The Fine Art of Moving a Garden

Moving furniture from one house to another is a snap.  You call a moving company, you sign a check, and experts do the rest.  On the appointed time and day, your furniture shows up at your new home.

Moving plants is a little more difficult.  To be completely accurate it is a lot more difficult.

The house - and garden - we will be
leaving behind.  Beautiful, but too
large for two people.

Last July I wrote of our plans to downsize; to leave the beautiful house we have called home for fifteen years in favor of a smaller abode in which we can (attention euphemism police!) ‘age in place gracefully’.  But this would be no ordinary home.  Its garden would be front and center in the planning process.

Our new home... maybe this month?

The house is now rising quite nicely on an acre and a half of land.  We optimistically think we’ll have an occupancy permit some time in December.  Our current home is on the market and we are equally optimistic that the right buyer will walk through the door any day now.

In preparation for our move we spent more than a hundred hours this autumn digging up and dividing plants – in addition to the hours Betty spent during the spring and summer doing exactly the same thing.  More than a hundred hosta divisions went into one- and two-gallon pots as did numerous Siberian iris.  Plugs of ginger and ground covers found their way into quart-size pots.

We have been dividing plants for the
past year.  Then the pace stepped up.

When we ran out of things to put plants in, we put out a plea to gardening friends who responded with an avalanche of pots – some of them gigantic.  Cuttings Betty made in the spring of climbing hydrangea had, by early October, formed strong root systems.  We now have an entire tub of climbing hydrangea, ready to cling to our new porch.  The largest containers became the home for grasses, peonies, epimedium and astilbe, all of which had migrated from their original planting sites and needed to be culled in order to restore order to the garden. 

By mid-October our portable garden – with pots spread out to allow leaves to soak up sun and water – had outgrown the fifteen-foot-by-forty-foot transplant bed and was spilling out into the walkways beyond.  We went to our neighbors and asked if they could take in the overflow.  When they agreed the potting continued. 

In the meantime, Betty created a dual tracking system for the plants.  Each pot bears a small wooden stick on which is written the name of the plant.  It also gets a second stick with nothing but a number on it.  In Betty’s computer is a growing list of what numbers correspond to which cultivars of plants.

The overflowing trench for the plants
that will be a small part of the
new garden.

In late November we began transporting our plants to their new home.  A Bobcat was being used to fill the trench created to bring in our water and sewer.  I cajoled its driver into carving out an eighteen-inch-deep hole ten feet wide and thirty feet long.  Four truckloads of plants later – and even pushing round pots so tightly they became squares – I had to hand-dig a second plant repository.

Next came the loads of leaf mold and pine needles.  This is to provide additional insulation against the winter wind and temperatures.  Then came soil to fill in any holes between pots.  Then more leaves. 

You should keep in mind that, while we’re lavishing this attention on our plants, we have not yet chosen colors for rooms in the actual house.

With the ground now beginning to freeze, the garden work at our current home is done.  We realize we are doing its next owners a huge favor:  for at least a year, there will be little need to do anything beyond routine garden maintenance.  Perennials will have room to stretch out their roots.  Shrubs will find less competition for light and nutrients.

For the past two months, the soil
around our new home has been
contacted into lifelessness.

Conversely, the work at our new home is just beginning.  All those plants now in their protective trenches need to find permanent homes come March or April.  The top two feet of our homesite’s soil has been compacted into an oxygen-free brick by a succession of cranes, trucks and bulldozers.  It will need to be coaxed back into life through aeration and augmentation. 

And, of course, the contents of those trenches are just a small fraction of what will be needed to fill a new garden.  Come the spring of 2015, the real work begins.

 

Tough Love

The jasmine plant in our master bathroom right has started to flower.  For the next two months, it will offer an olfactory hint of perfumed, Southern evenings in addition to its considerable visual charms.

By all rights, it ought to be dead.

In December 2011, we ordered a jasmine plant from White Flower Farm (I wrote about it here).  Common in Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas, Jasminum polyanthum is a semitropical vine, hardy to Zone 8.  Up here in the frozen north, it can only be grown as an indoor specimen.

Jasminum polyanthum.  A great winter
bloomer indoors

Our vine arrived beautifully planted in a hanging pot, rife with buds, and ready to be sat in a sunny but cool room to do its thing.  And, it did very well through its typical bloom period of January and February.  We enjoyed it every day.

I am well aware that many people purchase plants strictly because they are in bloom and, once that bloom is past, the plant becomes, well, expendable.  In my book, people can do with their houseplant what they want.  Plants, after all, are not puppies or kittens.  But around our home, there are no such things as ‘disposable’ houseplants.  Once a plant has entered our home, we do – within reason – whatever it takes to keep the plant healthy and happy for the long term.  Part of this is Yankee thrift; mostly, it is a belief that growing things indoors in winter is good practice for growing them outdoors in summer.

But White Flower Farm’s use and care booklet seemed to do everything in its power to scare off would-be jasmine farmers.  The instructions included ones like these: “To encourage the formation of flower buds for next winter, be sure your plant experiences the cooler temperatures and shorter days of early autumn. The plant needs 4-5 weeks of nighttime temperatures between 40° and 50°F, plenty of sunlight and the complete absence of artificial light after sundown.”

Once jasmine has finished its bloom,
it's a fairly dull vine

A few months ago, I asked Barbara Pierson, White Flower Farm’s greenhouse manager, why she offered such complex advice about plant care.  Her response was quite charitable:  “Most people need reassurance about what to do, and so we go into great detail about how to care for their plant.”

I suspect that most people who ordered jasmine plants in December 2011 put them out on their deck the following spring and then forgot about them.  There is nothing especially attractive about a jasmine plant that is not in bloom.  When that first frost hit in October, the plants were likely chucked out with the coleus and petunias.

We kept our plant in our screened, covered porch through the summer and brought it in with the rest of the houseplants in mid-September.  I was struggling with the question of where we could guarantee that the plant received that ‘complete absence of artificial light’ when it dawned on me that our basement, while not perfect, fulfilled most of the requirements.  It has a full bank of half-height windows and a fairly constant 55 degrees.  It gets artificial lights only when I journey into the basement for something.  We overwinter a number of plants there, including cyclamen, bougainvillea and aquatics. The jasmine fit right in.  From October through January we watered it sparingly but otherwise left it alone.

Off in a corner of the
basement: a jasmine flower

Then, this past weekend, I was in the basement to get wine, and happened to notice something white:  it was a jasmine flower.  Moreover, the plant was nicely covered with buds and a host of new tendrils were searching for something to grab onto.

The jasmine promptly came upstairs and into that cool bathroom where it will now receive the additional light it needs to promote flowering.

There’s a lesson here for gardeners, and I think it is this:  read the ‘use and care’ booklets that come with plants, but take them as guidance rather than as ‘my way or the highway’ rules.  In short, don’t be afraid to exercise some ‘tough love’ when a plant’s season is over.   

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.