May Turns to June, and Purple Reigns

The garden at 26 Pine Street, June 1, 2024
double-click on any image for a slide show.

When Betty began planning our new garden in 2015, she focused principally on trees and shrubs. It was a logical decision because those elements provide the 'structure' that anchors the property. It isn't that perennials, groundcovers, and bulbs weren't important; it's more the reality that, until Cladrastis kentuckyea (yellowwood), the right Chionanthus virginicus (fringetree) and the rest of the their horticultural brethren were on site and had been planted, everything else was going to be consigned to the sidelines. There was also the matter that Betty wanted to be able to imagine the garden as it would be viewed from inside our new home.

The same garden nine years ago.

Amazingly, by July (three months after we moved in), and as the photo at right attests, ten specimen trees and roughly 40 shrubs were in the ground (and a 500-count bottle of Ibuprofen had been consumed).  Betty then turned her thoughts to groundcovers and perennials. With the benefit of nine years of hindsight, what she accomplished is nothing short of miraculous. The garden is now approaching maturity, with weekly revelations of what a combination of long-term thinking, meticulous planning and luck can provide.

The view from the library

I start with the sight that greeted us for two weeks in mid- and late May as we gazed out of our library windows and front door. My memory is that we looked at more than half a dozen dogwoods. Betty checked for crossing branches, general vigor, and any indication of disease or abuse. She was also looking for a pink-flowering Cornus florida. Why pink? All I know is, she was adamant. But, here it is. It was a stunning sight, made all the more alluring because its color was echoed by multiple specimens of Dicentra (bleeding heart).

The view from the back porch

The view out of the back of the house is no less important. Because we chose to place our new home some 30 feet farther back that its predecessor (both for added privacy and to have a larger front garden), we have just 50 feet or so of 'cultivatable' land before we run afoul of our town's Conservation Commission restrictions. Betty wanted to preserve the view into the mixed pine and oak forest behind our home, while creating visually interesting vignettes nearby that change with the season.  Chamaecyparis 'Snow' is a remarkable shrub that shifts its color accents across the year while providing a predator-proof habitat for birds. Viburnum 'Winterthur' is a month away from flowering, but already is showing great texture and color. The purple-blooming perennial is Thalictrum aquilegifolium, better known as meadow rue.

In the front garden, Allium (not a native) offers purple umbels on tall stalks. The blue/purple blooming perennial in front is a native salvia, procured like many of our perennials from the Grow Native Massachusetts plant sale. Alas, the tag identifying the cultivar is nowhere to be found. At the back of the photo is our magnificent Cercis canadensis 'Burgundy Hearts'. Its deep purple leaves will remain that color until nighttime temperatures fail to fall below 70 degrees - likely some time in August.

That's a quick look at the garden. Check back in a few weeks to see summer begin unfolding on Pine Street.

The Spring of 2024 at 26 Pine Street

The winter of 2023-2024 was fairly well non-existent in eastern Massachusetts. There was rain - lots of rain - but not a single plowable snowfall in Medfield, the town Betty and I have called home for the past quarter century. There were  nor'easters that brought near-hurricane-force winds to the region, but the ponds never froze. As a result, we lost no trees or shrubs; the perennials did not get heaved out of the ground. In this, the first full week of May, the garden is a sea of new green with bursts of color from all the usual suspects. Please double-click on any photo to get a full-screen slideshow of the garden.

Sometimes, though, words get in the way of things. Rather than wax poetic, I'd like to let the garden speak for itself.  Let me start with the first tree to bloom. This is Amelanchier 'Autumn Brilliance'. It was, if memory serves correctly, the first tree to be planted on the property in June 2015. It wasn't so much an honor bestowed as a practical reality: Betty and I were still driving from nursery to nursery looking for 'the right' specimens. Weston Nurseries had exactly the Amelanchier in stock we wanted and so we brought it home and dug a hole in what we hoped would be the right place.

Our Amelanchier's bloom is brief. This photo shows it at its peak on April 23.  Two weeks later, the leaves have eclipsed the blooms.

Magnolia 'Elizabeth' bloomed right behind the Amelanchier. It us a glorious shade of yellow and it fairly glows.  This photo is from April 30 and shows the tree at or near its peak. 'Elizabeth' is supposed to get to roughly 25 feet in height and then stop.  By my estimate, it has reached its mature status.  The tree is still in bloom, but much of its earliest flowers have dropped to the ground. In another week it will be all green - though still a lovely tree.

New England wouldn't be New England without azaleas and rhododendron (the latter is technically a subset of the former). We have multiple specimens, but it is Azalea 'Weston's Aglo' that beats all the others to display the first color. This pair are readily visible from our library. In the photo at left, Magnolia 'Elizabeth' stands at peak glory in the background. There are other azaleas and rhododendron dotted around the property. They'll bloom as late as mid-June.

Fothergilla is largely overlooked in garden design. Part of their lack of broad appeal is that their leaves are a dull green. The exception is 'Blue Shadow', which offers a much more attractive leaf color. But, for a few weeks in May, all Fothergilla have a stunning white brush-like flower. Some are round balls; F Blue Shadow's bloom looks like a bottle brush straight out of a Williams Sonoma catalog. We have three groups of three on the property; one of which is shown in the left third of the adjacent photo.

Which brings us to Cornus florida, the American dogwood. It was only today, May 7, that ours burst out in its full glory.  Cornus florida has a bad rap: that it is disease prone, specifically anthracnose which can kill the tree. Cornus kousa, the Korean  variant, is considered immune to the disease.  The solution, though, isn't to abandon the native version. Rather, it is to give Cornus florida an open space to ensure adequate air flow. 

Why does it matter? Because our native birds can eat the small, thin-skilled fruit of the native tree. The large, rubbery-skinned Korean fruit falls to the ground and rots.

There are other, less grand  blooms around the property. For example, the Tiarellas are in bloom.  Betty acquired 120 Tiarellas and Heucheras in a sharp deal at the 2015 Boston Flower & Garden Show; taking them off the hands of an exhibitor for the price of the plugs - one dollar each.  Three months later, having pampered the plants with daily excursions into the sun, we placed them all over the property.  What you see at the right, blooming white, are maybe ten of those Tiarella, interspersed with ginger as a foundation planting for our garage.

Finally, we are endeavoring to use as many native groundcovers as possible to eliminate the need for grass. At the front of our property there's a growing expanse of Arctostaphylos uva-ursi, otherwise known as bearberry. It's a terrific groundcover, but its bloom is what is called 'insignificant'... a flower you need a magnifying glass to see. Not so Phlox stolonifera, shown at left. For about three weeks, it puts up a glorious blue flower spike. Then, the flower fades and the spike browns. We're left with a green mat of phlox that takes light foot traffic. What you see here started as three plugs back in 2015.  It's now about nine square feet and expanding at a rate of about two square feet a year.

That's how the garden looks this spring. Hope you enjoyed the visit!

One Day in June

This is the bed anchored by our
yellowwood tree (Cladrastis
kentuckyea) with Penstemon
'Husker Red' in the foreground

The garden at 26 Pine Street received its first ten specimen trees six years ago this month.  By the end of that first season (late September), we had planted perhaps 40 shrubs and the few dozen perennials that survived being part of the Mole and Vole buffet of the winter of 2014-2015.

The well-known garden mnemonic is 'sleep, creep, leap'. Perhaps, for the sixth year of a garden's existence, there ought to be a fourth entry: 'reap'. It's the time when the garden coheres; when everything comes together and all the digging, dividing, nurturing, and editing swell into the orchestra that is a mature garden.  For our garden, June 2021 is that 'reap' moment.  

We hosted several groups this month - a product of making our garden known to Grow Native Massachusetts and to the state's garden club federation. In its listing, we stress the garden is 'only half an acre' and, because there are no grass expanses upon which gaggles of gardeners can congregate (we have only moss paths), we limit the size of visiting groups to about a dozen or so people. 

Cladrastis flowered this year

What that relative handful of members of the gardening world see is, finally, what we hoped for when we (primarily meaning Betty) set off to create a site that would be a) pollinator friendly, b) overwhelmingly native, and c) low-maintenance for its two caretakers.

Take, for example, the bed anchored by our yellowwood tree (Cladrastis kentuckyea), shown in the top photo (please double-click on the photo for a full-screen slide tour). Betty wanted one as soon as she saw a specimen on a garden tour in Boston's Jamaica Plain neighborhood eight or nine years ago. It was a monster of a tree; probably a century old - and it was in full bloom with droops of white flowers. We found the one we wanted, already twelve feet tall, at Weston Nurseries. Knowing it would need room, Betty settled on trios of fothergilla 'Blue Shadow' and clethra 'Hummingbird' to flank it at a safe distance; then an almost-yellow spirea, pink-blooming mountain laurel (kalmia), and a host of perennials, led by tall, blue-blooming Liatris spicata and Penstemon 'Husker Red'.  Oh, and a couple of hundred daffodil bulbs for early season color, whose dying foliage would be hidden by Alchemilla mollis (lady's mantle).

Competing color in the bed anchored
by Cornus florida and Oxydendron

For the first several years, the bed made me wince because it was so... empty. Then, the Liatris - its common name is 'blazing star' - began to fill in with self-seeded offspring, and the Penstemon ('beardtongue' for reasons I cannot discern), not to be outdone, set out to colonize every square inch of space not already occupied by something else. This year, Cladrastis produced its first significant flowering - a shower of pink-yellow panticles (see second photo above).

In the bed (shown above, left) anchored by our Cornus florida (American dogwood, which bloomed white and pink in May) and Oxydendron (sourwood, which will bloom white in August), blue and yellow Baptisia compete for the eye's attention, as do the pink blooms of Physocarpus (ninebark) 'Little Devil' and the emerging flowers for our two Quercifolia (oakleaf) hydrangea. As a backdrop, the purple-leafed Cercis canadensis (redbud) 'Burgundy Hearts' gracefully sprawls with its now-15-foot breadth. I could have only imagined it would all look this beautiful in 2015. I had no inkling it would be so colorful.

The Magnolia bed

The bed closest to out house is anchored by a Magnolia 'Elizabeth' that flowered soft yellow in May. Now, the bed's color palette has changed dramatically, with Kalmia (mountain laurel) in reds and scarlets, a 'river' of long-blooming Johnson Blue and Rozanne geraniums, both upright and climbing Lonicera (honeysuckle), and the last of our peonies and blue-blooming Amsonia.  Here also are also the most visible of the roughly 20 container gardens Betty created for this year. The bright yellow-flowering container in the foreground is one of a pair flanking the front porch, and incorporate both fragrant Nemesia and prolifically-flowering lemon Calibrachoa.

The back garden has taken the full six years to come into its own. It gets less than half the sun of the front of the property and is planted accordingly. The photo at left shows the Pennsylvania flagstone patio, now filled in with fern and moss, the Chioanthus virginicus (American fringetree) in full, white-flowered bloom, multiple specimens of native Viburnum in flower and, in the right background, six Vaccinium (highbush blueberries) laden with un-ripe fruit. This part of the garden backs up to protected wetlands. The area is alive with nesting birds.

All of these photos were taken on the same June day in 2021.  I could only have imagined how beautiful it would be after so relatively few years. I'm proud to be Betty's 'Principal Undergardener' and to have played a role in seeing it come to fruition.

Three Down, Eight or Nine to Go....

For the past few weeks, there has seldom been a day when there has not been a copy of William Cullina’s ‘Native Trees, Shrubs and Vines’ or the American Horticultural Society’s ‘Northeast Smartgarden Regional Guide’ open on Betty’s desk.  Alongside those two tomes have been catalogs from several area nurseries.

It isn’t that Betty is expecting to find some heretofore unknown specimen of maple or oak lurking within those books.  Rather, she is looking for roughly a dozen very special trees. Specifically, native trees that will serve as the anchors for a brand new landscape.  The books are akin to audition tapes; a means of winnowing hundreds of candidates down to a few finalists.

Our oxydendrum will have flowers
on distinctive white panticles

We are starting with a blank canvas at our new home.  In the past two weeks we have carted away hundreds of cubic yards of rock and dirt officially classified by the University of Massachusetts Soil Laboratory as incapable of supporting plant life, and replaced it with eighteen inches of organics-rich screened loam.  We topped that loam with several inches of mulch, which now awaits a garden.

The garden is being designed to combine beauty with ecological sensitivity and low maintenance.  “Ecological sensitivity” translates to a strong emphasis on native trees and shrubs that will support the local population of birds and insects.  “Low maintenance” means exactly that: a garden that, once in place, doesn’t require long hours of maintenance to keep it looking attractive. 

This is amalanchier
'Autumn Brilliance'

The trees are the anchors.  There will likely be eleven or twelve of them.  On a recent weekday, we rode with senior horticulturalist Henry Schmidt of Weston Nurseries around their ‘back lot’, looking for the trees on Betty’s list.  The first tree we spotted was an oxydendrum, sometimes called a sourwood tree.  It’s a tree native to the northeast that is seldom seen, and that’s a shame.  An oxydendrum produces white flowers on long, distinctive panticles in midsummer; those panticles remain in place even as the leaves turn a vivid red in fall.  The tree before us was a magnificent specimen, standing nearly twelve feet tall.

Deep in the tree holding area, Henry stopped in from of a group of cornus florida.  Flowering dogwoods can be found everywhere in New England, but most of the dogwoods we see are the Asian kousa varieties, and Massachusetts is considered the northern limit of the native variety. Betty specified one that was not only native but with pink bracts or petals. We found a perfect specimen, more than ten feet tall, and it was duly tagged.  The third tree on the list was an amelanchier, or shadbush.  We spotted a multi-stemmed clumping version of this beautiful ornamental tree that feeds early pollinators, then the birds, and finally turns a rainbow of colors in the autumn. 

Two days later, we returned to the nursery with a borrowed pickup truck and our three purchases were effortlessly loaded by a guy driving a nifty machine that functioned like a giant hand.  The ‘hand’ picked up the tree, tilted it just so, and placed it in the truck.  We got them home.  So far, so good.

Here are first trees planted, our
oxydendrum and cornus florida

The problem was getting them off of the truck.  In the past, we’ve purchased much smaller trees.  If their root balls were wrapped in burlap, the width of the ball was usually a foot to eighteen inches.  These three trees, by contrast, had root balls two feet wide or even larger.  Moreover, they were wet.  I tried lifting one.  It would not budge.

After ten minutes of flailing and grunting, Betty grudgingly allowed me to go across the street to where our neighbors – a family roughly half our age – were entertaining some muscle-bound friends.  It turns out they had been watching our travails and were discussing whether to offer their assistance unprompted.  They were pleased to be asked to pitch in.  Even so, it took three of us to get the trees to their planned planting sites.  Had it not been for their intercession, those trees would likely still be on the truck.

Digging holes for the trees was another revelation.  Current theory says that you should dig “a saucer, not a teacup”.  Once upon a time, you dug a hole slightly larger than the root ball, lowered the tree into the hole, and filled the hole with enriched soil and water.  The problem with that practice was that the tree roots would get to the edge of that rich soil, encounter the lesser-quality surrounding stuff, and decide to stay put; resulting in a stunted tree with a poor root system.

Hence the saucer, which provides the tree with ample room to stretch out its roots.  The problem is that it require removing two to three times as much soil as the “saucer” technique.  The hole for each tree required up to an hour of digging, despite all that new loam.

But the trees are in.  They all stand up straight and face in the correct direction.  My one piece of advice to all assistant tree planters reading this is to always make certain that the Chief Tree Planter has specifically signed off on the tree direction, even at the risk of annoying the Chief Tree Planter by asking that unseemly question, “Are you sure?”  The alternative is trying to wrestle a tree’s root ball in a morass of mud; an exercise that can result in the uttering of many Bad Words.

And, did I mention that out expedition produced three trees?  And that there are eight or nine more to be located?  It’s going to be a long June….