The Summer Garden Tour

In 1848, a farmhouse was built in Roxbury, Massachusetts, a farming community a few miles outside of Boston.  Around the time of the farmhouse’ construction, a black walnut tree was planted twenty feet or so from the home’s front door.

The black walnut tree

That tree would see a lot of history.  West Roxbury would secede from Roxbury in 1851 and West Roxbury would be annexed by Boston in 1874.  With the annexation would come new roads and streetcar lines.  The farm would be subdivided and re-subdivided until it consisted of only a grand house and a barn (converted to a garage) on a short street called Grayfield Avenue.

The black walnut, though, remained.  It grew until it both towered over and covered the house and, indeed the entire front of the property.  Successive owners came to realize they were stewards of a piece of Boston history.

Christie Dustman does an impromptu
horticultural lecture at a garden on
the West Roxbury Garden Tour

I was unaware of that tree’s existence, let alone its history, until this past weekend when I went on the West Roxbury Garden Tour; a fundraising event sponsored by the Evening Garden Club of West Roxbury.  Because I had a ticket for the tour, I had the opportunity to chat with David Godkin, the home’s owner for the past quarter century, who went on at length about the tree’s maintenance.  I learned that black walnuts are finicky trees, given to dropping branches (and walnuts).  A tree of its size and age requires cables to stabilize branches.  I suspect being a steward of a piece of history is an expensive proposition.

The house on Grayfield Avenue was just one of ten properties on view that weekend and, indeed, the West Roxbury Garden Tour was one of several in the Boston area competing for attention.  Betty and I also journeyed to the South Shore town of Pembroke for a garden tour the next day (more about that in a few moments).

A garden tour is an invitation
to poke around

Garden tours are a wonderful thing.  They are invitations to poke around and ask questions.  Docents (or, better yet, the home’s owners) provide the unabridged answers.  Sometimes, you don’t even have to ask questions.  At a second property on the West Roxbury tour, Christie Dustman, who had designed the garden (a professional, in this case) was offering a hands-on seminar about the things that made the garden special.  She used a knife to slice off a branch from a hedge and challenged a crowd to identify the unusual shrub used (it was a longstalk holly, ilex pedunculosa).  She also showed how the growth of ornamental pines were managed by manually truncating the ‘candles’ produced by the pines each year.

The century-old Kentucky
Yellowwood

Most people go to garden tours to see flowers; we kept encountering glorious trees that stole the show.  In addition to the black walnut, a home on Montview Avenue featured a century old cladrastis Kentuckea – the Kentucky Yellowwood.  Yellowwoods are magnificent, tall trees anytime of the year, but in late May and early June, they produce a prodigious display of white flowers that stops you in your tracks.  Moreover, while the tree can produce flowers every year, the display is stronger in alternating years.  The yellowwood gracing the home was just past its peak flowering cycle, but the shape of the tree – massive and gnarled yet still as grand and proud as any tree in its prime – was a ‘teachable moment’ in horticulture.

West Roxbury featured gardens on small lots; a quarter acre is considered ‘huge’ within the Boston city limits.  On Sunday we ventured out to Pembroke where the Mattakeesett Garden Club was hosting its second annual tour.  Pembroke is 30 miles from the center of Boston and lots can range into multiple acres. 

An antique house on Brick Kiln Road was the site of both history and an expansive, meandering garden that showed care, imagination, and proof that vegetables can be an integral part of landscaping.  There were no fewer than half a dozen sites where vegetables had been tucked into unsuspecting sites, including adjacent to a swimming pool.  But perhaps the biggest surprise came when the homeowner insisted on showing us the interior of a shed.

The shed, as it turned out, was older than the house and was originally part of a shipyard that once sat on the property (itself on the meandering and historic North River).  Inside the shed was a piece of shipbuilding history – an intact lathe from the eighteenth century that was used to turn out the intricate wooden parts for the sailing ships built at the shipyard.  It was the most unexpected encounter I’ve ever had on a garden tour, and one that will stay with me for a very long time.

Garden tours are fun events; a great way to spend an afternoon with a mix of adventure and education.  They’re also important ways that garden club raise funds for civic beautification and educational programs.  Over the next month in eastern Massachusetts and on Cape Cod, there are garden tours in Sharon, Kingston, Dennis, Salem, Gloucester, and Osterville.  (I suspect that a Google search would produce an avalanche of tours in every state).  You can get full information on the Massachusetts tours at http://gcfm.org/Calendar-News/Calendar.aspx. 

Of special note, in the Berkshires, the Lenox Garden Club will hold its biennial “Hidden Treasurers of the Berkshires” tour on July 11.  I wrote their last tour here.  This is the Queen Mother of garden tours and while it is "only" six gardens, they are always spectacular.  This year's tour takes place in and around Stockbridge.  You can get information about and tickets for the tour at http://www.lenoxgardenclub.net.

 

If I were to pick one “don’t miss tour” though, it would be the July 11 Generous Gardeners tour of Annisquam.  Located on a peninsula within the town of Gloucester on Cape Ann, Annisquam is a stunningly beautiful village that meets everyone’s vision of the idealized New England coastal town.  Generous Gardeners, in turn, is an amazing philanthropic organization that exists to raise money for worthwhile horticultural projects.  You can get full details about the tour at http://www.gloucestergardentour.org/.

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….

Just Add Plants

Our new home respects the
wetlands that make up
two-thirds of the property

The evening before the beginning of The Great Replacement, Betty and I walked our property with Scott Dolan, a Medfield-based landscaper.  Using orange paint we marked the placement of a patio, sidewalk and stone wall. We discussed grade levels and ideal pitch; and how to ensure that we did not injure the wetlands behind our home.

We also marked where crushed rock drains would obviate the need for gutters in front of the house, and where a berm would be created to provide a measure of privacy from the street.  At the end of an hour, we all understood the exact scope of the work ahead of us.

Below the builder's crud
on the surface was more
of the same

Then, on Wednesday, May 20, a convoy of trucks, bulldozers and backhoes descended on 26 Pine Street and began The Great Replacement.  The goal: make a little over 20,000 square feet of land suitable for creating a garden.

Our new garden is being created from a blank slate.  The house that previously stood on the site was beyond repair; we had it torn down.  There was no garden.  The lot was densely wooded with end-of-life white pines.  Underneath those pines were a morass of invasive burning bush.  Surrounding the burning bush were sweeps of horrific black swallowwort. 

We excavated down 18 inches,
removing more than 900 cubic yards
of detritus...

More than forty pines became board lumber and mulch; the invasive detritus was stripped away.  A barrier was erected between the buildable portion of the property and an acre-plus of wetlands behind it.  A home rose on the site. 

Material from the digging of the basement, coupled with other fill, was used to form the open area around the house.  But the already rocky fill was continually compressed by trucks and cranes.  Over the winter, it hardened into something with the consistency of concrete. Our attempts to dig even small holes were exercises in frustration.  What was needed was a major-league do-over.  Hence Scott Dolan and his armada of yellow Caterpillar equipment. 

... replacing it with screened loam. 
Note the laser depth measurement tool

It takes a very good landscaper to accept a project like ours, much less to do it with enthusiasm.  For somebody in the business, the real money in landscaping is in creating extravagant ‘hardscapes’ that dazzle visitors and homeowners alike and, after that, in the continuing maintenance of lawns and shrubs.  Our project, on the other hand, was a one-time, low-margin deal.  But it was a monumental undertaking:  scrape out the top eighteen inches of crud on those 20,000 square feet, haul it away, and replace it with a like amount of screened loam. 

* * * * *

At the same time, we prepped for
the installation of a sidewalk...

Though the work was being done by Scott’s crew, I was on hand that first morning to rescue large rocks for the to-be-built stone wall, darting in between each scoop to pick up ones of a usable size and shape.  Each scoop revealed what we already suspected: beneath the ‘builder’s crud’ on the surface of our new home’s land was more crud.  The mix was more than 50% rock to soil.

What was interesting, though, was that further down – below the original grade – was a mixture of soil and river gravel.  At one time, our property had likely been part of a river bed.  Once the crud was gone, we would have great drainage.

We also created
a drainage network

Using laser-guided measuring tools, backhoes removed those useless top eighteen inches.  A lineup of trucks hauled it away to a construction project in another town that needed fill (just as much of our ‘crud’ had its origins from another excavation).

Even as the digging-out process continued in the front of the property, trucks began bringing in screened loam to the back.  Our loam came from a farm in a nearby town that has been sold and will soon begin to sprout homes.  We spot checked the loam as it came in:  it was rock-free and rich in organics.  This was the beginning of a great garden.

We topped the newly installed loam
with several inches of dark brown mulch

It took three days to replace those top eighteen inches.  A portion of that third day was devoted to making the property ready for a sidewalk, a patio, and a proper porous stone driveway (there will be no asphalt on the site).  A re-processed concrete material forms the base of the patio and sidewalk.  It was tamped into a hard-pack surface.  At dusk on Friday, Scott’s part of the job was done.

Now, all we have to do is
add several thousand plants...

Betty’s and my part of the job was just beginning.  On Saturday morning, a massive truck delivered twenty cubic yards of dark brown mulch.  As this is written we are still spreading it over the new loam.  The purpose is to prevent the soil from blowing and to retain the soil's moisture.  Twenty yards will not be sufficient to cover all the areas.

Also on Saturday, we went window shopping (or its open-air equivalent) for stone for the sidewalk and patio.  I had gone into the process with a fairly narrow view of what would be acceptable for those two elements of our hardscape.  My eyes were opened to a world of possibilities, including cleft Pennsylvania fieldstone, Sekonnet round stone, and a host of names that overwhelmed me with new choices.  All I can say is that ‘bluestone’ has a lot of competition.

On Sunday, we started shopping for trees and shrubs.  But that’s another story. 

One Potato, Two Potato...

The landscaper didn’t bother to reach down and pick up a handful of dirt to assess its merits.  Not that he could have.  Instead, he just tried unsuccessfully to loosen a clod with his heel.  After three attempts he shook his head.

At our new home all we have
is 'builder's crud' - rock and
more rock

“I see this all the time,” he said.  “Builder’s crud.  There’s nothing you can do with it.”

Fifty feet away from where we were standing was a silent testament to the truth of his statement: a large pile of stones and a few square feet of brownish-gray ground where, a week earlier, I had used our ancient, wheezing rototiller.  Every few feet the rototiller would go ‘clunk’ as it struck more ‘potatoes’, as Rocks Of A Certain Size are known in the parlance of the landscaping industry.  Three hours with my EconoHorse convinced me this was not a do-it-yourself project.

He was not the first landscaper we contacted and he would not be the last.  We spoke with four in all, each one delivering the same message:  we have a very expensive problem on our hands.

The problem is that, at our new home, we want a garden, not a lawn.  If all we wanted was a lawn, ‘builder’s crud’ would be fine as a base.  Just add six inches of top soil and spray on grass seed.  If we wanted a lawn with a few trees, we need only whack a hole through the rocks with a pickax and add a little compost.

Digging a simple foot-deep
trench to lay an electrical
line produced this much rock

When we explained that there would be no grass on the property, the landscapers’ mouths would form a little ‘oh’.  That’s when kicking the ground would begin.

The solution was a variant on this:  dig out the top eighteen inches of crud.  Truck it off or use it to create berms, walls, and other topographical features on the property.  Next, bring in two feet of good, screened loam, plus peat moss, plus compost.  Top it off with mulch. Then, plant anything you want.

How much loam will it take to create this garden?  Let’s do the math:  Let’s say the property has 120 front feet and all but ten feet of that width (the driveway) will be garden.  The house is set back 75 feet from the street.  So, the front garden is 8,250 square feet.  Multiply that by two feet of loam for a requirement of 16,500 cubic feet of loam.  Translate that into cubic yards: 611.

Our garden on Wild Holly
Lane was beautiful, but
required a lot of work

And that’s the front part of the property. There’s also the back and the side, though it is a little less daunting in size.  Does anyone want to venture a guess as to the cost of a cubic yard of screened loam?

As one of the landscapers delicately put it, “the cost of my crew for three or four days will be a minor component of this job.”

So, why are we doing this?  The reason is simple.  Over a period of sixteen years, Betty created a stunningly beautiful garden at our home on Wild Holly Lane.  We opened it for the Garden Conservancy among other charitable organizations, and the Wall Street Journal did a very nice piece on it.  But the garden ultimately became a maintenance burden.  The new garden will retain the beauty of Wild Holly Lane while making low maintenance a key factor in the choice of plant material and overall design.  It will emphasize (though not be limited to) native plants, and will put into practice all of the things that Betty has emphasized in her garden talks and writing.

My job will continue to be to move rocks and dig holes.  The ‘builder’s crud’, I’m leaving to the experts with their heavy machinery.

Tabula Rasa

What on earth have I gotten myself into?

Back at our old home, the snow is quickly melting off the lawn and gardens, revealing grass that awaits only a light raking to spring to new life.  Daffodils, warmed by the house’s foundation, are heading up for a mid-April bloom.  The buds, too, are swelling on hundreds of mature flowering trees and shrubs.

The house is finished, but now it
needs a garden....

This morning, I gazed out the window of our new home where, also, the snow is receding.  But what is revealed is… mud.  Nothing but mud.  Gray mud that last fall was compressed into the consistency of concrete by trucks, trailers and cranes parked for weeks at a time.

This is the site of our new garden. 

 Let us backtrack a few months.  Last year we found the ideal location for the home we plan to reside in until we are carried out, feet first.  It was a wonderful site but sitting on it was a dilapidated house.  Around that house was a forest of aging pines, a thicket of invasive barberry and burning bush, plus a lush garden of poisonous black swallowwort.

We had the house torn down and a wide area of trees and undergrowth removed.  Betty began planning a low-maintenance garden.  Then winter set in and our gardening plans were played in abeyance.

Now, we are ready to begin turning that tabula rasa into a garden, or at least begin gardening when the ground thaws.

To turn that concrete-like dirt into gardening soil we have a rototiller.  AARP just sent it a membership application.  We purchased our Troy-Bilt EconoHorse in 1980 and used it happily for ten years.  Then we moved and then moved again, taking along our rototiller because it had served us so well and we expected that one day we would use it again.  The last time either one of us can definitively remember using it was during the Clinton administration.

Our circa 1980 rototiller

Two weeks ago we hauled our rototiller to the place that has kept our snow blower running for a decade and asked whether the EconoHorse could be saved or should it be put down.  A group of employees gathered around it and gazed, awestruck that such a machine could still exist and not have been reduced to rust.  A technician gave a tentative pull on the engine and said there was hope. 

Three days ago our aging rototiller came home, renewed with a host of sparkling new belts, hoses, and other parts, and ready to do its best.

But while the machine is the same, the man behind that TroyBilt is not the same guy who, in 1980, created a 50 by 200 foot garden in a single weekend of sweaty, muscular grit and determination.  That was more than half a lifetime ago.  He is 35 years older and those muscles, while they have exactly atrophied, aren’t what they were once upon a time.

And, tilling that dirt is just the first step toward turning it into soil.  There needs to be truckloads of compost worked into it plus whatever else a soil test tells us it needs.  Then, there are dozens of shrubs to plant, grasses and perennials to place, and paths to create.

Like I wrote at the beginning of this essay, what have I gotten myself into?

We do these things out of love.  We also do these things because we want to prove to ourselves that we still possess the stamina to carry out a major project that is long on physical effort.  Mostly, we do these things because we want to be able to say that we had a hand in creating something beautiful.  But, all the same, get ready to pass the Advil.

It's Winter, and I'm Content

Let me admit this at the outset:  I did not see snow until I was twenty years old.  In fact, on that first occasion, in December 1969, I drove 200 miles from Gainesville, Florida to Augusta, Georgia for the sole purpose of seeing genuine flakes of the stuff falling from the sky.

February 1960.  No snow.  That's me
standing in the center.

My Florida upbringing notwithstanding, I have seen a lot of snow since.  A little over two years after that first encounter, I was ensconced in what I genuinely believed was the Snow Capital of the World: Schenectady, New York.  There, it is said, the snow never melts.  Instead, by June, enough soot collects on the top of the snow to support grass and flowers for a few months.

I have been in one snow mecca or another ever since, including a total of 25 years in the Boston area.  In short, despite a late start, I believe I have paid my snow dues. 

This latest round of snow - Marcus -
brings the 30-day snow total to
more than 60 inches

My wife, Betty, on the other hand, is from the upstate New York snow belt.  She has childhood tales of reaching out her second floor window to make snowballs from the lake-effect-fueled drifts.  Her definition of a ‘white Christmas’ is that it must actually be snowing on the morning of December 25.  I bow to the truth that she was shoveling snow as a child while I refused to go in swimming because the ocean temperatures at Miami Beach had dipped to a nippy 75 degrees.

For nine months of the year, our disparate upbringings have no bearing on our life together.  But when the snow starts falling heavily, my wife reverts to the fervent belief that I came to New England on the back of a mango truck sometime in the last few months.  When it comes to snow removal at our home, she is the boss and I am there mostly for comic relief.

Betty is the master of the snow blower

There is one final element of this story that needs to be told:  for the past fifteen years we have lived in a home with a winding, 220-foor-long driveway.  At the top of that driveway is a three-car garage that – likely as an architectural version of a practical joke – faces the street rather than ‘loading’ from the side.  All snow needs to be pulled away from the garage; not pushed past it.  Add an area for backing in, and you are talking about a little over 3000 square feet of asphalt that must be cleared each and every snowfall. 

And, there is a ‘part two’ of that final element:  along the driveway and close to the house are glorious beds of plants and trees that should never have excessive snow piled on them.  Plus a sidewalk.  And some pathways that lead to things like our compost bin and side door into the garage. 

A truck wielding a snow plow is impractical (those front-facing garage doors leave no ‘terminus’ to push the stuff).  Thus, there are no easy solutions when you are serious about not damaging a garden.  This is ‘retail’ snow removal, not ‘wholesale’.

All of this is manageable if the snowfall amounts to a few inches.  Using a ‘pusher’, I move the snow beyond what we call the ‘no throw’ zone, and we then shovel or use a snow blower to throw the stuff onto the lawn or into the woods.  Piece of cake.

My job is to keep the edges crisp
and even

The relentless series of storms that have encompassed New England for the past month had dropped more than 70 inches of the white stuff on our town.  That volume of snow calls for extraordinary measures and Betty devises the battle plan because she is the one who designed these gardens.  And so she commands the Ariens snow blower with its 20-inch-high maw and wide augur.  My job… is to clean up the edges and do any heavy lifting required.

I will be the first to admit that she does an extraordinary job of it.  The remnants of storms Juno, Linus and, now, Marcus, have been dealt with not just efficiently, but with an eye to managing snow melt if and when things warm up.  I will also acknowledge that I could not have done nearly as well.

In the meantime, though, my work on the edges is crisp and even.  I do have my pride.

Snow removal is supposed to be ‘guy’ stuff.  Our next-door neighbor has a tractor-cum-snow blower that is the envy of every guy on the street.  He can clear his driveway (with its side-loading garage) in half an hour, then do wheelies out in the street. 

It takes us considerably longer but, tomorrow morning, our driveway will be down to black pavement while all of our neighbors drive on a thin coat of ice.  Moreover, our mailbox is readily accessible to our carrier despite being ground zero for an entire street’s worth of snow.

No, I didn’t just arrive here from the land of the tropics.  Sometimes, though, you have to acknowledge that someone else has a ‘better idea’ of how to do these things.  Is it a product of being snow-belt born and bred?  I don’t know. 

I just do what I’m told.  But, in the back of my mind, I known darn good and well that I can husk a coconut ten times as fast as Betty any day of the week.

Christmas for a Worthy Cause

This past week I had the opportunity to see three garden clubs in action.  Each put on an ‘event’ designed to raise thousands of dollars from the public.  Each involved dozens of club members working toward a common goal and each was, in my estimation, a class act.  The remarkable thing is that in each case the money raised will go right back into the community.

* * * * *

For the Easton Garden Club, the event was a Festival of Trees.  The venue was the Governor Ames Estate, a Trustees of Reservations property in the town some 25 miles south of Boston. 

‘Festivals of Trees’ have been around for more than two decades.  Money is raised through a modest admission plus the lure of winning one of the trees on display.  Typically, a sheet of 25 chances costs roughly $8.  The more imaginative the tree, the more tickets it will draw. 

All of the trees at Easton's Festival of
Trees will be raffled off December 14

Easton held its first Festival of Trees in 2011.  The club is fortunate to have a number of gifted designers, chief among them a diminutive bundle of energy by the name of Gloria Freitas-Steidinger.  I have had the pleasure to know Gloria for several years now and she is not only an internationally recognized floral designer; she also decorates a mean Christmas tree.

This year’s Easton Festival of Trees features 45 trees, each one sponsored by a local business or a family.  The event opened November 28 and runs through December 14.  Last Sunday I had the pleasure to talk with Nancy Cohenno, the club member who organized this year’s and last year’s Festival, and who ‘wrangles’ several dozen club members who do everything from decorate trees for sponsoring businesses to selling tickets and being docents during every hour the event is open.

Nancy began working on the 2014 event even as the 2013 edition was concluding its run.  She has spent the intervening year devising a series of special events designed to bring people to the Ames Estate who might not otherwise gravitate to a garden club event.  These include a ‘Kids Day’ that drew hundreds of families, a ‘Walk Back in Time’ featuring antique cars, and a ‘Jazz Night’.

What will the club do with the proceeds?  For one thing, the club will pay for the installation of 174 planters, urns, hanging baskets and window boxes along Easton’s Main Street in 2015.  That is in addition to the ten public sites currently maintained by the club.

* * * * *

For the Garden Club of Hingham, the special event was a ‘holiday hour tour and boutique’ called ‘Deck the Halls’.  That cursory description does not do justice to what was going on in the town on the south shore of Boston last Saturday.

Part of the Holiday Boutique at
Hingham's 'Deck the Halls' tour

Hingham, in the interest of full disclosure, is an affluent town rich in history.  Its garden club is a good match for the community it serves.  The club maintains a sunken parterre garden at The Old Ordinary, a 1688 house museum; as well as multiple showcase gardens at the town library and other historic sites; plus traffic islands in Hingham Centre.  This year, the club donated greenhouse equipment for a new greenhouse at the town’s high school and a ginkgo tree to an elementary school.  It puts up Christmas wreaths at civic sites as well as weekly flower arrangements at the Hingham Library.  You get the idea.  The Holiday House Tour and Boutique – held on the first Saturday in December – pays for all this and much more. 

I have been on many garden club house tours.  They range from frankly poorly planned to quite good.  Hingham’s effort is first class in every regard.  The homes are a mixture of modern and historic and range from a pair of seaside manses to large suburban homes miles inland.  Each home gets a team of decorators.  Up to seven club members choose a theme in consultation with the homeowner and then go to work for several days to turn as many as seven rooms into festive holiday showcases.

The Garden Club of Hingham
decorating team responsible
for the 'snow bears' vignette

If I had to choose one vignette to represent the effort that goes into making the tour it would be a scene of polar bears.  An annoying feature of many new houses is a leftover space where architects have placed massive windows, typically over the front entry, to allow natural sunlight into grand foyers.  In many such homes the windows create ledges six to eight feet long and often two to three feet wide.  Their sole purpose seems to be to gather dust bunnies.  But the decorating team that went to work on a Bel Air Road home had a different kind of animal in mind.  They created a scene of polar bears frolicking in a glen of cottony snow.  The all-white creation was equal parts whimsy and great use of space. 



Andrea Wilson, at left, managed the
Holiday Boutique this year

My true appreciation for the club’s effort, though, came at the Boutique.  When I walked into the sprawling South Shore Baptist Church, I saw a long table where tour tickets were being sold, and another table with boxwood trees for sale.  I thought to myself, ‘Holiday Boutique, check.’  Instead, I was informed that the Boutique was upstairs. 

Sure enough, there were several vendors in the corridor.  But these turned out to be the overflow.  The Boutique was housed in a cavernous assembly room:  18 extremely handsome booths selling everything from hand-thrown pots to miniature Christmas trees made from mussel shells.

I asked who was in charge of this and was directed to Andrea Wilson.  Andrea was in the church kitchen baking cookies.  Yes, she had assembled these vendors, one of whom was her husband whose post-banking retirement enterprise is handcrafting lamps from antique brass fire hoses.  She has spent the past year going to other markets, looking for vendors that would ‘fit’ with the tone the club wants to set.  In this case, ‘fit’ meant personable, chatty, quick to hand out samples, and selling things that no one would mistake as having been imported from China.

* * * * *

I have a personal connection to that third and final holiday fund raiser.  The Medfield Garden Club has been running a Holiday Greens Sale for so long than no one in the club can remember when there wasn’t one.

When the doors open at 10 a.m., the
Greens Sale is a madhouse.

The Greens Sale runs for two hours.  The planning for it takes months and utilizes the skills of most of the club’s able-bodied members.  There’s a bow-making workshop and this year’s November meeting was devoted to teaching members how to make candle rings, boxwood trees and basket arrangements.  There are expeditions to cut cedar, juniper and other evergreens in the town watershed, old state hospital and other open lands.

Beginning Tuesday morning, the basement of the First Parish Church becomes an assembly line that is as much about catching up with garden club friends as it is making baskets and centerpieces.  Betty was the anointed ‘Basket Queen’ for many years, overseeing the production of as many as 130 gorgeous arrangements.  She taught me the basics and, this year, I turned out fifteen or twenty pretty good arrangements incorporating pine, spruce, cedar, and arborvitae that, when augmented with a Santa or a bow, would sell for $12 to $25. 

Proceeds from the sale pay
for decorations at
Medfield's Town Hall

What does the Medfield Garden Club do with the money it raises?  It goes right back into the community.  The club has an ambitious program of creating and maintaining more than twenty wayside gardens around the town.  Proceeds of the sale help purchase the annuals, perennials and shrubs that make the roadside gardens a prominent feature of the community.  It also pays for large wreaths for Town Hall, decorations for a gazebo in a town park, and many other touches that, in other municipalities might be done at town expense.

The Holiday Greens Sale is part of the fabric of Medfield.  Saturday morning dawned cold, raw, and rainy; yet a line began forming outside the First Parish Church 45 minutes before the 10 a.m. opening.  Once the doors opened, people grabbed paper trays (the bottoms of beer cases, actually) and began filling them with candle rings, boxwood trees and anything else that caught their eye.  Before 11 a.m. the ‘inventory’ would fit on two tables.  At noon, everything was gone.

* * * * *

Three events.  Three garden clubs.  Thousands of hours of planning.  All targeted at serving the community.  Call it Christmas for a Worthy Cause.

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.