Apple Picking Time

Growing up, I didn’t understand the fuss about apples. They were mushy, tasteless things that were already showing brown spots by the time they appeared in our local supermarket. But then, I grew up in Miami, that was more than half a century ago and the nearest apple tree was six hundred miles away.

I had my first taste of a just-picked apple when I was in my twenties. With that taste, I finally understood what I had been missing. Since then, picking apples in September has been one of the joys of early autumn.

This past weekend, Betty and I ventured 45 miles north to Doe Orchards in Harvard, Massachusetts to pick Macouns. Doe is a family-run business and has a 25-acre apple orchard plus two acres of blueberries and raspberries. There are closer orchards to our home, including nearby ones with Macouns. But Doe has magnificent, mature trees and apples are their primary business. The location is a hilltop and the trees have the air and light they need to produce luscious fruit.

This has been a very good year for apples in New England. Trees bloomed on schedule and there was no late hard frost or May snow to destroy the buds. The interminable rains of June and early July came after the fruit had set. The rain meant tree roots had all the water they could absorb and so the apples never lacked for moisture as they grew. A relatively dry August and September meant the fruit ripened slowly. The trees from which we picked were heavy with fruit, the Macouns huge with no loss of flavor.

We pick Macouns because they are, hands down, the best apple around for fresh eating, for baking and for making the two dozen jars of apple butter that will tide us over the winter, offering a tart, smooth reminder of autumn’s pleasure. Macouns are especially sweet, very aromatic and their flesh is tender and snow white. They have an especially satisfying ‘snap’ when you bite into one.

Macouns are Johnny-come-lately’s among apples. They were developed at the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva, New York in 1932 and are named for a famous Canadian fruit breeder W.T. Macoun. We’ve picked them as far south as Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

Apple butter is a fine souvenir of a harvest but, while the apples are fresh, they’ll be eaten with several meals a day and as in-the-car snacks. In what may be an apple’s finest incarnation, they’ll be the star of Molly O’Neill’s Apple Walnut Upside-Down Cake, which can be found in ‘A Well Seasoned Appetite’. Ms. O’Neill (who is Paul O’Neill’s baby sister in addition to other accomplishments) specifies Macoun apples in her recipe. Who can go against the instructions of the sister of a Yankee legend? Betty may make as many as half a dozen of these desserts during September and October.

We’ll make another trip to Doe Orchards when our half-bushel-sized bag is empty. The apple butter we put up will be made from those last specimens. Come January, jars will get opened and spread over waffles; reminders of the wonderful autumn of 2009.

Adjø, Acer platanoides

A few decades ago, the back cover of publications such as ‘Parade’ were adorned with ads for ‘miracle trees’; things that would grow from a four-foot whip into a thirty-foot shade tree in five years. You could buy four of them for $19.95 or some such absurdly low figure.

I’d be willing to bet that some of those ‘miracle trees’ were Acer platanoides, better known as the Norway maple. Beloved by developers twenty years ago for their ‘instant neighborhood’ qualities, the tree is today considered an invasive species. It has a thick, shallow, fibrous root system that fairly well sucks out the moisture from everything around it. It is also a brittle tree, given to shedding branches at inopportune times. Further, it's a imposter: the tree is native to Turkey. 'Norway' just sounded more upscale. Finally, anyone who loves maple syrup and thinks tapping this branch of the family is in for a disappointment.

Mostly, though, it is a great brute of a shade tree. It gets very large and has a massive canopy that permits no light to get through it. Anything that is planted between it and the sun is doomed to live in eternal shadow. It’s lone saving grace is that it turns a brilliant yellow and gold in the fall.

The builder who put up the ten homes on my street did a fine job with the houses, but his skills ended at finish carpentry. He put a five-clump river birch in the front yard of the house we would buy… ten feet from the septic tank. He dotted the street with now-banned burning bush (Euonymus alatus). And, to shade the sidewalks, he planted a great many Norway maples. Our home was four years old when we moved in and the tree on our property was roughly fifteen feet in height and still reasonably shaped.

Ten years later, the shortcomings of Acer platanoides could no longer be ignored. We had consistently pruned the maple in front of our shrub bed so that it was, at worst, an annoyance. But a second Norway maple on a neighbor’s property - forty feet high and as wide across as its height - was shading our ‘butterfly bed’ out of existence while keeping the soil underneath it as dry as dust.

Last summer, that neighbor’s home sold and the new owners had the property re-surveyed. When they mulched their beds this spring, Betty noted that the line of bark mulch ended abruptly a foot from the Norway maple. She inquired and was told that the new survey showed that the tree was on our property. Seldom has such a proclamation been so joyously received.

Yesterday afternoon, Sasa, the tree man arrived with the biggest Bandit chipper I’ve ever seen. Adjø, Acer platanoides.  In half an hour he reduced both trees to mulch and a stack of firewood. He then, at our request, upended the cart on his dump truck and left us a neat pile of roughly nine cubic yards of well-shredded leaves and wood chips. Last evening, Betty and I began the task of spreading that mulch, three inches thick, onto walkways and open areas.


Over the course of the winter the leaves will decompose and put nitrogen back into the soil. The wood chips – which we know to be disease-free - will remain to keep down weeds and build up the soil. The shrub bed will be slightly enlarged to incorporate the stump of the one Norway maple, the Butterfly bed will likely be replanted in the spring to take advantage of the new, unaccustomed sunlight.

What Clarence Hay Wrought

Truly great rock gardens are rare. In the Northeast, the one at the New York Botanical Garden is magnificent. Smith College has a fine, albeit small one. And then there’s the rock garden at The Fells, on the eastern shore of Lake Sunapee in Newbury, New Hampshire. It’s the one that makes you truly appreciate why rock gardens are such special places.

The name of John M. Hay has fairly well passed into the history books, but he was a pivotal figure of the nineteenth century, serving as private secretary to Abraham Lincoln, ambassador to Great Britain and Secretary of State under Presidents McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. The Fells was his family’s country retreat, a thousand acres on one of New England’s most scenic shorelines. Upon his death, The Fells passed to his son, Clarence Hay (1885-1969).

An avid amateur horticulturalist, Clarence started building a rock garden in 1920. He and a crew of skilled stonemasons began setting lichen-speckled rocks on the south-facing hillside toward the lake. He planted hundreds of alpine and rock garden plants to give the impression of a rocky Swiss hillside. A stream was created to wind the length of the rock garden; at its center he created a lily pool surrounded by azaleas and Japanese iris. Stone paths with rock steps meandered through the garden, and alongside them crevices and raised islands provided growing conditions for the more demanding rock garden plants. (The photo above, left is a view of the garden in the 1920s.)

The bulk of the Hay estate became a wildlife refuge beginning in the 1960s. By the time a non-profit organization called The Fells began managing the property in 1995, the rock garden existed only in memory and old photos. The organization set out to refurbish the multiple gardens Hay created, with special attention to the rock garden. It has taken over ten years of work by a dedicated staff, and volunteers (many of them New Hampshire Master Gardeners) but today the rock garden has been restored to its 1920s splendor.  The photo below was taken this weekend from the same vantage point as the one from the 1920s.

We were there this weekend to draw inspiration for our own rock garden. While Hay’s was a labor of love, ours was one of necessity. The back of our property slopes down steeply to a pond and, when we purchased our home, spring and summer rains poured off the roof, washing grass, soil and everything in its wake down into the woods toward the pond.

A civil engineering project worthy of the WPA came first. New downspouts were added across the back of the house and French drains installed to safely carry away rainwater and snow melt. Something had to go on top of all those pipes. We brought in large rocks to begin stabilizing the hillside and to create terraces. After the first few dozen stones were in place, we realized that, without intending to, we were creating an ideal environment for a rock garden.

We made our first visit to regional rock gardens, including The Fells, about nine years ago. We’ve returned to the Fells several times a year ever since, each time gaining new appreciation for what Hay (and a cadre of volunteers decades later) accomplished. The garden changes both with the seasons and from its multiple interior and exterior perspectives. The garden is at its most colorful in early summer but, even in September, there is color, texture and shape to please the eye. We’ve tried to learn from what Clarence Hay created. We have a long way to go.

The Rule of Three

Over the decade we have lived in our current home, we have transformed what was once two acres of woods with a too-large lawn into what we think is an attractive series of interconnected gardens: shrub beds, perennial borders, xeric beds and specimen trees – and a lot less lawn. I have willingly contributed the labor while my wife, the Master Gardener, provided the intelligence and design prowess.

But there comes a point in a garden’s evolution when the place is, well, full. For a period of time after that, new plants can be introduced by filling in gaps. Inevitably, however, you run out of space and, short of cutting down more trees to open up new territory, you have to learn to live within your garden footprint.

We reached the saturation point about three years ago. But nothing has diminished my wife’s interest in adding new specimens. A trip to a nursery ‘just to look around’ inevitably results in something up coming home with us. When those new shrubs or trees or perennials arrive at out home, there begins a game of musical chairs that I have come to think of as ‘the Rule of Three’.

The Rule of Three works like this: my wife falls in love with a new cultivar of Itea virginica ‘Little Henry’. ‘Little Henry’ is swaddled in burlap and comes home with us. My wife notes that ‘Little Henry’ is an ideal candidate for the shrub bed out in front of our property because it wants lots of sun, can tolerate a fairly dry area, and has colorful fall foliage that just might serve as an inspiration to our neighbors to get rid of their invasive burning bush.

Unfortunately, there’s a problem. Our shrub bed already contains more than twenty specimens. She begins walking the bed. She views the bed from multiple angles. Finally, she makes a determination: the Baptisia (false indigo to the rest of us) has to go. It never looked good there and it didn’t bloom this year until late July and then only for a few weeks.

Thus, we have the first hole. Out goes the Baptisia and in goes ‘Little Henry’.

But that’s too easy a solution. There’s nothing wrong with the Baptisia, it just wasn’t up to snuff for such a prominent locale. A home needs to be found for this misplaced plant. Once again, the entire garden is paced and viewed from multiple angles. Like ‘Little Henry’, the Baptisia also wants lots of sun and is tolerant of a dry spot. There are a limited number of such locales on our property.

It just so happens there is such an area in our xeric garden, created two years ago from what was once the strip of grass between the sidewalk and street. There is even a lovely spot for it just by the mailbox. The Baptisia would look perfect there. Unfortunately, that spot is currently occupied by a square foot or so of Hypericum calycinum, a ground cover with an attractive yellow flower that is, alas, effectively invisible from the street.

And so we have the second hole. Out goes Hypericum, to be replaced by the displaced Baptisia.

By now, you’re wondering if this plant version of musical chairs is going to go on infinitely. It could, but it turns out that Hypericum (sometimes called ‘Aaron’s Beard’) was a sort of failed experiment. My wife planted it (it was a gift from a fellow gardener) but never grew to love it.

But in our garden, things never get thrown away (except Rudbeckia, which goes straight into the mulch pile). And so a third hole is dug. This one is in the transplant bed, an area where sick plants go to get healthy and unwanted plants go to be potted up for the annual plant sale held by our local garden club. Hypericum will rest there until early May, when it goes to a new, more appreciative home.

That’s the ‘Rule of Three’: the introduction of any one, new plant requires the digging of three holes.

There is a corollary to the ‘Rule of Three’. I call it the ‘Rule of the Rock’ and it states that any perennial, tree or shrub put into a previously unplanted area will require the removal of a rock. Usually a big one. There is a handsome stone wall out in front of our property that wasn’t there when we moved in. Some of the biggest rocks in that wall were the result of putting in tiny hostas that ‘had’ to go in a certain area.

Now, you can only imagine what happens half a dozen new plants are brought in at once…

In praise of the uncommon nursery

Yesterday, Betty and I drove 90 miles to buy $116 worth of plants. It isn’t that we live in the middle of a nursery-free zone or that we have access to free gasoline. Rather, we chose to drive to Dartmouth, Massachusetts because we were looking for unusual plants and Avant Gardens is a reliable source for them. Then again, this spring, we drive 155 miles, to Andrew’s Greenhouse in South Amherst, to stock up on more than $300 of plants.

I have nothing against the ‘Big Box’ stores. If what I want is inexpensive potting mix or lime, I’ll be hard-pressed to find it cheaper anywhere. I also brook no argument with the locally-owned soup-to-nuts nurseries. The people at Weston Nurseries (a mere 18 miles away) know me on sight and they have supplied most of the trees and shrubs that grace our property. Weston’s staff is both knowledgeable and friendly and the nursery has some nifty marketing programs that keep us coming back. I used to joke that, instead of having my paycheck direct-deposited at a bank, it should be given to Weston and they could give me back any loose change that I didn’t spend there.

But when it came time to buy the annuals and perennials for some thirty containers this spring, we headed out the Mass Pike and spent roughly four hours shopping Andrew’s vast greenhouse and open-air sales area. Andrew’s (named for Andrew Cowles, who owns the nursery along with his wife, Jacqui) is a 30-year-old family business. It’s a 150-acre farm that has found its niche selling plants that you won’t find elsewhere. Those plants are lovingly described in a dense, 84-page catalog that makes it clear that Andrew’s both knows and believes in what it grows. For example:

MELAMPODIUM paldosum ‘Showstar’. This vivacious bloomer is the workhorse of your garden. Incredibly heat and drought tolerant. Once you try it you’ll never be without. Lush bushy mounds of misty green foliage adorned by multitudes of golden-yellow blooms. Full sun to partial shade.

That’s a lot of description for a small plant purchased in a four-inch pot, yet everything in the catalog is similarly detailed. Because those descriptions have been dead-on accurate every year, we’ve grown to trust that the cultivar we’re getting is going to perform as described.

Avant Gardens is not so easily described. If there is a common thread to the nursery’s collection, it is the unusual plants that owners Kathy and Chris Tracey have discovered and nurtured for the New England market. Going there is always a voyage of discovery: a mass of brilliant, late-summer color that turns out to be a self-sown annual brought back from California; or a capsicum annuum ‘Black Pearl’ that has dark purple foliage, the better to highlight the tiny, round black and red peppers on the plant. ‘Black Pearl’ was worth the drive all by itself. Finding an array of sedums and grasses with terrific autumn accent colors was exactly what we expected, and we were not disappointed.

Nurseries like these are a treasure and deserve a wide following. The outlay for gas is more than made up by discovering a plant with an off-the-charts ‘wow’ factor. And, to me, that’s what gardening is about: cultivating delight.

Mom's Garden

I like to think that maybe Mom hit the lottery, went on a luxury cruise around the Mediterranean and is, at this writing, fending off the attentions of some superannuated lothario on the Côte d’Azur. The alternative is too sad to contemplate.

Perhaps I should explain.

Rather than cut down a dozen trees on our property, fend off the deer and figure out how to fix the rototiller, my wife and I have a 20 foot by 60 foot plot in our town’s community garden. The town tills up the land, marks off the plots, supplies a large pile of manure and unlimited water. We fence it, plant it and keep it neat. For this we pay the bargain price of $40 a year. Last year, we harvested produce worth, conservatively, ten times that figure.

Anyone can sign up for a plot, first-come-first-served, and no gardening experience is required. In point of fact, once you’re there, you can get all the advice you need, much of it first-rate if you talk to the right people. You would think that with such a payoff ratio – plus the lure of indescribably fresh tomatoes, basil and corn – every plot would be lovingly tended now that everything is ripening.

Alas, there is summer gardening and there is… human nature. Of the 40 plots in the community garden, at least six are abandoned. Some still have fencing but other have shed even that pretense. The gardener gave up with all the rains of June or else they came back from those two weeks in California and discovered that the weeds had overwhelmed their little plot.

Which leads me back to Mom’s Garden. It’s the first one you see as you enter the community garden; a 20x30 plot. A four-foot fence went up in early May and, attached to the fence, a colorful, hand-made sign announcing that this is ‘Mom’s Garden’. Inside, a garden was laid out and planted and a weather-proof chair appeared. For a few brief weeks, it all looked perfect.

Then, the weeds began to sprout and, worse, the grass. The community garden was carved out of a hay field and is still surrounded by acres of greenery that is mowed just twice a year. If you don’t continually pull the grass, it takes over with a vengeance.

The rules of the community garden state that a garden plot that is not worked by the first week of June can be turned over to someone on the waiting list. Well, Mom’s Garden had a fence and some seedlings appearing, plus that chair. But, by early July, the grass was knee high. This week, the grass was chest-high and seed heads were ripening. The chair may or may not still be in there somewhere.

Perhaps Mom’s Garden was an unwanted gift from the kids. The kind of thing that seemed like a great idea at the time, except that no one bothered to consult Mom about whether she wanted to spend her summer hoeing and picking off bean beetles (“But we made you such a cute sign…”). If that’s the case, the kids ought to get to the garden once a week and show Mom some respect by weeding the thing.

Personally, though, I like the Mediterranean cruise explanation.

August: The Payoff Month

I was in our vegetable garden this afternoon picking green beans and noticed that the corn, now chest high, is starting to tassel out. Next to the green beans are harvest-size heads of cabbage and beets pushing themselves out of the ground. This evening, even after lavishing them on our salads, there are roughly twenty unused tomatoes on the kitchen counter.

In the garden immediately in front of our home, there is a riot of color and texture as white balloon flowers, golden heliopsis, lavender stokesia, yellow coreopsis, pale blue hydrangea, rust-colored blackberry lilies and a dozen other perennials compete for the attention of bees and butterflies. In another bed, rudbeckia crowds against solidago and fragrant Orienpet lilies, while red and purple monarda stake claims to the morning sun.

August is the month of excess. It is too much, really. Too many flowers all at once, too much lettuce that will not save and chard that will grow bitter before it is eaten. Our town’s food cupboard distributes twice this month. We will share the excess with the less fortunate but, even after turning over bags overflowing with produce, there will still be too much by next week.

This year’s bounty is less plentiful for certain vegetables. Last year, our bumper crop of zucchini forced us, at one point, to take several bags of it to our town’s transfer station – not to throw it away, but to leave it in the ‘swap meet’ area in hopes someone would say ‘yum, zucchini!’ Last year, we put up dozens of bags of frozen green beans, consuming the last of them just as this year’s crop began to mature.

Our eight varieties of tomatoes, many of them heirloom, began ripening in mid July. Now, three varieties are in full swing and a fourth will soon join them. My fear is that this year, despite planting squares three weeks apart, all our corn will ripen at once. Those chest-high plants mean we are, at most, three weeks away from ripe ears. Once it starts, we will be inundated with more corn than we can possibly eat.

Corn, in turn, may be the most satisfying of crops because it is one where there is a night-and-day difference between what appears in supermarkets and what comes from your own garden. Corn sugar starts turning to starch as soon as it is harvested. Two days after being picked, it is essentially tasteless. A local farm stand sells sweet corn that is hours from the field. Last year, because of the dry summer, it was a dollar an ear. We will definitely get our money’s worth… but how many ears of corn a day can two people eat? Some will be given away and some will be frozen in hopes of reliving a bit of August when winter sets in.

Finally, there are the ‘winter’ crops – winter squash, principally, but some other gourds as well. The vines are still relatively small – a product of too much rainfall and too little sun. I have confidence, though. Two weeks of heat will cause them to spill out past the garden fence into the fields beyond. Last September, we picked dozens of huge Butternut squash that filled several wheelbarrows. Stored in our cool, dry basement, they were a tasty reminder of summer for many months. I confess, though, that I cheered when we ate the last one in April.

All this bounty will all be over too soon. The New England gardening season is effectively over shortly after Labor Day because, here at 45 degrees north latitude, the daylight starts to shrink at an alarming rate and frosts appear with impunity.

So, I am enjoying this excess of August, the payoff month for gardeners. Flowers fill vases around the house bringing the beauty of the outdoors into out home and brightening our evenings. Meals are built around produce so fresh that, as I joke, it thinks it is still growing. I know it will be over too soon. That’s why I’m relishing it so much right now.

Lyme Disease

If you are reading this and you are not aware that I recently contacted Lyme Disease, then you are truly a minority in this new Age of Information. In the past three weeks I have received calls from friends, friends of friends, and President Obama all inquiring about my health.

Before going further, let me say two things about Lyme Disease: first, contracting it is likely an inevitable part of being a gardener. The deer ticks that carry it are the size of poppy seeds and, at least in southern New England, they are endemic. (The photos at left show the relative size of an adult deer tick and the deer tick nymph that latches onto humans and spreads Lyme Disease. In comparison, the common dog tick is the size of Jupiter.) Second, there is nothing humorous about undetected Lyme Disease. It can be debilitating and cause long-term health issues.

Fortunately, my own prognosis and treatment came swiftly. Three weeks ago today, I saw a bulls-eye rash on my skin in the morning. Instead of pretending it was something else that would go away on its own, I called my doctor. My doctor saw me at 4 p.m., took one look at it and said it was Lyme Disease. “I’ve seen more cases in the past six weeks than I’ve seen over the past six years,” he said. “We’ll do the blood work, but I’m starting you on antibiotics.” A vial of blood was drawn. By the time I got to my local pharmacy, two prescriptions were waiting for me. I took my first pill with dinner the same evening I first saw the rash. (Attention Congress: this is how health care is supposed to work.)

Lyme Disease is a bacterial infection. A deer tick nymph attaches itself to you and settles in to draw blood. In the process, an infected tick releases borrelia bacteria. If you remove the tick within 36 hours, the chance of further infection is virtually nil. If you don’t, you may see symptoms (the rash) within days. The good news is that if you treat the infection promptly, the ‘cure’ rate approaches 100%. I’m pleased to report that I’m free of any other symptoms.

But the news of my infection has spread within the gardening world like a Japanese beetle infestation. The reason is that my wife considers my condition, well, fascinating. Not to get too personal about this but, after each gardening session, we perform a tick check on one another. The fact that this tick escaped our scrutiny is cause for comment. The unnerving part is that Betty’s description generally includes the tracing (on her own body) of the location and progress of the rash. As a result, I get stares at a part of my anatomy that, well, I consider unsettling.

The downside to taking the antibiotics is that you are warned not to go out into the direct sun. This leads to weeding the vegetable garden at 7:30 a.m., all the time keeping an eye on the sun as it inexorably rises behind the trees. Of course, on a muggy July morning, any reason to get in and out of the garden early is welcome, but I consider it my responsibility to do my fair share of garden work.

This will pass. The treatment includes one set of pills for ten days and another for three weeks. I take my last pill this evening. On Monday, I’ll see my doctor again and, with luck, he’ll pronounce me one of the fortunate ones who didn’t procrastinate and so who were cured with a few dollars worth of pills. Then, I’ll be back to pulling my full weight as we hit the peak of the summer season.

A word to the wise: If you see that rash, don’t hesitate. Don’t pretend that it will go away on its own (it will but, when it does, your problems are just beginning). Get a diagnosis and get treated.

A Double-Header in the Bronx

New York City is 210 miles from my home and, on a Saturday morning, it’s a leisurely three-hour-and-change drive. This past Saturday, my wife and I spent a beautiful day visiting two old friends – Wave Hill and the New York Botanical Garden. Both are in the Bronx, which causes people’s eyes to bulge (you went where?!). These two gardens are must-sees for anyone who is serious about horticulture.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Wave Hill is that it is there. You walk from a modest parking area around a bend in a hedge and there, before you, is a vista that ought not to exist. A vast lawn stretching hundreds of feet sprinkled with specimen trees, a magnificent pergola studded with plants, and a vista across the Hudson River to the 500-foot-high Palisades that is unchanged from two centuries ago.

But then Wave Hill has an extraordinary history and enjoys unusual support. Located in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, it began, in 1843, as the ‘country estate’ of a grandson of a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Theodore Roosevelt lived there for two summers as a boy and Samuel Clemens was a resident for two years while the property was owned by a wealthy publisher. In 1903, a financier purchased Wave Hill and began acquiring adjacent properties, ultimately assembling 28 riverfront acres. The property passed to the City of New York in 1960 and is run today as a city-owned ‘cultural institution’. But it is hardly an impoverished institution: as of their last annual report, Wave Hill held cash and marketable securities valued at $21 million.

The Great Lawn, with its flights of eminently movable, tall-backed wooden chairs, is the dominant feature when you first see Wave Hill. This is Riverdale’s ‘front porch’, so to speak. Dozens of people read books and newspapers or chat with friends, oblivious to the stunning backdrop. If there were no gardens, Wave Hill would be worth the visit, just for that glorious view of the river and the high-rise-free cliffs beyond.

But there are gardens. Imaginative ones large and small. The pergola is a study in the use of containers. It is a riot of colors and textures and much of it is provided by dozens of containers holding everything from full-grown fruit trees to cascading, flowering vines. In another part of the park is a monocot garden – one comprised entirely of plants such as grasses, grains, banana plants and taro that produce a single leaf from each seed instead of the more prevalent two – which in turn surrounds an aquatic garden. It is intelligent in its design and intriguing in its execution. There is a flower garden – tiny for so large a park but packed with hundreds of annals and perennials. The layout is a formal grid but plants spill over into walkways producing a glorious jumble. There is an herb garden and an elliptical garden, each a fascinating space. Perhaps best of all, there is a container garden filled with Alpine plants. The containers – concrete cubes mostly – would be plug-ugly except for the riot of tiny plants they hold and the imaginative arrangement of those cubes. They stack upon one another and spread out line an Alpine meadow. It is a wonderful space.

I have been to Wave Hill perhaps half a dozen times and each visit brings something new to explore. On this visit, for the first time, I explored a woodland trail that tacks down the hillside toward the Hudson. It brought me by an unmarked, half-acre-sized swatch of land that appears to have been given over to seed-eating birds. It is a mass of Rudbeckia, Vernonia noveboracensis (New York State ironweed), Solidago, and Echinacea. Every garden should offer something new with each visit. Wave Hill never disappoints.

The New York Botanical Garden may be the most exquisite public garden in the U.S. It is lavishly endowed and continually being renewed. Its horticultural staff has the funds to Do Things Right and its marketers continually dream up events to pull in the crowds. Every public garden that has ever bemoaned poor attendance needs to send someone to the Bronx to see how it’s done.

Seeing NYBG properly takes days. We had a limited itinerary: to see the Rockefeller Rose Garden in its summer glory and take a walk through the Rock Garden looking for ideas of how to improve our own.

During the interminable rains of June, multiple rose specimens were hit by fungal disease and the NYBG staff belongs to the when-in-doubt-rip-it-out school of floriculture. Seeing several linear feet of mulched, empty beds is startling in such a garden but a wise move on the part of those who tend the garden. The signs promise a return of new specimens. But the color of everything else made those empty beds almost unnoticeable. If there is a scheme to the arrangement of rose varieties in the garden it escapes me. It’s just a wonderful, formal space that no home gardener could or should ever try to replicate. It’s the reason why there are public gardens. It’s the reason why you have to see the New York Botanical Garden.

Altogether for the McLaughlin Garden: A Trip to South Paris

I will leave it to the social scientists to decide whether it is a sign of maturity or senility, but it has been quite a long time since I wondered what the people around me looked like naked. But I could be forgiven a lapse yesterday if I kept seeing them that way: on tractors, behind wheelbarrows, and weeding flower beds. Oh, they were artfully camouflaged with leaves or shovels in just the right places, but they were nude all the same.

I guess an explanation is in order. The McLaughlin Garden in South Paris, Maine, has a storied history. It was the 60-year-long project of Bernard McLaughlin, who died at 98 in 1995. Upon his death the two-acre property, consisting of a farmhouse, barn and the garden, went up for sale. Because of its location on a main road in a growing town, McLaughlin’s garden seemed destined to become a supermarket parking lot. Fortunately, a group of area residents acquired the property with the expectation that the garden would remain open to the public without charge, just as it had been in McLaughlin’s lifetime. Unfortunately, the group had few assets apart from the property which they mortgaged. Seven years after it was acquired, the garden seemed without a future. The McLaughlin Foundation had solicited funds in the conventional way but with little success.

Then, the foundation’s trustees hit on an idea. It wasn’t entirely original: the Rylstone and District Women’s Institute in the Yorkshire Dales had done it in 1999. They had published a calendar and it had done very well, raising over a million dollars for leukemia research. The McLaughlin Foundation had a no less noble cause: to save the garden. And so they stripped. ‘Altogether for the Garden’ raised enough to pay off the $450,000 mortgage and acquire an adjoining acre parcel.

On a glorious Saturday in July, I tagged along as the Massachusetts Master Gardeners toured the garden (http://www.mclaughlingarden.org/Tour-garden.html), led by Kristin Perry, Director of Horticulture. It was a three-hour drive each way to get there, but it was, as they say in the Michelin Guides about three-star enterprises, ‘worth a journey’.

Interior Maine has a short, spectacular gardening season. The earth is frozen solid into April but, when it thaws, plants jump out of the ground seemingly overnight. The bloom season is compressed from mid-May into late August because Labor Day frosts are not uncommon. McLaughlin was an avid plant collector and trader and the garden is a mix of Maine natives – especially wildflowers and ferns – and exotics, notably Japanese cultivars. He had a passion for lilacs (there are more than 200 of them in the garden) and irises, and those plants are found in virtually every corner of the property.

The garden plan is a combination of broad grassy strips delineating deep planting beds and narrow, hard-packed pathways among those same beds. It is astonishing to think that McLaughlin started with a treeless farm because much of the garden is in shade, some of it in deep shade from coniferous and deciduous trees that are now some seven decades old. A cow path from the barn to distant pastures became a delightful walk through a woodland garden filled with ferns and May apples. The literature describes the garden as ‘formal’ but the description is accurate only in the technical sense. Looking across the beds you see a tangle of plants, but there’s an intelligence behind it.

Kristin Perry’s job for the past seven years has been to maintain the integrity of the garden while also making sense of it. On the tour she pointed out where new trees and shrubs have been brought in as old ones died or did not over-winter. There are beds that are overrun with garden ‘thugs’ that need to be scoured of species that have outgrown their welcome. There is considerable deliberation taken before making changes: was this plant in the original garden? If so, the replacement should reflect McLaughlin’s vision. In the case of a particularly obnoxious Petasites overrunning a hosta bed, it was recently found to be an interloper. It is on its way out.

But it is a very good garden and the fact that it was the singular vision of a man with no formal horticultural training makes it all the more inspiring. McLaughlin’s house is given over to a café and a gift shop, the barn houses exhibits. McLaughlin would approve of the local Maine cuisine served there and of the friendly staff that goes out of its way to dispel the reputation of Downeasters as being aloof. The garden looks much as it did in his lifetime; a credit to Ms. Perry and a cadre of volunteers. I suspect is it very much as Bernard McLaughlin would have liked, even if it did take a bit of artful disrobing to make it all possible.