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.