Going Strong at 90

When Betty and I first came to New England in 1980, we purchased a still-being-built home for which landscaping did not rise even to the level of an afterthought.  We needed to learn about what kinds of trees and shrubs could survive in the deep pine forest out of which our new homestead had been carved.   In our first weeks, we heard about and visited a place called Weston Nurseries in Hopkinton. 

Weston turned out to be the answer to our needs.  It was – and still is – a source of freely offered and sound, professional advice about plants provided by a dedicated and long-serving staff.  We populated our three acres with Weston plant material and it thrived.  We stayed in that home ten years, then decamped for corporate opportunities, first in Connecticut and then in Virginia.  When we returned to New England in 1999, we again gravitated to Weston Nurseries for our landscaping needs, sometimes one or two plants at a time and sometimes in bulk.

A jazz band played at a
1920s-themed party

Yesterday afternoon I had the pleasure to help Weston Nurseries celebrate its 90^th birthday.  It is a remarkable achievement for any business to endure ninety years, much less to thrive.  It is all the more remarkable for a family business to reach that milestone. 

Last month, I wrote about Blanchette Garden’s announcement that it will close its doors after 32 years.  Weston Nurseries, by contrast, appears positioned to thrive over the long run.  It has not been easy, though, and it has not been without wrenching change.

Weston Nurseries Chairman Wayne
Mezitt with family memorabilia

Weston’s story begins with Peter John Mezitt, who was born into a family of Latvian farmers in 1885 and studied agriculture before emigrating to America in 1911.  Mezitt found his way to Massachusetts where he would become superintendent of a vegetable farm.  By the early 1920s, he had set his mind to becoming a nurseryman and, in 1923, he and his wife Olga purchased 80 acres in Weston (then a country town far outside of Boston) and began Weston Nurseries.

Their children became part of the business, which grew steadily while establishing a reputation for growing New England-hardy plants.  By 1941, Weston Nurseries encompassed 200 acres.  After World War II, urban development began encroaching on Weston and the family began looking for new land.  They found 300 acres of hilly, rocky abandoned farmland in Hopkinton that had the advantages of having a microclimate of a more southerly region (thus extending the growing season) and being firmly beyond Boston’s urban sphere.  The land was cleared, terraces were built, ponds were dug and roads were created.

Weston's Hopkinton Garden Center
offers a lot more than plants

The course of Weston Nurseries’ history changed in 1945.  For several years, Peter Mezitt’s son Ed had worked to crossbreed rhododendron to create stronger colors and more vigorous plants.  In early May of that year, a remarkable hybrid bloomed and, with it, the PJM rhododendron.  Weston Nurseries can be said to have fairly singlehandedly created the rhododendron (and its taxonomical little brother, the azalea) as a must-have ornamental shrub. 

By the 1970s, a third generation of Mezitts had joined the business.  Ed’s sons, Wayne and Roger, became part of Weston Nurseries, which now sprawled across 900 acres in Hopkinton.  The PJM family of rhododendrons became the gold standard of spring blooming ornamentals and Weston’s Hopkinton retail store a destination for anyone serious about quality horticulture.  Those acres yielded not just rhodies, but a full range of trees and shrubs.  The fourth generation of family members joined the company in 1996 (today, Wayne’s son, Peter Mezitt, is president). 

Employees dressed in flapper
costumes were everywhere

The world – and the industry – does not stand still, though.  The high cost of growing plants from seed to finished product in Hopkinton began pressuring margins in the 1990s.  Bringing in trees and shrubs from specialty growers became much more practical.  In the meantime, Boston’s suburbs grew and prospered… and urbanization headed inexorably west.  By 2005, the 900 acres owned by the Mezitt family was more valuable than the nursery business that occupied the site.

Weston Nurseries' 900 acres.  The
land below Route 135 was sold in
2005 and is being developed

Family pressures can both strengthen and divide an enterprise.  After 2000, Roger Mezitt asked to be bought out of the business.  That began a years-long effort that could have – and nearly did – extinguish Weston Nurseries.  It took a voluntary bankruptcy filing in October 2005 to open the way for the $23.7 million sale of 615 acres – two-thirds of the Mezitts’ land - for residential development that provided the liquidity for Roger’s exit.  The new community, called Legacy Farms, is now rising on the south side of Route 135.  Wayne Mezitt continues as Chairman of Weston Nurseries.

Legacy Farms can fairly be called
the price of securing Weston
Nurseries future

Yesterday afternoon, the events of eight years ago seemed remote.  The retail center hummed with activity when I was there even as guests enjoyed a jazz band and flapper-dressed employees greeted long-time customers.  Weston-created cultivars are well represented at the New York Botanical Garden’s new Azalea Garden. Today, you can purchase everything from upscale lawn furniture and pizza ovens to tropical plants at Weston Nurseries.  There is even a two-year-old satellite operation in Chelmsford, twenty miles away. 

I spoke with Wayne Mezitt at the event.  At 71, he is the steward of a legacy of horticultural quality and no mere figurehead.  He recognizes that Weston Nurseries must continue to evolve, and he and son Peter will guide that evolution.  Weston Nurseries still owns several hundred acres, part of it dominated by hoop houses that are no longer needed.  Planning is underway to determine how best to use surplus acreage.

Betty and I have made our decision to ‘downsize’ from our overly large house in Medfield.  We are looking for property on which we can build our ‘final’ home and where Betty can create a new garden.  We know two things about that pending event: that we will stay in the Boston area and, wherever we build that third home, we will make the drive to Hopkinton to find exactly the right trees and shrubs for it.

Company's Coming!

I am told that, in a different era, becoming a member of a garden club was not simply a matter of filling out an application and paying some dues.  There was an "applicants’ review committee" that went out and inspected the prospective member’s garden.  Notes were taken.  Discussions were held.  And, only if the garden showed exceptional dedication was a prospective member approved.  Those days have gone by the boards, of course.  Today, no one inspects your garden.  What a silly idea! 

The xeric garden is the first thing that
visitors see when they come to the
house.  That's baptisia and peonies
blooming in the background.

Then why was I out re-edging our driveway this morning and sweeping it clean? 

The reason is that two garden-club-related groups are coming to our home this week.  And Betty wants the garden to look its best.  Call it a matter of taking pride in your garden and wanting to make certain it reflects what she says when she talks about gardening to other groups.

The right-hand side of the xeric
garden (foreground) and shrub bed.
The deutzia and fothergilla are
in bloom (double-click any image
for a better look)

By way of background, last week Betty was installed as the First Vice President of the Garden Club Federation of Massachusetts.  In two years, she will become the Federation’s president.  Anyone who thinks that being an officer of a state garden club federation is an honorific with no responsibilities needs to re-think what garden clubs do in the 21^st Century. 

Walking up the driveway, visitors
see the two shade beds on the left.

For the past two years (as Second Vice President) Betty has had responsibility for two ‘big’ issues:  insurance and 501(c)(3) eligibility.  The latter consumed several hundred hours of her time.  The state garden club federation is a registered non-profit.  And, each individual club in the state (192 at last count) can choose to come under the state’s um-

This is the inner and outer sidewalk
beds are they appeared this morning.
It is a riot of peonies, irises, amsonia,
and geraniums.

brella.  Betty’s job was to patiently guide Massachusetts garden clubs through the process and to make certain that her charges did not end up running afoul of the IRS (which sometimes seemed to take delight in making small clubs fill out voluminous paperwork for no particularly good reason).  Betty excelled at her job.  At the state garden club conference last week, I watched several club presidents and treasurers express their appreciation for her efforts.

Detail of the outer sidewalk
bed.  From front to back,
huechera, amsonia, yellow
and blue iris, and a dwarf
Japanese maple.

As First Vice President, Betty’s new responsibilities include overseeing District Directors (‘DD’, to keep things simple).  DDs are the link among clubs in neighboring towns and with the Federation.  It’s hard work but actually a fun job, and Betty's goal is to have them all hit the ground running.  Lunch at our home seemed like a great way to introduce everyone to their new responsibilities.

This afternoon, the new crop of DDs are coming to our home for lunch.  My job, as principal undergardener, has been to make certain the that garden is ship shape and Bristol fashion, with all the beds freshly edged and mulched, and the ‘million dollar edge’ laid down on our 230-foot-long driveway using a tool that is right out of another century but that makes a great first impression as people walk up to the house.

A portion of the rock
garden at the rear of the
property.  

The accompanying photos show the garden as it looks today (June 11).  It has been very wet and cool for the past week, so perennials such as peonies, irises and baptisia are sticking around far longer than usual, while the ‘yellow’ flowers of summer (heleopsis, helianthus) are still budding up.  The containers Betty planted at the beginning of May are not nearly as lush as they would usually be at this point in June, but they’re attractive all the same.

There is no formal tour planned as part of the luncheon, but most of the group has heard about the garden and it is nice to be prepared.

Going Native in the Bronx

The entrance to the new
Native Plant Garden 

It took two false starts but, this past weekend Betty and I finally made it to the new Native Plant Garden at the New York Botanical Garden.  The consensus opinion?  Two very solid thumbs up for a garden that is as intelligent as it is low key.

NYBG has had a ‘native plant garden’ for decades and it was always in the same place, adjoining the Rock Garden.  It was a product of a different era; one that displayed plants in the same way that zoological parks once displayed animals.  Here is a tiger, here is a bear, here is a stand of caryx grasses.  We last visited the ‘old’ native plant garden in probably 2003.  It left no impression despite the fact that Betty has a strong affinity toward using natives in our own garden.

This 230-foot-long pond is central
to the garden's ecosystem

The ‘old’ native plant garden closed in 2009 and a board fence went up around the site.  If memory serves correctly, the original opening date was spring 2012.  Somewhere along the line, that became 2013.  The garden formally opened in early May.

The first impression is that the place is huge.  It is three and a half acres, but it looks even larger by designing out to the full borders of the site and ‘borrowing views’ from adjacent gardens.  It is billed as a ‘cutting-edge’ installation.  That definition is almost an understatement.  To create the garden, its designers went back to a blank slate; reimagining the site as a shaded woodland; a dry, open meadow; and a wetland.

Yellow trillium - a mid-Spring-
blooming native - have been
planted in among grasses

The aspect of the garden that is – at least to me – most jaw-dropping is the underlying, invisible engineering.   A visitor sees a central water feature; a dramatic 230-foot-long pond surrounded by wetlands.  Rising from the pond is a meadow and the woodland.  What is invisible to the eye is a vast system of recirculating pumps that push 600 gallons of water through the garden every minute.  (You may want to re-read that last sentence and think about 600 gallons of water – almost all of it recirculated – flowing every minute). 

The water feature is, in reality, a man-made bit of ecology.  Water is pumped into the wetland where it is pushed up through layers of sand, gravel and plant roots to reach the upper basin, then over a weir to reach the lower basin.  Underground cisterns collect excess rainwater for release as needed.  Natural processes keep the water clean, filtering out excess organics and maintaining oxygen levels. 

Mature oaks provide a canopy for
the garden's shade plantings

There are nearly 100,000 plants in the garden, arranged with intelligence as well as an eye to inspire home gardeners.  There is harmony as groupings of cultivars give way to new groupings, and the groupings promise to change with the seasons.  In late May, we were treated to sweeps of yellow trilliums, rue-anemones and lady slipper orchids.  The meadows were rife with a carpet of Sisyrinchium – blue-eyed grass.  The flow is visually inventive; a delight, and NYBG promises that the plant color palette will change with the seasons.

The choice of plants is also designed to showcase that ‘nativars’ can be as attractive as any exotic import for a home garden.  The perennials we saw featured bright colors (and based on Betty’s acquaintance with them, long bloom periods).  The NYBG Shop in the Garden carried an excellent assortment of the plants we had just seen.

The garden is also about native trees.  Mature oaks were left in place to provide shade to stands of rhododendron and understory trees and shrubs.  We found a stand of amalanchier with an explanatory text to tell why they’re also called ‘shadbush’.  There was also a great specimen of a mature oxydendrum (sourwood) that should be glorious in late summer.

The carpet of sisyrinchium.  By
being at the garden at 10 a.m., we
had the place to ourselves for
much of our visit

What we did not encounter was a crowd.  NYBG opens at 10 a.m. and, when visiting, we make a point of being in line at the main parking area when it opens at 9:45.  As members, we’re waved into the entrance which means we’re in the garden proper at ten.  We made a bee-line for the Native Plant Garden and were its first visitors.  We saw the garden at our leisure, exploring each of the side trails with opportunities to linger over especially interesting vistas or plants. When we departed the garden an hour and a half later, there was a steady flow of visitors entering.

Five days after our visit, the Native Plant Garden is still vivid in memory.  What stands out the most is its tranquility (too-loud music coming from a birthday party at the adjacent ‘Children’s Adventure’ area notwithstanding).  In the rhododendron glade, the paths are very narrow and winding; you can’t walk it briskly.  Gazing out at the dry upland meadow, we saw an unbroken expanse five hundred feet wide and seemingly just as deep (the depth is something of an optical illusion).

In short, it’s a beautiful addition to the New York Botanical Garden.  In the parlance of the Michelin Guide, it’s worth a journey.

Caught In a Bind

Growing up in Florida, I was painfully aware that my home state was – pest-wise – a national laughingstock.  Every week, it seemed, the pages of Time magazine or the evening news had stories about walking catfish; giant African snails that could eat the paint off of your house; and a large toad, bufo marinus that, when licked, produced a hallucinogenic reaction (although exactly how this was discovered remains a mystery I have declined to ponder). 

I learned not to trust
everything I saw on the
cover of the Saturday
Evening Post

My assumption was that the rest of the country was some kind of an agricultural paradise and that New England, with its wholesome Norman Rockwell image, was a place where having a garden was a pleasure.  The growing season would begin on the first day of spring and conclude with a golden-hued harvest at Thanksgiving.

Time has taught me that you shouldn’t believe everything you see on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post.  At the end of May, we consolidated the fifteen miserable kernels of corn that had sprouted (a one-third germination rate) into a single square and re-planted, hoping against hope that, perhaps by the middle of June, the soil temperature will warm up to 70 degrees and it will stop raining.  Moreover, we have yet to pick a single leaf of lettuce or spinach off our miniscule plants and entire rows of other crops in our garden are nowhere to be seen.

But these are minor irritants compared to what is growing in my vegetable garden.  What I have is a bumper crop of bindweed.

In April, I took out an entire
wheelbarrow filled with
bindweed roots

Bindweed, or Convolvulus arvensis to give the plant its proper name, is something that the national media chooses not to report on.  It’s a New England specialty, a weed with a ‘particularly aggressive root and rhizome system’, to quote the Cornell University Extension Service.  What that means in plain English is that, once you get bindweed in your garden, you are consigned to pulling it out for all eternity.  The reason you don’t want bindweed in your garden in the first place is that it will climb other plants and kill them by taking their sunlight and water. 

We never had a bindweed problem until this year; it arrived via a neighboring plot.  But here is how bad it is:  a month ago, I systematically turned over the soil in our vegetable garden and took out a wheelbarrow full of bindweed roots.  This morning, I noticed that little green shoots were poking above the surface in unplanted areas of the garden.  And so, I decided to dig out the shoots, roots and all.  I followed one slender, white root down a foot, where it began running horizontally, ending in a two-inch-long piece of ‘old’ root from our neighbor’s garden that had been turned under by the tractor that plowed our garden last fall. 

Bindweed and its root system.
Double-click on the image to see
at full size.

Think about that:  a tractor chops up a piece of bindweed root and buries it a foot down.  That little piece of root survives being frozen over the winter.  Come spring, it has the energy to send out a tendril eighteen inches in search of light.  Now, repeat this concept several thousand times.  I think I know where the idea for The Invasion of the Body Snatchers came from.

You are probably asking yourself, ‘what about herbicides?’  What, indeed.  A friend recommended an organic solution, a product that is primarily clove oil.  Spray it on anything.  A day later, the leaves of the invasive weed or plant look like they’ve been scorched by fire and the root shrivels into nothingness.  I sprayed this product on a patch of bindweed.  Two days later, the leaves were crispy as advertised.  I followed the roots down into the soil.  They were prospering; pumping iron.  A dozen new shoots already headed for the light.

How about one of those ‘kills everything’ kind of herbicides?  I don’t especially care to use them in my vegetable garden, but this was getting serious.  The Royal Horticultural Society (bindweed, like Simon Cowell, is an unwanted European export to America) offered the bad news:  Spraying in the early spring is ‘generally less successful’.  Instead, the RHS recommends that one wait patiently, sprayer in hand, until bindweed produces its morning glory-type flower (by which time it had taken over your garden).  Even then, the Society cautions, because bindweed roots can reach out twenty feet or more, the herbicide may not reach the ‘mother’ root.  In other words, abandon hope all ye who enter here.

I did find one glimmer of hope in my research.  An enterprising gardener reported that she had eradicated bindweed from her garden.  She diligently dug out every root every time a shoot broke the surface.  She did this day after day, depriving the plant of photosynthesis.  I should add, though, that it took eight years.

Florida ultimately capitalized on its exotic pests by creating things like the ‘International Walking Catfish Derby’ in which fish with rudimentary lungs travel several feet on their pectoral fins.  I have sincere doubts that any such fun events are planned by New England gardeners wondering what to do with their bindweed.

Help Me Celebrate the Big 25,000 - Win a 'Principal Undergardener' Polo Shirt

This blog has been in existence since 2009 and now has nearly 200 essay-length posts on it.  I created it as an 'etude' for my fiction writing: a mental finger-stretching exercise to limber up for penning mysteries.  In the beginning, I was lucky to get ten hits a week and I marveled that anyone would take the time to find it.

This year, 'The Principal Undergardener' is averaging a hundred hits a day.  Yesterday (May 15) the visitors came from the United States (57 visitors), Canada (9), the U.K. (7), plus a handful each from France, Australia, Russia, China, Brazil, Indonesia, India and New Zealand.  How broadly is it read?  On one memorable day in March, I had visitors from six continents.

I humbly recognize that, on a blogging readership scale of one to ten, mine barely makes the needle move.  My wife's website, www.BettyOnGardening.com, now routinely draws 300 visits every day and is Google's top-of-the-heap sites for information on topical things like impatiens blight.

But if today is an average day for me, something neat is going to happen:  I'll get my 25,000th visit.  And, to honor that milestone, I'd like to give away a couple of 'Principal Undergardener' polo shirts. I usually let people know via Facebook that there's a new post on the site but, to keep the playing field level, I'm not doing so this time.  Also, I know that most visitors have found the site because they're looking for information on a specific subject or photo ( for some reason I seem to have the world's best photo of a squash borer) and so go directly to an archived post without seeing this top item.  Anyway, if you see this post, drop me an email at n_h_sanders (at) yahoo.com.  I'll get back to you and ask for shirt size and color preference.  As of today (August 12th), only one polo shirt has been claimed - yet there have been 5,000 additional hits!

Thanks for reading,

Neal Sanders

Goodbye, Old Friend

Thirty-two years ago, the Boston metropolitan area was very different than it is today.  With a handful of exceptions, ‘civilization’ ended a few miles outside of Route 128.  Beyond ‘civilization’ was a collection of small towns reached by country roads. Those towns, in turn, dated back to the colonial era. 

Carlisle, Massachusetts
in 1875.  A hundred years
later, it had changed little.

And, land was inexpensive.  Out near Route 495, you could purchase five acres, drill a well for water, put in a septic tank for sewage, and have a home in the country.  Boston was an hour or so away when you needed to go into ‘the city’.

Carlisle, Massachusetts was one of those little towns.  In 1980, it has a population of 3,306 spread out over 15.5 square miles.  Leo Blanchette took five acres and built something much better than a home.  He built a nursery.  And, not your run-of-the-mill garden center kind of nursery; he created a destination.  He specialized in hostas and epimediums and daylilies; and then added things he got interested in: hard-to-grow things and hard-to-find things.

In a few years, Blanchette Gardens had become a ‘destination’ for plant aficionados.  Open from May to October, it was a Holy Place where you went and discovered a plant or cultivar you had never heard of or only read about in an obscure book.  Leo would have found that plant a few years earlier, purchased one, and then started propagating it until he a) had made certain it would grow in New England and b) he had enough of them to sell. 

Blanchette Gardens - thousands of plants from which to
choose, all grown at the nursery

Sell plants he did.  He put up screens to provide shade for the hostas and epimediums, so that Blanchette’s was a great place to be on even the hottest days of summer.  If you picked up an unfamiliar plant or cultivar and brought it to him (he parked himself on a stool next to a small shed by the entrance), he would declaim the plant’s virtues and weaknesses without having to resort to a computer or a book.  Leo made it his business to know every plant in his inventory.

Need information on a plant you've
never heard of?  It's right there.

For a nursery selling the rare and exotic, Blanchette never charged what the market would bear.  There were a few corners of the garden where prices above $25 could be found but most plants were $7.95 and $8.95. 

But times change.  Boston’s technology and financial industries exploded and a new-money elite went in search of quaint, country estates where they could be squires.  Carlisle was ground zero for that demographic shift.  By 2010, the town’s population had risen slightly to 4,852.  But its average household income soared to $244,544, the third highest in the state, behind only Weston and Dover; two other sparsely settled ‘country’ towns bypassed by anything as vulgar as a shopping center or supermarket.

That's Leo on the left.

In April, Blanchette Gardens announced that the 2013 season would be its last.  Leo is approaching 65 and wants to retire.  His kids aren’t interested in the business and he isn’t going to force it on them.  The value of Blanchette Gardens in inextricably linked to the land it occupies.  No one who would want to operate it as a nursery can pay what the land is worth, and no one who can pay what the land is worth is interested in running a nursery.

We were at Blanchette Gardens this past weekend.  The place was crowded and we saw many people we knew; fellow plant lovers.  They were drawn by the 25% discount on everything in stock but also by a need to say goodbye.  Leo will keep the place open until everything is gone.  Based on what I saw this weekend, that could be as early as June.

There are no villains in this story.  A nursery that was a godsend to serious gardeners is closing its doors.  It wasn’t done in by the Big Box Stores or by greed.  An owner aged and elected to retire.  The value of the land under the business makes maintaining it as a nursery uneconomic.  In all likelihood, by this time next year the land will have been sold.  In two years, the site will sport a grand home.

But I will remember Blanchette’s and Leo’s enthusiasm for everything he sold.  The world of horticulture will be a little poorer for the loss of his dedication to the joy of growing the unusual.

The 'Hurry Up' Season

It seems like just a few weeks ago, I was starting to rake leaves out of dormant perennial and shrub beds around our property.  I would clean one bed per day and feel I was doing a good, thorough job of getting my garden in shape.  Over several days I cut back the grasses that had provided winter structure.  Each time I completed an area I would step back and admire my handiwork.

I did not know it, but those were the good old days.

A hundred square feet of lawn
disappeared as part of the
"Hurry Up" season

This past weekend, Betty and I re-established the edge of our shrub bed and moved multiple cubic yards of mulch into it.  We stripped off a hundred square feet of grass out to the drip line of a nicely maturing Forest Pansy Redbud, we trimmed winter kill from a dozen shrubs, and we put up 140 linear feet of fencing around our vegetable garden.  And all that was just on Saturday.

This morning, the epimedium have
burst into bloom... and so need
to be mulched

Welcome to the Hurry-Up Season.  Spring in New England takes its time appearing.  There were still patches of snow on our lawn in mid-April.  Then, in very quick succession came snowdrops, squill, daffodils, forsythia, hyacinths, magnolias and, just this morning, epimedium and bluebells.  Spring is suddenly racing ahead at a full gallop.

Ten days ago, two mountains of
mulch appeared at either end of
our driveway.  Half of it is gone.

Hosta is making its appearance known, thrusting up little spikes that, in a few weeks, will become giant leaves.  And, as soon as the sixty-plus hostas in our ‘hosta walk’ have shown themselves, it will be time to sink down the soaker hoses that keep the garden lush through the summer months.  There is a second mountain of mulch in our driveway that could not be spread until the perennials made their presence known.  Now, with salvia, columbine, coreopsis, brunnera, dicentra, and a dozen other plants in our borders staking out their spaces in the garden, that mulch needs to be carefully placed in beds for weed control.  Oh, and those same returning perennials need to be reined in so as not to intrude on their neighbors; and the peonies – now growing an inch a day – need to be staked.

Did I forget to mention our lawn?  Once the last of the snow melted, the grass was properly raked to get it ready for the new season and remove the accumulation of winter debris.  The grass greened up nicely and now it is starting to grow.  I have added ‘sharpen the lawn mower blade’ to my to-do list.  There is also a smattering of dandelions in our lawn.  We don’t use broad-leaf herbicides to get rid of them (it would also kill off the beneficial clover and nice-to-look-at squill and violets that help give the lawn a lush, exotic look).  Instead, each afternoon I survey the lawn for dots of yellow, and then pry out the offending dandelion, root and all, with a screwdriver.

All winter long, we piled up brush
from winter storm damage...

All winter long we piled brush from storms in one spot.  In March and early April, we cut down damaged trees and pruned ornamentals, adding to the pile.  By mid-April, the brush pile was ten feet high.  Last week, it took eight loads in a pickup truck to get it to our town’s transfer station.

...Eight truckloads later, the debris
was gone; all in a day's work

The vegetable garden looms large on the horizon.  As soon as the fence was up, the ‘cold weather’ crops were planted.  Now, each week in May will mean another clutch of seed packages that beckon to be put in the ground (and then thinned, watered and weeded).  The ‘benefit’ of the garden – fresh vegetables – is weeks away.  For now, it is all work and postponed enjoyment.

You can pack a lot of plants into a
Prius.  This was our haul on
Sunday from Andrews' Greenhouse
in Amherst.

Sometime during the month of May, dozens of container gardens will also come to life.  To make that possible, containers need to be brought out of the basement (a few weigh up to fifty pounds each), assessed for damage and cleaned.  Then will come multiple shopping expeditions at garden centers to find exactly the right mix of annuals (and a few perennials) to give each container a distinct personality.  Planting each container can consume an hour.  The 16 flats of annuals shown at right were purchased Sunday morning.  They'll be used in Betty's container gardening programs during May.

The good news is that in early June the pell-mell rush slows to a more stately pace of garden maintenance.  There will be time to actually sit back and enjoy what we have done.

That’s the pleasure of gardening in New England.  When you finally see your handiwork in its full, joyous bloom, your mind miraculously wipes clean the aches and sweat that are the hallmark of May.  You sip a beverage of choice and enjoy a breeze perfumed by nature.  You admire what you have wrought and think to yourself, ‘this is why we did it.’

The April Fools

Three weeks ago, the snow by our front door had retreated sufficiently that a clutch of yellow crocus had burst open, ready for whatever pollinators were buzzing about.  Two days later, the Storm That Wasn’t Supposed To Get This Far North dropped a foot of ‘partly cloudy’ on Medfield.  Over the weekend, the snow retreated, exposing the spot where the crocuses (croci?) had bloomed.  Alas, there were only crocus greens.

On Sunday, the crape myrtle,
hydrangea and lavender came out of
the garage, even though the ground
was still covered with snow.

Welcome to New England, the home of the April fools. 

‘April fools’ is not a day; it is season in which spring arrives in fits and starts.  Temperatures begin to rise, and so I drag pots filled with tender shrubs and perennials from out of their winter quarters to begin the acclimation process.  Then, the evening news brings word from a cheerful weatherperson that an unexpected dip in the jet stream will bring nighttime temperatures down into the upper teens.  Out I go, into the fading twilight, dragging pots back into the garage. 

At least I provide a continuing source of amusement for our neighbors.

The trick is to ignore the pink and
yellow lines, which show a nice,
gradual warming trend for the
month.  It's that blue bottom line
that counts.

This past weekend was a glorious time, weather-wise.  Temperatures soared to 60 degrees and so Betty and I went to work clearing oak-leaf-clogged perennial beds.  When the inner sidewalk bed was done, we found we had exposed broad patches of daffodil shoots, which gave us the zeal to tackle the next bed.  That one, too, had bulb greens awaiting the kiss of sunlight.  By yesterday afternoon, we had even cut down the grasses in the xeric bed fronting the street.  There is nothing like exposing a little green to get a gardener’s heart thumping.

In mid-afternoon, of course, a cold front came through, bringing high winds, rain, and plummeting temperatures.  This morning, we awakened to temperatures in the twenties.  All those fragile bulb greens – which had been protected under that covering of leaves – are now exposed to the elements.  Yep, we jumped the gun yet again. 

Winter has not yet run its
course.  This photo of our
front lawn was taken
April 3, 2011.

Anyone who has lived in New England for a decade or so knows the April weather stories:  the April Fool’s Day snow storm of 1997 (more than 20 inches in Boston) probably tops the list, but how about the ice storm of mid-April 2011 that let you watch the swelling buds on your fruit trees freeze before your very eyes? 

Maybe the Boston Marathon has something to do with it.  If it’s warm enough for 26,713 athletes to run 26 miles, surely it’s reasonable to expect that a few plants can survive outdoors.  What we fail to remember is that those athletes want it to be cold and dreary.  If it’s warm enough to grow petunias, runners will be dropping like flies.

In our spare time, Betty and I manage Medfield’s community garden with sixty plots for a like number of gardeners.  On March 23, Betty gave her annual vegetable gardening talk at the town library.  A room full of people listened intently as she repeatedly said that soil temperature is the only reliable indicator of when to plant.  The air temperature may be 55 degrees, but if the soil an inch down is 35 degrees, nothing will germinate.  By my count, she repeated that mantra five times.

No sooner did she finish her talk when the first hand went in the air with the inevitable question:  “How soon can we start working the garden?”

To her credit, Betty did not throw anything.  Instead, she smiled and gave her pat answer:  “You tell me what the weather is going be through the end of April, and I’ll tell you exactly when you can start your garden.”

Patience is the principal virtue of a New England gardener.

This clutch of
daffodils is waiting
to bloom... and to
be snowed upon.

At the same time, I know that the teasing will continue.  In a protected corner by our garage, a dozen daffodils are already eight inches high and headed up, waiting for the perfect afternoon to dazzle me with their blinding yellow trumpets.  And, just as surely, Old Man Winter will have a last gasp, and those daffodils will suffer the indignity of multiple inches of snow, sleet or freezing rain (or maybe all three).  But eventually, spring will arrive.  In New England, we call that ‘May’.

Just Visiting...

The end of March brought two images worth sharing.

For most all of March, it has been wet and cold and a foot of snow blanketed the property.  As a result, the fifteen or so containers we have been overwintering in the garage have limped along with just the light from a single south-facing window to provide the stuff of photosynthesis.

Three visitors from a more southerly
zone get a taste of spring in Boston.

Sunday, though, brought sixty-degree temperatures and so, for the first time in 2013, an array of Zone 7 and 8 shrubs came out of the garage and into the warmth and sunshine.  From left to right, an acuba, cape plumbago, and a loropetalum get acclimated to spring.  Behind them, a snow bank still tops out at three feet.

Sunday's outing was a one-day event.  By evening, temperatures were back into the low 40s.   By later in the week, though, they'll be back outside, basking in sunlight.

* * * * *

This was the inner sidewalk
bed on March 27.

On a crisp, cold morning in early February, I walked out my front door and was confronted with proof that nature always has the ability to startle us.  There, in an otherwise barren patch of earth, a half dozen white hellebores were in full, glorious bloom.  They caught the sun’s weak rays, preening like movie stars.

The very next day, they were buried under 18 inches of snow.

I thought little about them for the next seven weeks.  The inner sidewalk bed absorbed snow pushed off from the driveway from repeated storms.  For much of the time, two feet of dense ice greeted visitors.  

The hellebores, March 31

Then came the late-March melt and the snow pack retreated daily.  By this weekend, the snow was gone from all those areas except where it had been pushed by hand or thrown by machine.  On Sunday, the retreat was startling and, by the hour, the inner sidewalk bed showed more and more soil.  

Sunday afternoon, I saw something startling:  that same clutch of hellebores that had been buried under the snow and ice.  They were a little limp at first then, by the hour, they perked up.  By mid-afternoon, the hellebores were as though the storms had never happened.

Wonderful Things Come in Brown Paper Wrappers

Today’s mail brought an eagerly anticipated package, a publication with a brown paper cover.  Once upon a time, mail received in a ‘brown paper wrapper’ carried a certain unsavory connotation.  For the past six years, it has been a badge of honor. 

The publication in question is the 2013 edition of the Garden Conservancy’s Open Days Directory, 304 pages and hundreds of properties strong.  This 18-year-old program is a marvel of organization and good works.  The Garden Conservancy exists to preserve irreplaceable American gardens; the Open Days program is both a fund-raising tool and an educational outreach project. 

More than 3,000 individual gardens have been open for visitation since 1995 and, each year, approximately half of the gardens are new (we opened our own garden for the Conservancy in 2008).  The first garden of 2013 opened on March 23 in Houston; the last one will be on November 2 in Mount Kisco, NY.  I counted a total of 426 gardens in 17 states, certain of them open multiple times for roughly 500 visitation opportunities.

Gordon and Mary Hayward's garden
in Vermont will be open this summer.

The Garden Conservancy is strongest in New York and the Northeast.  Connecticut has 39 open gardens this year; 79 are in New York.  I note that for the first time this year, gardens will be open for the Conservancy in Charleston, South Carolina, all on May 25.  There are also a sizeable contingent of gardens in California and Washington.

Over the years, I have visited close to a hundred gardens under the auspices of the Conservancy.  A small number have been ‘reviewed’ in this blog (you can see write-ups here, here, here and here) but most are seen just for the pleasure and for the gathering of ideas.  No two gardens are alike.  Some are clearly professionally designed and maintained; others are just as clearly labors of love of the homeowner.  There are grand estates and quarter-acre pocket gardens.  I have never been to one that could be described as ‘non-descript’; each has a vision that is well articulated. 

Michael Trapp's garden in
Connecticut is memorable, and
open in 2013

A handful have been memorable duds – extravagant layouts conceived by landscapers and bereft of anything unusual.  Those are more than outweighed by the dozens of gardens that are one-of-a-kind visions. 

If you are a member of the Garden Conservancy, you receive a copy of the Open Days Directory as part of your membership.  Otherwise, look for them at garden centers and nurseries.  Entry to gardens is $5, members can also order a book of six tickets for $15.  We regularly go through several books of tickets each season.

The Open Days schedule is also available online, although certain garden owners request that their property be listed only in the directory.

If you’ve never been to an Open Days garden, make this the year that you start.  It is gardening education at its most enjoyable.