Lookin' Out My Back Door

 

We offer migrating birds free bed and
bath, plus all the seeds they can eat

This morning, four migrating bluebirds are luxuriously splashing about in a raised bowl in our back garden. When I went out to fetch the newspapers at dawn, I startled half a dozen finches pulling seeds from out of our Rudbeckia. And a colony of mourning doves has spread out along the ground in military fashion seeking insects, seeds, and any other edible that wasn’t there last night.

Welcome to the start of autumn at 26 Pine Street. In this, the sixth year of our grass-free, 95% native-plant garden, we are apparently well established as a five-star stopping point for migrating birds. We clean and re-fill the bird baths regularly and, while we acknowledge the Audubon Society’s warning not to put out seed feeders, we offer suet for woodpeckers and other avians with a need for a McDonald’s-style fat fix.

The Felcos have been put away for now in
order to give migrating birds seed heads from
our Rudbeckia and shasta daisies

What the birds want most of all are seeds, and we have those in abundance. All summer, our front garden was a riot of color from sweeps of native Agastache, shasta daisies, Lobelia cardinalis, Monarda, Liatris, and the aforementioned Rudbeckia. In late August, as the last of the flowers passed, we made the painful decision to keep our Felcos in the garden bag. Deadheading the beds would have given us a pleasant, uniform sea of green punctuated with the autumn-blooming phlox and oak-leaf Hydrangea. As the nearby photo shows, there’s a lot of brown in the front garden. The brown stuff is seed heads, which is why the birds are here in droves.

Our rear garden, with its mix of
shade-tolerant plants

The rear garden is another, more pleasant, matter. It is too shady for the sun-loving perennials that dominate the front of our property, so there is not a lot of past-blooming ‘stubble’. Instead, we have a hodgepodge* of ground covers, shade-tolerant perennials and shrubs, most of which flowered over the spring and summer. Now, the remaining seed heads are a bird buffet. The Ligularia ‘Othello’ has been a favorite, as well as the several dozen Astilbe that dot the landscape.

Cornus florida in bloom, early May

There is still one more scene to play out, and I look forward to it with special satisfaction. Cornus florida – the American dogwood – got a bad rap a few decades back for its supposed susceptibility to spot Anthracnose, a fungal disease that produces leaf spots and blotches. That reputation gave rise to a demand for Cornus kousa, an east Asian cousin. Subsequent research shows Anthracnose can be kept in check by the simple expedient of giving Cornus florida ample light and air. In other words, don’t stick it in a shady area hemmed in by other trees,

Cornus florida fruit is small and brightly
colored, versus Cornus kousa

The American and Asian dogwoods differ in one crucial area: the size of their fruit. As the nearby photo shows, Cornus florida produces a small, bright-red berry; Cornus kousa, a much larger, duller fruit with a thick skin.

The subtle difference came into play one late September afternoon two years ago when our pink-flowering American dogwood began shaking as though it was alive. I watched in fascination through my library window for a while, then went out for a closer inspection. There were roughly 50 birds in the tree, gorging on the dogwood berries. After an hour, the tree had been picked clean. I called friends with the Kousa variety and asked if they were sharing my experience. No, they said, their fruit had mostly fallen to the ground where it was rotting (and required periodic raking to prevent odor build-up).

Our neighbor's back lawn is all grass
(photo from Realtor.com)

I close with a photo of an across-and-down-the-street neighbor’s back yard. They’ve just put their home on the market and I scrolled through the listing photos. The first 35 showed a pleasant home – the interior professionally staged as is the custom now, to remove traces of individuality that might turn off a potential buyer. The final two stopped me in my tracks. They showed a back yard that is nothing but a perfect, green lawn surrounded by a white fence. There are no shrubs against that fence; no flowers or plantings of any kind.

It is, in its own way, staged to show an ideal safe, suburban yard where a child can play without fear of injury. It is also utterly sterile. I cannot imagine a passing flock of birds giving it a second glance.

Abigail

If we are truly stewards of the land, we ought to acknowledge that our property serves more than just a human audience. Our garden does that in spades – all the while giving the child in us (and, especially, our cat) hours of visual entertainment.

 * A partial list of the plants in the rear garden includes Actea, Astilbe, Asters, Aralia, Cimicifuga, Digitalis (foxglove), false strawberry, ferns, Heuchera, Hosta, Ligularia, Lobelia, Persecaria, Tiarella (foamflower), Vaccinium (blueberry), and Viburnum.

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.

The Siren Call of the Instant Garden

Our first act as homeowners was to
remove dozens of azaleas dying because
they had been planted too close'together
(no, this wasn't the house)

Several moves ago, Betty and I purchased a ‘doctor’s home’.  That house was relatively new and stood at the end of a suburban cul-de-sac in Alexandria, Virginia.  It had been professionally landscaped perhaps five years earlier, and the good doctor (or his landscaper) apparently had a thing for azaleas.

Our first act as homeowners was to remove at least 30 of those shrubs.  The doctor’s landscaper had installed double rows of medium-sized azaleas on two-foot centers.  In the ideal growing conditions of northern Virginia, the shrubs had doubled and tripled in size.  What had looked ‘perfect’ when first planted, now was not only wildly overgrown; plants were dying as they competed for light, food, and water.

Our two new polemonium

I was reminded of that long-ago landscape this past week as we planted two polemonium in our rear garden.  The perennials, commonly known as Jacob’s Ladder, were being added to an area once contemplated as the site of a water feature.  That idea has been shelved for the time being, and perennials will instead anchor the site.

Betty planted the polemonium on two-foot centers – 24 inches between what are (for now) fairly small plants.  To the untutored eye, there is a vast, empty plain between the two specimens.  Why not put in half a dozen and “make a statement”?  Your local garden center will love you for it.

What started as a single
Jack-in-the-pulpit is
now at least six specimens

The answer can be seen all over our garden.  Three years ago, it was a blank slate.  Even after a dozen trees and sixty shrubs, it still looked bare.  We’ve since added roughly 2,000 perennials.  That may sound like a lot but, when spread out over 20,000 square feet of garden, works out to give each plant ten square feet… like putting everything on three-foot centers.

The wonderful thing about plants is that they spread, and seed, freely.  Three years ago we carefully transplanted a single Jack-in-the-pulpit (Arisaema triphyllum) into a shady area of our garden and surrounded it with protective ferns.  The following year, we found two plants.  This year, there are at least six in glorious bloom  

Betty's 'bargain' tiarellas and
heucheras have tripled both in
size and in number

Those 125 tiarellas and heucheras Betty procured at the 2016 Boston Flower & Garden Show have more than tripled in area and number.  Twenty native asters planted in 2015 have completely colonized and carpeted a dry, shady slope where nothing would seem to flourish.  Today the area is a verdant green, and we are pulling out asters where they are encroaching on other perennials.

What we’ve learned is patience is a virtue.  Everyone loves that “perfect garden”, but when everything goes in at once, the result is an image that makes for pretty wall calendars and postcards, but not much else.  And, there’s another problem: the next year, the garden won’t look the same way because some plants are bullies and some are shrinking violets.  A gardener will spend his or her weekends trying to maintain the “status quo”, always unsuccessfully.

A relative handful of native asters have
now colonized this dry hillside

Giving plants time to settle in is a much better idea.  Some won’t make it, some will flourish.  It is up to the gardener to maintain balance while allowing for the serendipity that makes gardens great.  So, that pair of polemoniums will have eight square feet of garden to themselves this year.  I’m counting on there being siblings and offspring come next June.

This is how much a garden can change in just two years - May 10, 2016 and June 1, 2018

Perennial Road Trips

I have had a very active May, with lots of exciting road trips.  I’ve been as far afield as Maine and as close as Waltham (just 22 miles away).  One included a stop for ice cream but what ties together all of those journeys was that they were built around buying lots and lots of perennials.

May 29, 2017.  Believe it or not, more than a hundred new
perennials have been planted this month.  Double-click
for a full screen slide show.

It was two years ago this month that Betty and I began building our new garden.   We moved into our ‘dream retirement home’ in April 2015 and promptly discovered we had a terrific house, but not a square foot of arable land around it.  Faced with such a problem, most homeowners would arrange for a few truckloads of topsoil to be brought in.  It would be placed, two or three inches deep, on top of the ‘builder’s crud’; grass seed (or sod) would be spread; and a few pretty shrubs would be added along the foundation.  Problem solved.  Time to fire up the grill.

We are not ‘most homeowners’.  Betty is a very serious and highly dedicated gardener, and she had a vision for a garden.  Her vision did not include any grass.  It included trees, shrubs, and perennials – very nearly all of them ‘natives’. 

Along the driveway,
we've added Geun rivale
'Flames of Passion'
(with the red spike)

And so our first act as new homeowners was to hire a landscape contractor to dig out the top 18 inches of ‘builder’s crud’ on the front half acre of our acre-and-a-half property.  Nine hundred forty-seven cubic yards of lifeless dirt and rock was hauled away, to be replaced by 950 cubic yards of screened loam. 

That first year was dedicated to finding and planting a dozen good-sized native trees, a few dozen native shrubs, and 1800 bulbs.  (We originally intended to move more than 200 perennials from our previous home, but moles and voles had other ideas.  Roughly thirty plants survived the winter.)  In our second year, we added a few more trees, another few dozen shrubs, 1400 more bulbs, and a few hundred carefully selected perennials, including 120 heuchera and tiarellas that had graced a landscape exhibit at the Boston Flower and Garden Show.

The purple allium was
planted  last fall. The
coreopsis will hide the
allium foliage

You might think that our garden would be fully populated after two years of planting.  Nope; not even close.  This is the year of the perennial (plus a few more trees and shrubs).  Thus, the need for road trips.  Our first one was a warm-up.  Northborough is a leisurely 45 miles from Medfield and, in early May, we visited Bigelow Nursery and brought home a Cornus mas (Cornelian cherry) and a Bartzella intersectional peony that blooms yellow. 

We next set off for a trip to the Middlesex Conservation District plant sale in Littleton, Massachusetts, where we brought home three crabapples trees, 25 strawberry plants (yes, strawberries are natives), and another dozen miscellaneous native perennials.  A week later, we were at the Grow Native Plant Sale in Waltham, where we filled our car with barren strawberry (a ground cover), monarda (bee balm), and buttonbush, among many other purchases.

Roughly 25 of the new
perennials are in this
photo.  Can you spot any?

Next, we headed to Log Cabin Perennials in East Overshoe, Maine (all, right, Saco), where Kenneth Rice sells more than 300 varieties of perennials in one-gallon pots for the unbelievable price of five dollars per plant.  It was pouring rain that morning, but we packed 30 specimens into the back of our car.  On our way back to civilization, we made a detour to a place called Kane’s Flower World in Danvers, Massachusetts, where Betty made use of a gift certificate she had won in a drawing five months earlier.  Six more perennials were crowded into the back seat (we also stopped for the aforementioned ice cream).

 Last Thursday, we set off for Bay State Perennial Farm in West Bejesus, Massachusetts.  Betty has been getting emails from Bay State since the invention of the internet, and because it was raining and 47 degrees, we decided it was a perfect day to see central Massachusetts. Bay State has an impressive plant list, and we packed the car with finds such as Monarda ‘Cherry Pops’, Geun rivale ‘Flames of Passion’, and Nepeta nervosa ‘Cat’s Meow’.  No, Betty does not purchase plants based on cute or alluring names, but it’s intriguing that few plants that come home with us are ever labeled ‘species’.

More new perennials,
all well hidden for now

Any trip beyond the Charlton Rest Area on the Mass Pike inevitably includes a stop at Andrew’s Greenhouse in South Amherst.  Andrew’s has been Betty’s go-to place for annuals ever since she discovered it a decade ago, and each year we make the pilgrimage two or three times in May and June.  It is also a major source of perennials, and Betty packed the car with Veronica, Echinacea, Guara, Chelone (turtlehead), and Achillea (yarrow); plus most of the vegetables we don’t plant from seed in our garden.  Between the two stops, we stuffed 38 perennials and an untold number of vegetable and annual six-packs into a Prius with a rated capacity of thirty perennials.  I only needed to move the flat of vegetables when I had to shift

Amazingly, we finished planting all of these perennials this morning. 

The topmost photo of this essay was taken at noon today (May 29).  I’m calling this the ‘before’ picture.  Over the course of the summer, as the plants bloom and grow, I’ll update the sequence.

The garden is beginning to show its true potential.  What were long expanses of mulch now has clusters of green that will burst into color with the advent of summer.  Next year, those plants will self-seed, spread by runner or rhizome, or otherwise fill in their allotted spaces. 

Me?  I’m waiting to find out where the next road trip will take us.