in
the hosta walk this morning.

There are also hosta markers that have either lost that clear plastic label over the course of the winter or – and this is the scary part – returned to our garden from some parallel universe. Once upon a time (when we had only twenty or so named hostas), we were content to identify our cultivars with a black pen on a metal tag. I would swear, though, on a thousand-page Hostas A-Z reference tome that every single marker has been ‘upgraded’ to clear plastic tape during the past two years.

Why, then, do I have two warped and mangled handwritten tags for hosta ‘Golden Tiara’? Betty ejected all of the ‘Golden Tiaras’ from the formal hosta garden four or five years ago because they multiply like rabbits and she hasn’t bothered to make a tag for one in the better part of a decade. Where did these tags come from?

Once again, Betty’s rational explanation is frost heaves. The tags were buried in the soil. The ground froze and thawed and, one day, belched up a ‘Golden Tiara’ tag or two. I like the parallel universe theory a lot better.

My task now is to dig out our diagrams of the hosta beds and match loose tags with last known locations of plants. Now that’s what I call a spring ritual.

Crocus and violets and squill, oh my!

A number of readers have asked why this blog does not carry ads. The reason it does not is because of posts such as the one you are now reading. After digesting this entry, ask yourself, WWSD? That is, if you were the senior vice president of advertising for the ScottsMiracle-Gro Company LLC, the manufacturer of Scotts, Miracle-Gro, Ortho, RoundUp, EverGreen, Pathclear, Weedol, Fertiligene and Substral, would you want your banner ad above this entry?

Our green lawn

The photo at left is of my lawn. It was taken this morning, April 20, 2011. You will note that my lawn is lush and green. You may also want to know that less than a month ago (and, per the post immediately below, as recently as ten days ago on one section of the lawn), it was still covered with snow.

My neighbors also have green lawns this morning, but they all have lawn services. Those services have put down an early season fertilizer to ‘make the lawn green up faster’. While I have not included photos of my neighbors’ lawns, please be assured that my lawn is just as green as theirs. Those lawn services have also applied a crabgrass preventer either in the form of an ‘organic’ product such as corn gluten or an ‘inorganic’ product containing trifluralin, benefin, pendimethylin, dithiopyr, prodiamine, or siduron.

The perfect tool to
green up your lawn

I have applied… a rake. Two weeks ago, we raked our lawn with a spring-action, steel-tined rake. We scuffed at the base of the grass to get rid of accumulated dead grass and heaved the resulting detritus into the woods where it will decompose. In the course of raking, I also noted the appearance of a number of early-season dandelions. When I rake, I carry with me a screwdriver. When I encounter a dandelion or other unwanted weed, I dig into the soil next to the culprit and pull it up, root and all. This is an extremely effective dandelion and weed preventer.

Crocuses in the lawn

Why not apply the crabgrass preventer and be done with it? Because last fall I did not apply a broadleaf weed killer like 2,4-D; MCPP; or dicamba. The reason I did not do that is because my lawn contains clover. It also contains squill, violets and crocus; all of which would be killed by the application of those chemicals. The clover puts nitrogen back into the soil, plus it remains green even in early August when the rest of the lawn goes dormant. The squill and crocus do not, to the best of my knowledge, enrich the soil, but I rather enjoy seeing them in the lawn for their brief flowering, and I have been known to pick a bouquet of violets, especially the white ones. Call me a romantic.

Squill!  Oh, my!

Instead of a spring fertilizer application, last fall I mowed my leaves into the lawn. I did so several times. The leaves decomposed over the course of the fall and winter, supplying the equivalent of a healthy dose of spring fertilizer (which I am augmenting by spreading a thin layer of compost). I know the leaves decomposed because, when I raked these past weeks, there was no leaf matter in my piles of dead grass. 

Lest the lawn chemical companies of the world fear for their economic survival, please be aware that in a few weeks time, I will apply 400 pounds of crushed limestone to my lawn and perennial beds (and I will repeat the process in October). We lime the lawn in order to ‘sweeten’ the acidic soil- itself a product of the grinding down of New Hampshire mountains - that is the bane of living in New England. The sweetened soil, in turn, yields healthier, hence greener and lusher – grass. I have already purchased the lime, for $3.14 per 40-pound bag. That’s $31.40 into the coffers of the agri-chemical industry.

Friday is Earth Day. Be kind to your mother.

Coming on Strong

Two events coincided this week: the last of the snow disappeared from the lawn and the first of the marsh peepers were heard. Welcome to April in eastern Massachusetts, where spring arrives in a hurry.

The last of the snow on
April 11.  It vanished
overnight.

As noted last month, Betty and I made our annual bet back in late February as to when the last of the snow bank would melt. I picked April 10, she chose April 15. Technically, my date was closer, but then April 10 came and went with a ten-square-foot pile of stubborn ice still in place. It finally succumbed to a 65 degree day and was gone this morning.

The marsh peepers are a welcome arrival. Peepers (more accurately, Pseudacris crucifer) are small chorus frogs and, to be more accurate still, they were already here. They’re creatures of the wetlands and the bog around the pond below our home is a perfect ecosystem for them. And, because it is conservation land, the peepers are likely to remain happily ensconced.

A marsh peeper

It is their sound that is new. The mating call of the peepers begins at twilight and, by 9 p.m. ,it is a raucous cacophony that sounds terrific – as long as retiring indoors is an option. April is the loudest month, May will be somewhat quieter.

The hellebores which provided the sole sign of spring just two weeks ago have been joined by crocus and daffodils. We have planted crocus almost as an afterthought over the past decade, sticking clutches of 25 or so tiny bulbs in shallow areas, often on top of more desirable bulbs such as allium. The crocus are clearly spreading – we have thousands now – and they’ve even insinuated themselves into the lawn.

Crocuses in the
Manhattan bed

The daffodils come in waves. One group bloomed this past week, another is a week away from showing color and yet another is still green shoots with nary a bulge to be shown. Hyacinths have come out of nowhere in the Manhattan bed. By week’s end there will be more than a hundred of them, all purple, in that site alone.

Spring is coming on strong. It is a terrific prize to be treasured after a winter like the one we’re just gone through.

Harbingers of Spring, Reminders of Winter

The Hellebores outside
the front door

There is a pair of Hellebores outside my front door that between them sport at least 30 blooms. Until three weeks ago they were under a mound of snow that varied between two and three feet deep since the Boxing Day Blizzard. This is called resilience.



Winter is finally in full retreat in eastern Massachusetts. Most homes in my town have long since seen their mounds of snow melt. Because so much snow needs to be removed from the top of my driveway, there is still a swatch of snow (ice, really) that is more than a foot high in spots. Each year at the beginning of March, Betty and I make a bet as to when the last ice will melt. This year, I guessed April 10; Betty took April 15. With eleven days to go until my deadline, it is touch and go as to who is going to win.



How deep was the snow this winter?  Compare the lamp post in the two photos.



But the melting snow yielded its share of bad news. The snow mound in the inner sidewalk bed – the site of those Hellebores – hid the fact that our oxydendrum had taken a major hit, losing seven lower branches. Planted three years ago, we had chosen that particular sourwood for its perfect shape. Now, with a third of its apparently delicate branches shorn by ice and snow, the tree is top-heavy. No, we won’t yank it out, but recovery will likely take years and, in future winters, we will likely construct a barrier around it as we do the nearby thuja occidentalis.



Another casualty is the Chamaecyparis ‘Sungold’, a ground-hugging so-called ‘false cypress’ that is – or perhaps was – a key part of the ‘structural elements’ Betty has been adding to the outer sidewalk bed. Many New Englanders simply abandon their front doors for the winter and don’t bother to shovel out their sidewalks, making their garages the de jure entrances as well as the de facto one. While we would no more park our car in our garage and then walk back outside to use the front door than we would drink tea with our pinkies extended, we maintain a quaint notion that guests should not have to inspect the detritus in our garage as a precondition of entering our home. And so we shovel the sidewalk down to bare concrete after every storm, no matter how inconsequential.

Chamaecyparis 'Sungold' -
or its remains.  Time will
tell if it is salvageable.

The condition of the Chamaecyparis became known only in the past few days as the snow along the sidewalk retreated. We readily dumped snow from the sidewalk onto the area where the shrub was thought to be sleeping safely. The multiple broken branches show we ought to have been much more careful. ‘Sungold’ did not cost a fortune, but its color was perfect for the site and it had reached a size that it was eye catching.

Much of our garden remains to be uncovered. A thick blanket of oak leaves covers the rock gardens and those leaves are removed delicately so as not to injure the plants underneath. I don’t expect a lot of surprises there; killing stonecrop is next to impossible and our extensive hosta garden seems to thrive after a vicious winter. (One exception:  the carefully placed markers identifying the hostas have a disturbing habit of disappearing every winter.  We suspect raccoons.)  Elsewhere, the customary number of pines are down and a birch bordering the driveway lost its top. The town plow ‘relocated’ several plants in our xeric garden and these have been restored to their proper sites. These are the expected casualties of winter.

I keep reminding myself that the long New England winter and ugly early spring have the effect of making the later spring and summer here all the more beautiful and precious. I’m going to make a point of enjoying the blooms on those Hellebores every day… even if it means I have to use the front door.

The snow mound in retreat on the last day of March.  I say it will be
gone on April 10, Betty says April 15.  We'll see who is right.

Walkin' Miracles

We have been growing Neomarica as houseplants for at least a dozen years.  Our first one came as a gift and, to the best of my knowledge, the 100+ specimens we have given away have all been offspring of that first one in its three-inch pot.  Neomarica is a tropical plant, a member of the Iridaceae family (iris to us mere mortals).  Each plant puts up dozens of thin iris-live leaves from a thick rhizome but some of those leaves are flower stalks in disguise. 



Neomarica, in its brief hours of glory

 For 350 days a year, Neomarica is a snoozer of a houseplant.  In fact, to be both unkind but entirely accurate, its sole benefits are that it is green and requires little care.  But then, for two weeks a year at the end of winter, something wonderful happens.  A couple of those leaves begin to swell near their tips.  And then, miracle of miracles, little flower buds appear and then open to form a stunning and complex flower.

Look fast, though.  The flower you see open when you get up in the morning will already be flagging by late afternoon.  Overnight, it folds back into itself and, by morning, it's a little ball of brown mud.

But then, lo and behold, another bud swells up from the same stem and there's another day of beauty.  And then a second stem gets into the action and third.  For about a week, you get to play this marvelous game of guessing how many flowers will be open this morning - five?  six?  eight?  One morning, an especially thick clump had a total of 14 flowers open all at once.

Just as quickly, however, bud production falls.  A few days later you're back to sporadic bloom here and there and, a week later, there's one or two laggards as the stem is spent.  Then.... it's back to being green background scenery.

350 days a year, it's green
background scenery; but for
two weeks at the end of
winter, it's glorious.

Neomarica has one more trick up its sleeve.  After the last stem has produced its last flower, it bends over as though it had been to the maternity ward one too many times.  The stem lays down on the ground if it's in the tropics.  If it is in your home, you need to get a little pot and some potting mix, and steer that poor, tired stalk toward your pot.  In a few weeks, it will root.  And, a few weeks after that, the rooting is putting up a new crop of leaves.  When that happens outdoors, the plant is growing by 'walking', hence the name 'Walking Iris'.  When it happens indoors, it's an opportunity.

We have rooted upward of 15 pots each year of Neomarica this way.  An established pot can also be readily divided into half a dozen plants after a year.  Those pots go with her when she gives presentations on houseplant care to garden clubs.  They're always a hit.  And, perhaps one of them will be given as a gift to a friend, who will watch it grow, see it flower, and put out a pot...

The Watering Can Report

A writer for a regional 'lifestyle' magazine called yesterday.  They are doing a feature on 'fun' watering cans for an upcoming issue and wanted some gardening tips to go along with the watering can story.  I'm not the family expert on watering cans, but one of Betty's most popular programs is called 'Water Smart Gardening', so I figured she was the right person to speak to the writer.

The result was, shall we say, something other than what the reporter expected.

As near as I could tell, the writer is a young freelancer eager to turn in a 'feel-good' piece that her editor will like.  She already had spoken with the designers and manufacturers of the watering cans that would be featured in the piece; all she needed now was some stuff from a gardener; what to water and what to plant - that sort of thing.

Betty started with some physics: a gallon of water weighs eight pounds.  So, a two-gallon watering can requires the person wielding it to lug around sixteen pounds of water.  Water an entire vegetable garden with one?  Come on!  Get serious!  If the water spigot is 100 feet from the garden and the garden is 20 feet by 20 feet, that's 400 square feet of garden area. 

Betty then noted that shallow watering of a garden encourages shallow roots, which dry out quickly in heat and sun.  A gardener needs to soak the soil down a foot to encourage deep root growth.  How many gallons does that take?  Lots.  Probably a hundred gallons of water on a hot day... and all of it carried a hundred feet eight pounds at a time?  Do the math....

OK, the writer asked, how about watering the houseplants?  What's wrong with a nice, little watering can for that purpose?  Well sure, Betty said, as long as you make certain you've allowed the chlorine in the water to evaporate.  Betty explained that chlorine is a salt and that she keeps around half a dozen gallon-size plastic milk jugs to collect the water that runs out our taps while we're bringing up hot water for washing or bathing.  We let the water stand in the garage overnight and that's the water - once it warms up - that we use to water our houseplants.  In the summer, we use water straight from our rain barrels.

"Then do you use a watering can?" the reporter asked, hopefully.

"No, the milk jugs work just fine," Betty replied. 

"How about watering your container gardens?"

Betty explained that for our exploding population of containers, we have a basement full of two- and three-gallon jugs that originally held cat litter.  Those, too, we fill from rain barrels.

The interview went on for a while longer, but the chances are extrememly slim that any of Betty's excellent gardening tips are going to make it into print.  Lifestyle magazines depend on ads, and advertisers want readers who are eager to drop $50 or $100 on a designer watering can.  Experts who suggest substituting cat-litter containers and milk jugs just aren't a desirable demographic.

Which is why Betty's excellent blog (http://www.bettyongardening.com/) will likely never carry ads.  But it's also why she is consistently one of the top-rated and most-in-demand speakers on the garden club circuit.  You win some, you lose some. 

The reporter is likely still reeling.

Flower Show Fever

I’m testing out this theory of mine that exhaling warm air on houseplants speeds up their bloom cycle. Scientists may pooh-pooh the idea, but I think I’m on solid ground here. Fact: plants thrive on carbon dioxide. Fact: they also want a little warmth this time of year. So, every time I walk past a plant in my house, I lean over and exhale.


Why am I doing this? Frankly, it’s because I have flower show fever. Last year, my wife took three plants into Blooms! at the Boston Flower & Garden Show and walked out with two blue ribbons for her efforts. My contribution to that enterprise amounted to lugging in gallon-size jugs of water once a week. This year, I have my eye on entries that will actually bear my name. They don’t all have to be blue ribbons. A red one will do.

The kalanchoe and bougainviellea are both blooming
beautifully.  Unfortunately, they're in the same pot.

There’s a kalanchoe that has bloomed an orange-red on the plant rack right outside my office. I figure all the hot air that comes out of my office (both from the computer and from telephone calls) is responsible for its unexpected and unseasonal display. That, plus Betty wouldn’t be caught dead taking credit for something orange.

My problem is that the kalanchoe doesn’t live in the pot all by itself. It’s a volunteer that appeared one day alongside another plant that had a long-term lease on the site. I don’t think the Amateur Horticulture classification people are ready to bifurcate their entries. So, alas, no kalanchoe blue ribbon this year.

OK, I’ll enter a bougainvillea. Having grown up with them, I’m also the official bougainvillea guy in this household. Two of our plants are showing tiny, delicate blooms right now. One is a tender lavender, the other yellow-gold. One of them is certain to get me that blue ribbon. Of course, any probing on the part of judges and I’m toast, because there are plenty of childhood friends out there who will attest that I hacked at the half-dozen bougainvilleas around my house without mercy. Those plants had thorns as nasty as any yucca and their branches could grow two feet overnight. It was only when I moved north that I decided bougainvillea was not a weed.

Then, there are the orchids. As readers of this blog know, I love orchids and buy them whenever I think I can sneak one into the house without being seen. However, the rules of the show are straightforward: an entry must have been owned for three months or more. Well, some of my best orchids have a little less than the requisite three-month residency period. The best one, in fact, is still getting acquainted with its brethren. The ones that have been around the longest are just starting to show flower buds and, frankly, they have persistent scale. My conscience won’t allow me to enter the new ones in the show; the old ones will end up in some awful quarantine. Nuts.

OK, Our neomarica are in bud. One pot in particular has six buds forming and each swollen bud site may produce half a dozen flowers. Unfortunately, the blooms are spent in a single day. I could bring the plant in on entry day bursting with spectacular iris-like blooms only to find that the next morning the thing has gone dormant. I know how the guy in One Froggy Evening feels.

Betty has already tagged and is assiduously grooming the plants she intends to enter. I’m welcome to anything left over – say, any of the dozen or so Spathiphyllum (Peace Lily) that bloom randomly around the house. I have my eye on a begonia whose full bud seems to have escaped her attention. So, I exhale on houseplants and hope for lightning to strike. That’s what it’s like to have Flower Show Fever.

A Winter Respite

There comes a point in every New England winter – especially one that features multiple feet of snow on the ground – when sanity requires a dose of greenery. There are multiple ways to get a shot of green but most of them start with a pat-down by a TSA agent. Having neither the time nor the inclination to fly the unfriendly skies, we ventured instead to the Tower Hill Botanic Garden.
Tower Hill is the home of the Worcester County Horticultural Society, a venerable organization that barely registered on the radar screen of not-for-profit institutions until it decamped from downtown Worcester for a 132-acre former farm on a hilltop in Boylston, some ten miles northeast of that city. A visitor center opened in 1994 but it was the unveiling of the 4000-square-foot Orangerie in 1999 that made Tower Hill a winter destination for me.

Tower Hill's new Limonaia

Last November, Tower Hill augmented its credentials with the opening of the 3500-square-foot Limonaia (pronounced, I was informed, lee-mon-NIGH-ya). The opportunity to see a camellia show at the site was sufficient impetus to make the 40-mile journey this past Saturday.

Reduced to its simplest, both the Orangerie and the Limonaia are, essentially, large open indoor spaces with lots of plants in containers. Well, yes, but then the Venus de Milo is a chunk of sedimentary rock to which someone took a chisel.



The Orangerie at Tower Hill



Both are extraordinary spaces, light-filled and airy, and classically proportioned. The new Limonaia has a bit more exposed concrete than I care for, but that’s quibbling. Mostly, it’s the plants that make the space such a welcome respite. We’re talking containers with mature, subtropical trees and shrubs; artfully arranged to form a garden. There are occasional fountains and statuary, with garden-appropriate tables and chairs scattered about, but the plants are the main attraction.

A garden of pots
in the Orangerie

True to its name, the first thing you see in the Limonaia is a lemon tree heavy with bright yellow fruit. Camellias in flower march along the walls in rows. And, everywhere there are interesting botanical specimens. Palms soar to the ceiling, yucca aloifolia – what I called ‘Spanish bayonets’ growing up – tempt children. The mix of foliage and bloom colors is pitch-perfect.

The Orangerie hardly looks picked over for Tower Hill’s expansion. As the nearly photos suggest, it was as lushly tropical on this visit as when the Limonaia was just an excavated pit.

The Camellia Show at Tower Hill

The camellia show – our ostensible reason for visiting – was a delight. Camellias are native to eastern and southern Asia and Sandy Kautz, the show’s organizer and arranger, brought in a trove of Chinese and other Asian-influenced objets d’art to capture the eye.

Camellias are not easy to grow in New England – this is not a tree you park in the nearest sunny window and expect it to thrive. Its roots and branches are hardy down to well below zero, but leaves and buds are susceptible to winter burn, making it more of a Zone 6 or 7 plant. In other words, a cool greenhouse is a nice accessory to have if you’re interesting in pursuing camellias as a hobby.

There were hundreds of specimen blossoms on display and judges still at work when we arrived. We watched them work, marveling at their attention to detail. All in all, a very satisfying visit.

Tower Hill is, of course, far more than a winter destination. But in summer there are parks and reserves that are much closer and offer comparable experiences. At least for me, winter is Tower Hill’s time to shine.

The Huddled Masses

They are camped out around my home, at least 80 refugees, far from their subtropical origins, gathered by windows and leaning toward a feeble sun for sustenance. They huddle together to preserve precious water in a house where the humidity is in single digits.
What we do to our houseplants. We take growing things whose ancestors never experienced a frost and transport them to environments where, for six months of the year, all that separates them from death by frozen capillaries is a pane of glass. And all this for…. What?

There are more that 80 houseplants
in my home, clustered around
windows.  Here are 15 of them.

Why do we have houseplants? I typed that question into Google, ordinarily a bastion of reason and well-marshaled information. The first response was a query right back at me: ‘How can I get rid of gnats?’ Not ready for a Socratic dialog so early in the morning, I declined to provide an answer. Five pages of scrolling later, I had not found any erudite answers from horticulturally-inclined sociologists, although I uncovered an online survey indicating that our 80+ population of plants puts us dangerously outside the bell curve (the average number is five).

And so, I am left to come up with my own answers. The first one is obvious: they’re green and they sometimes flower. It’s February in New England. There is more than two feet of snow on the ground. Who wouldn’t want to have something nearby that reminded us that winter is not a permanent condition?

Another answer is that houseplants are undemanding. Water them once a week. Check them for insects (including, yes, gnats). Re-pot them once a year. Compared to a pet, they’re self-sufficient. My aunt kept a snake plant (Sansevieria trifasciata) in a darkened hallway that, to the best of my knowledge, was never watered, only dusted occasionally. It lived for decades.

Plants can surprise you. My wife received a lipstick plant (Aeschynanthus ‘Rigel”) as part of a plant challenge. She nurtured it for three months but, once the challenge was over, put it in a plant rack where it was promptly forgotten about. This winter, it has started flowering. Not spectacularly and not prolifically. But every week another bright red bloom appears.

Plants also respond to pampering. I cannot walk by a display of orchids without pouting like a six-year-old that “I want one”. And so our home is filled with dendrobium and phalaenopsis specimens. They bloom for several months, then the flowers wilt and the stems turn brown. The plants go onto a lower rack away from the prime sun locations. Then, one day something magical happens: a new stem forms and, over the course of a month, bud nodes appear. The orchid gets tender, loving care: swabbed with alcohol to rid it of pests and placed in a location with perfect, filtered light. A few weeks later, the flowers begin to open.

Neomarica's blooms last just one
day and the plant does nothing
but take up space 50 weeks of the year.
But those two weeks of flowers
make up for the freeloading.

Finally, plants get to become family. Last month I wrote about a cyclamen that has been around so long it is practically a family retainer. Our various bougainvillea have been in residence for so many years that I can predict their flowering cycles to within a few days. As this is written, the buds are starting to swell on our walking iris (neomarica), a plant that freeloads around the house for 50 weeks each year before earning its keep in a spectacular succession of blooms, each lasting just a single day.