In Pursuit of a Little Hanky Panky

There are days that are meant for working in the garden, there are days that are meant for reading a good book indoors, and there are days that are meant for… driving to the ends of the earth in search of the perfect hosta.


To say that Mason Hollow Nursery is located off the beaten path is to imply that there is an actual path to the nursery, beaten or otherwise. It is located in Mason, New Hampshire and, if there is a physical town, we have never found it. Were there a town, it would be located about ten miles over the Massachusetts border above Fitchburg, except that we did not start our expedition from Fitchburg but, rather, from The Fells, fifty miles north in Newbury. But I digress.

To get to Mason Hollow Nursery, you must first find Parker’s Maple Syrup Barn Restaurant, which the Mason Hollow website treats as a navigational feat akin to, say, finding the George Washington Bridge from the New Jersey Turnpike. In reality, you can travel for hours, fastidiously following tiny signs nailed to telephone poles and trees. Once at the restaurant, you see signs for the nursery, which is ‘just 1.6 miles farther on’, mostly over dirt roads.

Sue and Chuck Andersen (that's Chuck facing the camera on the right) run Mason Hollow as both a business and a labor of love. It is open five days a week and, one weekend a year, they entice a lot of people to visit with the promise of hot dogs and ice cream while you shop. With more than 650 varieties of hosta in their collection plus hundreds of perennials, there’s a lot of shopping to do. The ice cream, incidentally, is excellent.

We made the journey because their website lists among their collection, a hosta called ‘Hanky Panky’. As the accompanying photos show (double-click on them to get larger versions), this is not your grandmother’s, or even Tommy James and the Shondells’ hosta. ‘Hanky Panky’ has leaves in three tones: a dark green surrounded by gold border with a narrow, cream-colored thread between the two patterns. Moreover, as the season progresses, the yellow edge changes to white with an unusual light green overlay. How did it get the name ‘Hanky Panky’? Because it’s a sport of ‘Striptease’. (And, just to show that breeders who name hostas have a wonderful sense of humor, there’s another ‘Striptease’ sport called ‘Yellow Polka Dot Bikini’.)

Betty encountered ‘Hanky Panky’ while judging horticulture at a flower show several weeks back. She came home talking about it at length, which is a reasonable data point to infer that it will soon be in our garden, assuming that a good-looking specimen can be located. We are approaching 100 named varieties of hosta and have just opened a new bed to accommodate the growing collection.

You do not go to a nursery like Mason Hollow and walk out with just one plant. We came away with six, including one hosta called ‘Madam’ and other with the terrific name ‘Olive Branch’. The fern collection also continues to grow apace and Sue threw in a small tiarella as a ‘thank-you’.

We live in a time when, all too often, we go places because they are convenient: the McDonalds is just off the exit ramp and the Barnes and Noble is at the mall. All Big Macs taste exactly alike and B&N will reliably have the new Martha Grimes at a discount. When it comes to gardening, though, identical isn’t necessarily better and knowledge counts for a lot. Mason Hollow features extensive and intelligently designed hosta gardens showing their offerings at maturity. The staff understood what we were looking for and where to find it. If they didn’t have it, they could recommend something very close.

Service like that is worth a lot. Even a very long drive in the country.

The Xeric Garden Hits its Stride

It would be easy to claim, with perfect 20/20 hindsight, that the Xeric Garden was always part of our master landscaping plan.  It would, however, be a fib.  The xeric garden began as a disgusted response to a six-foot by ten-foot patch of weeds where no grass would grow.  Betty hoed up the weeds and planted some catmint (nepeta) in the spot, flanked by some Joe Pye weed (eupatorium) that thrived in an equally inhospitable nearby spot.  The two cultivars grew happily despite searing, all-day sun and benign neglect.

Let's step back a pace or two.  Every lot that has a sidewalk also has an easement between the street and that sidewalk.  It may be two feet wide in an urban setting or it may be eight feet wide in a less dense suburb.  Most often, that easement is planted with grass, often augmented by utility poles (hence the 'easement' desciption).

The easement hides two irrevocable truths.  The first is that underneath a veneer of topsoil is all the crud that the builder needed to dispose of, whether five years ago or a hundred.  The second is that - at least in New England - the easement will collect snow pushed up from the street by plows during the winter, and that the snow will be laden with snow-melting chemical laid down in the early stages of the snow storm.  Those two truths combine to make easements inhospitable to anything except stuff highly tolerant of abuse - meaning weeds. 

Which is what led to that first experiment five years ago.  For the first five or six years we lived on Wild Holly Lane, we did everything possible to grow grass in the easement.  We seeded, transplanted, sodded and pampered the area, all to no avail.  In hindsight, it made no sense because, fifteen feet away, we were ripping out grass to continually expand our street-side shrub bed. 

When the first rectangular patch worked, we added a second, flanking bed, which also thrived.  That's when Betty came up with the idea of ripping out all 960 square feet of our easement and planting a Xeric garden - a bed of perennials that would thrive in an abused area and require no watering beyond what was needed to establish the area. 

It took two years to accomplish because the process involved not only ripping out the weeds, but the depleted topsoil as well.  The entire site was dug down to a depth of fifteen inches, from which was removed rocks of every imaginable size, cans, lengths of cable, plastic bottles, chunks of concrete and even remains of workmen's lunches.  What remained was primarily sand.  We then filled the trench with a mixture of compost and chopped leaves which we mixed with the sand.  A contractor with a backhoe could have accomplished all this in a day.  With just a shovel, it took a good bit longer.

The six accompanying photos (double-click on them to get a full-screen view) show the Xeric garden as it looked this morning, June 14.  I've walked around the beds (plural because it is bisected by the driveway) clockwise starting from the east.  In the top photo, the yellow flowering shrub is genista, which has a roughly three-week bloom in June.  The grasses will send up plumes in August.  The daffodil greens in the foreground will be cut down in July as they yellow; the entire bed is heavily planted in spring bulbs.  The second photo picks up the bed at the nepeta in full bloom.  It is about to be severely trimmed back to give the variegated eupatorium between the two clusters time to grow and bloom in August.  In the foreground is one of the dozen or so sedem plantings that will enliven the fall, and just starting to grow is a bed of agastache that will start blooming in late August and still have its azure blue flower stalks into October.  Beyond the catmint is more eupatorium which, if the deer leave it alone, will bloom in August.

The third photo looks back east from the far end of the garden.  There is more genista, a baptisia 'Carolina Moonlight' that bloomed back in May, and a soft yellow achillea that just went into bloom last week and will be a highlight of the bed for the next month.  Hidden by the genista are a variety of perennials, including yellow gallardia which, once it starts blooming, doesn't stop until there's a hard freeze.  The fourth photo looks east across the driveway with yet another genista in the foreground, showing the sweep of the Xeric bed beyond.  As soon as this particular genista has finished blooming, it will be trimmed back to allow a Himalayan indigo to get more light for a late July-August bloom.

The fifth photo shows a quickly spreading and prolifically flowering delosperma, blue rug junipers and short grasses.  This is the most abused part of the bed as this is where snow from the driveway is deposited and where ice may endure until mid-April.  The sixth and final photo shows the plots of thyme that are now well established and growing quite well along - and into - the sidewalk.  There's a plan to extend the thyme border.

The Xeric garden attracts bees and butterflies, as well as lots of walkers.  Alas, none of our neighbors have evinced an interest in following our lead to creating a prettier - and more ecologically prudent - easement.

Open Day at the O'Callahans

It is a-near annual pilgrimage for us. On a June morning that may be brilliantly clear or threatening rain, we will embark on an 80-mile journey to an enchanted garden. It does not matter that we have seen this garden half a dozen times over the past decade; all that is important is that, for an hour or so, we will experience something that comes close to the idyllic.

The garden of Juan and Bunny O’Callahan sits on six acres overlooking Little Narragansett Bay, just outside of Stonington, Connecticut. Once a year - or every second year – they open their property for the Garden Conservancy’s Open Days Program. Today, June 6, was the chosen day as noted in the Open Days Directory, and it has been marked on our calendar for months. Our goal is always to arrive as close to the 10 a.m. opening time as possible so as to see the gardens without the crowds.

This garden is stunning both for its location – a 270 degree view of the bay, the ocean beyond, and Stonington Village – and for the breadth of the garden. For starters, six generously sized cutting beds with a variety of flowers and bulbs (peonies, lupines and poppies were in special abundance today) and a vegetable garden all enclosed in a yew hedge, the better to keep out both deer and the stiff ocean winds.

A sunken garden is built into the rock ledge next to the seawall, and it is truly a “secret” garden – there is no hint of it until you are upon it. Once inside, there masses of huechera all with long stems vibrating in the breeze and succulents growing in the ten-foot-high rock wall face.

Nepeta – catmint to the rest of us – is a unifying element across the property. It is used in long, undulating rows to break up the lawn and to border other beds. Today, it seemed every catmint plant was blooming a brilliant blue. Also in their full glory were hundreds of lupines, which can be found in many of the perennial beds.

It is a garden that seems the same, even as it changes. We have watched the rehabilitation of a pond take shape over the past several years. On this visit, it seemed finished, overrun with bull frogs and with a spouting fountain. On a visit a few years ago, the O’Callahans and a neighbor had planted an unused field in red poppies, with results like something out of a Monet painting. Alas, that experiment hasn’t been repeated.

The O’Callahans have always been generous with their time on their Open Day, fielding questions from dozens of visitors. And, because there is always something new to discover, we had questions of our own. Behind their greenhouse and surrounding their compost pile, we spotted a thicket of multi-stemmed shrubs with maple-like leaves bearing clusters of some tiny, green, immature fruit. We were stumped. Bunny O’Callahan, though, had a ready answer: red and black currants. Because they were linked to a disease affecting white pines, their cultivation was banned for the better part of a century. The ban has been lifted in certain states, including Connecticut, in recent years.

Well-contained Enthusiasm

I was at the Chelsea Flower Show a few years ago, standing in a queue for drinks. Directly in front of me in line were two gentlemen, both silver-haired and attired in gray, chalk-stripe suits that spoke of both good tailoring and good breeding. They said little during those few minutes I was behind them, but one sentence continues to ring in my ears with a clarity undiminished by time.

“Penelope,” one of the men said to the other, and then paused for just a moment before continuing, “has a £100 a week perennial habit.”

He said this with neither anger nor regret in his voice. It was a statement of fact; tinged with opinion only in his use of the word, ‘habit’ in describing Penelope’s voracious gardening budget. I swiftly did some currency conversion in my head: at the then-current exchange rate, Penelope was buying up $182 a week worth of salvia, astilbe and hosta.

When I returned and handed Betty her drink, I related what I had just heard and I said, “Don’t ever again fret over what you spend on gardening. You will always be a rank amateur.”

We had a pounding rain here overnight and one of my jobs this morning was to empty saucers from the various containers around the property. Saucers with water in them mean containers can become waterlogged, which leads to root rot.

Somewhere along the way, I began counting the containers surrounding our home. I found 52 and am not certain I got them all.

Now, one or two are just for show – unplanted behemoths that are in perennial beds strictly as focal points. Some others are long-term homes to plants that we overwinter, such as a beautiful burgundy loropetalum or the stone planter given by Betty’s garden club that is home to a fern that returns majestically every May.

The core group of containers – medium and large terra cotta, glazed ceramic or high-quality foam ones – numbers about 35. Betty has been diligently planting them for the past month, filling them with an amazing array of mostly annuals but also including perennials, tropicals and a few shrubs; none of them common.

Those containers are scattered around the property, bringing color to otherwise bare areas of asphalt, concrete or rock. Some are awaiting permanent assignment, such as a large, colorfully planted pot that will sit atop a clutch of prominently visible daffodil greens once those greens have started to yellow later this month.

There are multiple containers along the sidewalk that will fill voids in the perennial beds as June bloomers pass. There are six containers on our deck, turning an otherwise drab structure into a colorful annex of the garden below it. Two matching metal urns are overflowing with color on either side of the front door. Large containers bring drama to the spaces between garage doors and still others fill an awkward, dark corner.

Does this count as a ‘container habit?’

Hardly. And, were it so, then I would be the principal enabler. Betty takes me plant shopping at her peril. I’m the one saying, “Don’t you want another of those?” And, at container sales, I’m the one piling the cart to overflowing, with Betty ordering me to put them back.

It isn’t even a container obsession. Rather, it’s an appreciation for what can be wrought by mixing plants of differing heights, bloom size and color into a small space, and then massing the resulting containers into a pleasing arrangement. It’s art using a different palette and medium.

So, to the gentleman at the Chelsea Flower Show, I say, “Hooray for Penelope.” I hope that she, too, is still creating art of a different kind somewhere in the U.K.

Now You See 'Em, Now You Don't

We don't make nearly enough use of spring ephemerals.  Perhaps, in New England, that's because they're not supposed to live, much less thrive.  Tell that to my bluebelles.

We lived in Virginia for eight years and came to love the annual, massive display of Virginia bluebelles at Manassas State Park.  They carpeted acres of that park for a few weeks each March, then disappeared as if by magic.  When we returned to Medfield, we decided - against the advice of nurseries - to try some two clusters in one of our shade gardens.

The result can be seen in the two photos.  The one above (double-click on it to see a larger version) was taken in early April.  There are the bluebelles, now eight clusters and growing.  They provided color for three sweeks when there was nothing else in the bed.  The photo at right is from the same vantage point last week.  The bluebelle foliage is still there - barely visible - crowded out by the hosta and emerging astilbe.

By mid-June, the astilbe will be in flower and the bluebelle foliage will have completely disappeared.  It's a terrific use of two plants in the same space, and an opportunity to extend the color season.

The Perfect Driveway Edge

I can state with some degree of confidence that for the first five-plus decades of my life, I never thought much about edging my driveway. I had a string trimmer and, twice a year, I’d dutifully create a moderately straight demarcation between asphalt and grass. On a scale of one to ten of satisfying activities, it was a solid ‘one’.


Then, a few years ago I found myself at Hidcote on a mid-May morning. Hidcote, for the garden-impaired, is one England’s (and the world’s) great gardens. It sprawls across the Cotswold countryside near the village of Chipping Campden and is, as Michelin would put it, ‘worth a journey’.

Anyway, on that May morning, I was savoring the gardens when I happened to look down and see the world’s most perfect pathway edge. Instead of grass butted up against macadam, this path contained an inch-and-a-half wide dirt channel on either side. The grass was crisp and green up to the channel, which was perhaps an inch deep. Nothing grew in the channel.

Can you get rapturous about a ditch?

Yes, the gardens were spectacular, but I had to know about this ideal edge. And so, with Betty rolling her eyes, I went off to find someone who could tell me about how it had been made. I assumed it was done with one of those half-moon edgers wielded by someone with a perfect sense of touch and infinite time.

A docent was pleased by my question, put her finger to her chin, and then pointed to one of the garden ‘rooms’ nearby. “You’ll likely find him working over there,” she offered.

A few hundred feet away, I found a young man wielding a tool with two wheels and what looked like a bicycle chain ring. He easily pushed the tool forward, one wheel on the path. Grass and bits of garden debris sprayed out as it clattered. He did this for perhaps fifty feet, then lay the tool on the sidewalk and swept up the clippings. As he did, what remained was that perfect inch-and-a-half-wide channel.

“I think I know what I want for my birthday,” I said. Betty rolled her eyes again.

Upon returning to the States (when you’ve just come back from England you can say things like that), I made a beeline for Home Depot. There was no such tool, I was assured, but they had something even better - the eight-pound, gas-powered Lawn Boy Micro-Trim, and for the unbelievably low price of just $189.98.  I did what I should have done in the first place and made a beeline for Will’s Hardware, where I am locally famous for my idiosyncratic requests.

The manager, Randy, and I leafed through several catalogs and finally settled on a Deluxe Mechanical Edger ($34.95). It wasn’t exactly what I had seen at Hidcote but it was close enough. A week later, I had it in my hand (birthday we damned - I had to have this thing).

Now, twice a year (more often if there’s a group coming), I get to use my Deluxe Mechanical Edger. It makes the same satisfying clacking sound that I first heard that morning at Hidcote. The channel not only looks terrific, it is practical: it carries away rainwater, preventing ponding on the driveway.

It takes perhaps five hours to do our 220-foor driveway with its curves and parking aprons. I’m spending about an hour each morning this week on the project. It’s eminently satisfying and the result looks like a million bucks. Best of all, for a few hours, I feel I’m back at Hidcote. And that is a very satisfying feeling.

The Secret Pleasure of Mulching

In mid-April – a month earlier than it should ever be done in this area – I watched as a lawn maintenance company blew mulch into the beds around a neighbor’s home. The mulch came out of a long, probably eight-inch-diameter hose that snaked back to a large truck. The person doing the mulching haphazardly sprayed the mulch into azaleas and rhododendron, creating piles six inches deep or more. I cringed at the sight, but am long past the stage of saying anything about such behavior on the part of my neighbors or the firms that service their lawns.


I cannot imagine paying someone to spread mulch for me, though this evening my back and shoulders are telling me I did too much work today. To me, there’s a great satisfaction in spreading mulch. In mid-May (when the ground has warmed up in New England), perennials are well established for the new season, early spring bulbs have been reduced to foliage and shrubs are showing their new growth. Spreading mulch is a final step in re-imagining a landscape for the new season.

At our home, mulch must first be inspected before it is purchased. Ten days ago, Betty drove up to Sam White & Sons, where she walked the mulch piles, sifting handfuls before pronouncing it acceptable. Later that day, a dump truck dropped off ten cubic yards in two piles. Six yards went to the beds alongside the street and was spread over two days. Next came the beds along our driveway. Today, at the end of three days of preparatory work, we tackled two beds immediately in front of the house.

During those three days, we ‘edited’ what we call our outer sidewalk bed, a fifty-foot-long, eight-foot-wide curving garden of mixed perennials and shrubs. A summer-blooming phlox that was hidden behind a rhododendron in another bed now has a new, sunny locale. Stands of Ladies Mantle (Alchemilla mollis) that had migrated from its reservation were dug out and sent to the compost heap. The area of Snow-in-Summer (Cerastium tomentosum), though in full bloom, was reduced by half. A dozen perennials were brought back to acceptable boundaries and spurge was grubbed out from dozens of unwanted locations.

When the mulch finally went down this morning, it was top dressing for a bed that, at least to the trained eye, had been subtly re-made. Foliage colors have been re-arranged in a more pleasing fashion and the color scheme that will follow with summer blooms will be equally altered. It was three days well spent.  The final result is shown above.

But the mulch is more than a top dressing. It is also a unifier. A week ago, the outer sidewalk bed looked, frankly, messy. It was a hodgepodge of plants that, because of a season of rampant growth fueled by abundant rain, lacked visual coherence. The dark brown mulch provides the canvas upon which those plants and shrubs are arrayed, plus the contrast to the dark green grass of mid-May is dazzling. Because of the mulch, the eye can easily follow Betty’s planting pattern.

The mulch will be in its current state of perfection for perhaps two or three weeks. Then, inevitably, the sun will bleach the dark brown out of the top-most layer and it will no longer be as ‘special’. But for now, all is perfection. The sidewalk bed is perfectly edged and the mulch is uniform.

So much pleasure from so simple a thing.

The Sweet Smell of... Mulch

Ten cubic yards of dark brown mulch were delivered on Monday.  Two-thirds of it has been deposited in the street-side and driveway beds.  No garden ever looks better than when it has been newly mulched.  Here's a photo gallery, taken this morning.

The Inmates Take Over the Asylum

For the past decade we have taken advantage of a terrific program offered by our community, in which a town-owned field is plowed and marked into 40, 600-square-foot ready-to-plant garden plots. For the munificent sum of $20 per year, we get water, manure, and a site with ample sunlight. It’s a bucolic site with a 4-H sheep encampment across the road. The soil, once dense and prone to flooding, is now well aerated and heavy with organics.


We never thought much about who managed the enterprise. We received a notice each spring in a town envelope and paid our $40 for a double plot at the information desk of town hall. As the years passed, it became evident that one of our fellow gardeners, Lenny, was the ‘manager’ of the site. His principal responsibility seemed to be to run a gas-powered weed-whacker over the paths to the garden. Other than that, it was all very low key.

Then, last year, there appeared to be a change. The heretofore simple set of guidelines for the garden ballooned into a multi-page manifesto that took on an uncomfortably shrill tone. We read the rules with a sense of amusement and made the assumption that they were the work of one of our neighboring gardeners, a woman who is stridently organic and, well, pushy about her views.

There had also been a few things about the garden that irked us. Two water spigots stopped working and were never repaired. Publicity about the availability of plots was almost non-existent with the result that some gardeners could claim three parcels. Other gardens were quickly abandoned by people who discovered that keeping a plot weed-free required actual time and labor. The result was in a town with a strong interest in fresh foods, there were weed-filled plots next to an oligarchy of triple-plot empires. We brought up the subject with one of our town’s selectmen and followed it with a letter outlining the issues.

In October, Betty and I found ourselves appointed to the Community Gardens Committee (who knew?). More surprising, upon being sworn in (we took the oath of office, administered by the town clerk, in her office), we quickly thereafter discovered ourselves to be the only members of the committee, the long-time chairman having finally found someone willing to take on the role, and so resigning. We asked about the woman whom we suspected had authored the revised garden rules. No, she was not a committee member.

In February, we took our overhaul of the Community Garden rules to the town’s Conservation Commission, who listened and then gave us their blessing.

The garden opened this past weekend. There are now six, half-sized plots for those who want to dip their toe into the water without committing to a 600 square-foot garden. Triple plots had been outlawed. The spigots are being fixed as this is written. An evening seminar on good gardening was held in April and there were multiple newspaper articles announcing availability of plots in the garden. The ‘guidelines’ fit comfortably on one page.

We’re being pushy in one way: if a garden isn’t being worked by the middle of the month, the owner forfeits it to one of the people on the waiting list. There will be no weedy lots this year.

It’s a modest start. When she swore us in, the town clerk warned us that ‘people don’t like big changes’. Maybe we’ll be deposed in a coup d’etat by the rabidly organic crowd. For 2010, anyway, the inmates are in charge of the asylum.

Emily Dickinson, Gimmick

What does it take to draw a crowd? What does it take to draw a crowd when you have a hundred thousand members and a gazillion dollar endowment? What does it take to draw a crowd when you have all those things plus it’s the first weekend in May and the most beautiful day of the year?

Apparently, Emily Dickinson.

The New York Botanical Garden is without question one of the finest facilities of its type in the world and I’ve been to no finer one in the United States. I’m pleased to be a member despite living 209 miles from its front gate.

We were there yesterday as part of “members’ weekend”, perhaps a kind of “old home” event on the part of the NYBG marketing staff. Parking was free, use of the tram was free, admission to the rock garden was free. Of course, except for the tram, these things are always free for members anyway. But we also got free admission to “Emily Dickinson’s Garden – the Poetry of Flowers”, except that is also free any other time for members (for non-members, it’s $20). Oh, and everything in the gift shop was 20% off.

It was a glorious day to be at the garden. We arrived at 9:30 and were one of the first dozen cars into the parking lot. We walked the Ladies’ Border and perennial beds in front of the Conservatory in utter seclusion. At 10 a.m. the Conservatory opened its doors and we decided to go see what the fuss was about as regards Ms. Dickinson.

We usually skip the Conservatory during the warm months because there’s so much to see outdoors. That’s a mistake. The Enid Haupt Conservatory is divided into climates representing different regions of the world and, on May 1, it seemed as though the whole world had exploded into bloom. Turquoise pods fell in chains on vines in the rain forest. A cactus in the desert room was covered in vividly yellow flowers. Bougainvillea in hues of red, orange and purple cascaded from the ceiling.

And then we were in the Special Exhibitions area of the Conservatory and in Emily Dickinson’s garden.

It was a nice garden, though why it was mounted indoors is a bit mystifying. It featured the flowers, trees and shrubs that the Belle of Amherst wrote about in her poetry. But it was a tiny, densely packed New England garden with a lot of explanatory text. The plants were of the sort found at any decent nursery. It had a ten-foot-long woodland path; not exactly conducive to the kind of contemplative walks that inspired Ms. Dickinson.

There is no question, though, that Emily Dickinson and flowers are inextricably linked, or that her family’s garden (at The Homestead, an estate in Amherst) stimulated her. Bringing it indoors and compressing it into less than two thousand square feet seems extremely short-sighted.

We spent the balance of our time walking the lilac garden (in full, fragrant bloom) and paying homage to NYBG’s spectacular rock garden, a continuing source of inspiration.

At half past noon we were ready to journey into Manhattan. That’s when we got to observe what happens when you dawdle on members’ weekend. The lines to get in stretched out of the visitor’s center and out into the parking lot. The NYBG parking lot was long since filled to capacity and closed, with a massive traffic jam stretching into the garage at Fordham University across the street.