A Tiny Walled Garden

        I don't like to tell stories I've included in my book, but because today's column is about the Abitta Garden, I really must explain its beginnings.  It was originally a small stone hut built into the side of the cow pasture's hill by a hired man around the turn of the century, who preferred to sleep in this dank, windowless hovel than in the house. Later someone added a cement floor, making the ceiling so low you couldn't stand up inside. We used the building to store garden tools, broken furniture, old tricycles and trash, and it soon became known as the Alotta as it housed such alotta junk.

        One evening as we were eating dinner we heard a loud crash, followed by the frantic bellowing of a cow.  When we rushed out the back door we discovered one of our neighbor's heifers inside the stone hut, thrashing around in the midst of rotted roof beams and alotta junk. Since the building's roof was on a level with the pasture at its back edge, this silly young cow had lumbered onto it and fallen through.  She was too big to get out the door so we spent the next hour pulling down the front wall in order to free her.

        As we started hauling away the debris next morning it suddenly occurred to me that the remains of the Alotta would make a sweet little garden, a space 8 feet by 10 surrounded on three sides by the remaining walls of the hut.  The fact that there was still a cement floor was a minor detail. At least that was my thought, but as it turned out it was major. We not only had to break up the cement with a pick axe, we had to haul away a deep layer of stones from underneath it.

        We filled the resulting hole with dirt and well-rotted manure and rebuilt the front wall into a foot high edging for the garden. By then it was too late to do much else but dream about what I would plant the next spring to turn the Alotta into the Abitta, a tiny walled semi-secret garden.

        Having had little experience in designing a flower garden, my sweet dreams turned into bad ones as I struggled to create the perfect tiny garden. It took four or five years just to figure out that my flagstone path was all wrong. Entering the garden from the front, the flags were laid out in the shape of a cross, an esthetically unpleasing design.  Eventually I came up with a better arrangement, entering the garden from the side and making a curved path that led to the far corner where I placed a small pool I'd made with cement.

        Over the years  I tried many different plants, both annuals and perennials, but I had more failures than successes. I planted phlox in back of the pool, but in that airless corner the leaves were always covered in mildew by July.  I planted pansies, which looked fine in May but were scraggly by June. I put in sweet alyssum, but  these delicate little plants were always smothered by the annual pink poppies that self-seeded by the dozen.

      As you can see, I'm not exagerating.

The garden became a poppy party because

I never even thinned these annuals.  It's

hard to pull up flowers just because they're

growing in the wrong place, so besides the pink poppies other proflagate flowers sent their seeds to join them -  feverfew, Chinese forget-me-nots, columbine, dianthus.

       Despite all these greedy interlopers there were a few successes.  The nice old-fashioned hollyhocks on the back wall in that photograph, managed to keep coming every year, even though they're biennials - new ones replacing the old.   By pure luck I planted two peonies in spots where they looked well.  Daughter Bridget gave me a little machine to make a small fountain in the pool.

        Daughter Trum brought me five different varieties of thyme from Oregon ( plant prices in Oregon are a quarter as much as they are in Connecticut) and helped plant them between the flagstones where they thrived and spread their tight mats of tiny leaves.  And last year I picked just the right places to plant a white lupine and a stately delphinium.

          Take heart all you inexperienced gardeners.  I struggled for more than thirty years  to get the Abitta garden even close to what I'd envisioned as I broke up the cement floor of that hired

man's hut. The Abitta garden is still far from perfect, but each year it gets closer to my dream of what a tiny walled garden should be. 

Plant some bulbs

        Having lived on Locust Hill for close to fifty years, I've planted a great many bulbs on the property.   No gardener should let the fall slip by without planting a few bulbs so there will be something new and exciting to look forward to come spring. What other flower can you plant that is more rewarding than a daffodil , a few crocuses or those first harbingers of spring, the snowdrops pictured above?  They go on and on forever, free of diseases, increasing in size and beauty each year?

        Plant a single narcissus and in a few years it has turned into two or three.  In five years they can be dug up, separated and the results replanted.  This endless cycle can be endlessly repeated, provided you've marked the clumps that need dividing before their foliage disappears so they can be easily located when it's time to dig them up come fall.

Do you know the difference between a narcissus, a daffodil and a jonquil?  Not even the botanists do any more, using the terms indiscriminately.  Narcissus is actually a genus of the amaryllis family and includes both jonquils and daffodils.  Jonquils are a single species with rush-like leaves and sweet-smelling, short-cupped flowers in clusters.  There are many species of daffodils, all hardy and having trumpet flowers like those found in the handsome white Mt. Hood variety.

I have daffodils with pink trumpets in my perennial border,  a mix of white and yellow  in the sheep pasture, and although it took many year, I now have a cloud of golden daffodils up on the knoll.  Several years ago I had so many divided clumps of different daffodil varieties that I couldn’t think where to plant them. It was Hank who finally offered  the solution.  We have a large Carpathian walnut tree that we mow under so we can find the nuts each fall.  I planted a border of bulbs at the edge of the mowed grass circle.

Tulip bulbs are the one exception, a different story altogether.  Unfortunately tulips don't last for years and years. You’re lucky if they last more than one.  That’s because unlike narcissus bulbs, which are poisonous, tulip bulbs are edible, and field mice consider them a tasty treat. Many gardeners have the mistaken idea that moles are the culprits when they see tunnels bumping along under the soil and no tulips gracing the garden the following spring. But moles are carnivores.  They're only interested in bugs.  It's the vegetarian field mice who dine on tulip bulbs.  They use the mole tunnels to get underground.

       
        Because tulips rarely last for more than a season
or two, even when planted with moth balls or buried in

wire baskets, I stopped bothering to grow tulips many
years ago as it didn't seem to be worth the effort. The
one planting that turned out to be the exception was the
tulips daughter Bridget and I planted the fall before her
wedding.   That wedding was in the spring of 1987,
almost twenty years ago.

        The following year I planted that area with pach-
ysandra, not wanting to care for another flower bed. I
guess both mice and moles just aren't interested in tun-
neling through a vast maze of pachysandra roots.  The
tulips in today's photograph are some of those planted
for Bridget's wedding, still popping up each spring sev-
enteen years later.  I don't particularly want tulips in my
pachysandra beds, but I think I’ll try putting a few in the
bed of periwinkle up by the barn.

A New and Different Perennial

        I just looked up the word perennial in the dictionary to see if it fit the plants in my perennial border.  "Appearing again and again; continually recurring." Hmm. I guess that's a fair definition, provided your plants aren't killed by winter frost or summer drought, aren't attacked by insects or crippled by disease and are divided periodically.  I'm lucky if my hybrid lupines last three years, and my delphiniums only last one if we have a dry summer.

        There's one perennial, however, that requires no care at all and literally lasts forever.  It needs no watering, fertilizing or dividing, and can add interest and even grandeur to the garden.

        Rockus perennialis is more commonly known as a boulder.  The Asians are the experts in using rociks in a garden. To them a stone is a pure piece of nature, unaltered by man.  Silent, unmovable and permanent, stones suggest eternity.  Not just any old boulder will do, however.  It should be picked for its color, texture, surface, grain and sometimes the sound it produces when struck.

        According to the Chinese, a flower brings butterflies, a willow brings the oriole, a pine the wind, a pond the croaking of frogs, while the rock promises the cheerful chirp of the cricket and invites cloud formations. A rock's natural line and composition can be as beautiful as a winding river or a sailing cloud.  One with cracks, veins of white or pink marble, or perforations which allow wildflower seeds to nestle and grow, is particularly desirable.

        Back when Hank and I lived in Fairfield, I had a wild garden, a most appropriate place to plant a few good-looking rocks.  Hank made a drag cart for Pipsissewa, our burro, which enabled Pippy and  me to bring home several spectacular boulders covered in moss and lichens, and one that actually had a wild columbine growing in a crack. 

        Locust Hill, surrounded by 40 acres of open meadow, had no shady  place for a wild garden or handsome rocks. As a consequence, we planted none until  1990.  Elihu Carlson, our favorite bulldozer man, was coming to do some landscaping.  The day before he arrived with his backhoe, I mentioned to Hank that I'd found a special stone in the woods I wanted to bring home and use as a seat beside the sauna, the little round building at the end of the lawn.

        Before I could describe the rock or its location Hank said "It's that great flat stone by the brush pile at the edge of the heifer pasture, right?  Soft, reddish color, about two feet high, smooth as glass on top?"
        Well, no question but great minds think alike.  We'd never discussed this natural stone seat, but had obviously both been eyeing it for years.  Elihu scooped it up with his backhoe, carried it across the meadow and "planted" it.  There's something very nice about sitting on this sun-warmed seat after a summer night's skinny dip, and since we planted the weeping hemlock behind it, the rock looks as it had been born there.

        When I started writing this column I had in mind using an old photograph of Bigger, our Collie-Shepherd, sitting on the rock, but when I got it out of the album I realized that you couldn't see the rock at all. I decided to use it anyway and convinced Clover and Rumple to take their turn on the rock for a new photo.

        Stones with strange shapes, irregular surfaces or striking veins of color can be an excellent focal point in the garden.  Our rock seat is a little boring, except for the fact that it makes a fine place to sit. We have far more interesting boulders in our woods, craggy and mossy, but so far I haven't found an appropriate place to put one. 

        I realize that not everybody has a backhoe or a woodland filled with interesting stones, but did you know that garden nurseries sell landscaping rocks? I have a friend in West Hartford who purchased  a red rock from Cassio's Nursery that is shaped just like an old man's head.

        Think about these easy-care perennials.  Wouldn't it be nice to have a perennial that really was perennial?

The Children of Perennials

 

        Regular readers of Weeds and Wisdom all know what a parsimonious old Yankee I am, and since opposites attract they've probably guessed that Hank is a charmingly generous fellow.  By the time our three daughters reached their teens they'd come to their own conclusions about managing money.   One handled her finances conservatively, but not as tightfistedly as her mom.  Another was a free-spender, generous beyond her means.  The third saved and hoarded her money for months, then suddenly would splurge to the point of being stone-broke. Of course now that all three are married their spending habits are not my concern.
        Having just come in from dead-heading iris and dozens of spent daffodils in the flower border, I've decided that perennials are like children in how they handle their lives.  Despite the fact that they're raised in the same bed with the same love and care and basic rules to live by, they all have different ideas about how to get on in life. Some are overly generous with their seeds, squandering them all over the place while others don't bother producing any seeds worth counting. 
        Chinese forget-me-nots are real profligates.  Each year these heavenly patches of blue that dot the border in early May throw away their seeds like rich American tourists scattering dollar bills.  They end up so destitute that they wither away.  The next spring their children are so numerous they form a new sea of blue in the border.
        The little daisy called feverfew is not quite so extravagant.  It, too, scatters seeds that soon grow into new plants, popping up in all sorts of unexpected places.  But unlike forget-me-nots, feverfew parents keep hanging on tenaciously the following year.  I uproot these old plants and let the children take their places.  If the parents are allowed to stay a second year their tough old stems must be cut down with a clipper to make them look respectable.
        Phlox is a pretty conservative perennial, rarely self-seeding.  Its clumps get a little larger each year and needs some thinning in late spring but otherwise take care of themselves.  Once in a while though, a weed like bedstraw or vetch will sneak into a clump and establish itself so firmly that there's no removing it.  At first it just looks ugly, but after a few years it may dominate the clump.  Then it's time to dig up the phlox and throw it away.  Replace it by dividing another clump that's weed-free.

        Iris propagates itself by adding offshoots to the end of its rhizome each year.  Eventually these extensions crowd each other and need replanting or they'll get root rot, a very unattractive disease.  Less crowding will occur if you plant the rhizomes in a circle so new growth forms away from the center. Do this in July when bloom is past but there's still time for the new planting to get re-established. The self-centered peony just gets bigger and better without investing in anything but itself. The tree peony in my photo gets even more spectacular each year and has the additional advantage of having sturdy stems that don't require staking.  Unlike many perennials which offer the gardener new plants if allowed to self-seed, the peonies don't seem to care about producing offspring.  Deadheading these handsome perennials is merely for looks.

              I've never minded the job of deadheading.  I love walking down the border on a dewy spring morning, breaking off the dried-up fleur-de-lis of iris  that have finished blooming, or removing the spent spires of lobelia as dusk settles on the October garden. What I don't like is the name - deadheading. I just looked it up in the dictionary and was surprised to find the first definition was "A person who uses a free ticket for admittance."  Three more definitions preceded the one about pulling dead or dying blossoms from a flower.
        Well, whatever it's called, it varies from one perennial to the next. Some plants such as Shasta daisies look brown and ugly if their tired blooms aren't removed; others like astilbes can be left all summer long. Removing the finished blooms of delphiniums has its own reward, as this perennial will often produce a second bloom. 
        Then there are greedy perennials that may not produce lots of seeds but can take over areas of the garden as their roots expand.  Artemisia is a prime example.  Evening primrose and beebalm are two more.  All three need to be kept in check by pulling up their roots as they become too invasive.
        Oh, I almost forgot one of the easiest flowers in the garden - daylilies.  These perennials have almost no faults. They are so hardy and grow so thickly that they are hardly ever attacked by weeds.  They carry on for years and years, just getting more attractive each year.  Yes, one has to cut off the old dead stalks in late fall or pull them (much easier) in early spring, but that's it until you decide to divide one and get two. 
        And that's one of the greatest things about perennials.  What a mathematical miracle - divide and you're multiplying. For this old penny pincher all those "freebies" are a treat.  After dividing and multiplying I feel just like Lady Bountiful as I give away the extras. 

A Crocus Conversation

                                    
        "Oh, doesn't that sun feel great!" exclaimed the lavender crocus, opening her petals luxuriously.
        "I'll say," replied the deep yellow one, stretching his stubby stem a little higher.
        "And that south breeze is better than a massage."
        "A massage is just what I need! Getting out of the ground was exhausting this year."
        "Yes, I know," the lavender lady sympathized.  "Fighting all those dead leaves and that layer of road sand."
        "Why do you suppose Mrs. T. planted us in this spot anyway? I loved our old home."
        "But that bed  was getting awfully crowded with so many children."
        "Yeah, but a flower bed's a lot more pleasant than living here among a bunch of flagstones."
        "I wouldn't complain if I were you.  Most of our friends are over there by the woodpile.  The mess of old bark that accumulated over the winter is a lot harder to get through than road sand.  The few who've managed to do it still look battered and bruised from the experience.  The rest haven't even gotten up far enough to feel this great sunshine."
        "Guess you're right.  And once we're all up and blooming, we'll look pretty cute right here in front.  No one even saw us way out there in-"
        "Woe!" the yellow crocus interrupted.  "Here comes Mrs. T."
        "Uh-oh, we may be in for a bit of a squash.  I  think she's forgotten that she put us here last fall."
        "She's obviously planning to do some spring cleaning.  Got a broom and a bunch of buckets.  Sure wish she'd gotten around to it earlier.  Then we wouldn't have had to fight all this debris."
        "Just listen to her," a pale yellow crocus chortled, "she's spotted my cousin coming up there where she's working."
        "Oh, you dear little thing!  Where'd you come from? I'm so sorry.  Did I hurt you?
        "She's sort of batty, isn't she! Do you suppose other humans think they can communicate with the plant world?"
        "Oh, I think gardeners do.  Don't be so hard on her.  After all, she saved almost all our children last fall when she dug up our bed."
        "Well, I sure hope she wakes up and remembers where she put us pretty soon.  She's going crazy with that broom!"
        ""Whew, what an effort!" groaned a deep purple crocus, emerging from around the edge of a flagstone.  "Talk about being caught between a rock and a hard place.  I didn't think I'd ever see blue sky again."
        "Howdy, friend," said the yellow crocus.  "Glad you made it. Mrs. T hasn't cottoned onto the fact that this is where she put us to bed last October.  She's going at the clean-up with a vengeance."
        "She really gets excited, doesn't she?  Remember when she dug us all us? You'd think she'd found a pot of gold coins."
        "Yeah," added a tiny baby who'd managed to rise above the grit further along the terrace.  What's she-"
        "Oh, you cute things! I do believe I actually planted you here!  I'm so sorry.  Didn't mean to hurt.  I'll be very careful from now on."
        "She's cleaning the ivy.  Those leaves always winterkill along the edge of the porch."
        "Well, you would, too, if you had to sit right out here all winter, one minute freezing to death, the next minute burning up with sunshine."
        "Yes, but look at the ivy climbing up the maple tree over there.  It looks great."
        "That's fancy 198th Street ivy.  It's not supposed to winterkill."
"Get your numbers straight," said the deep purple blossom.  "It's 238th Street ivy.  Somebody from the Brooklyn Botanical Garden found it in the Bronx.  One of Mrs. T's readers brought it to her."
        "Watch it!" the yellow crocus warned suddenly.  "She's headed this way with the broom."
        "She knows we're here though," a small white crocus who'd emerged a few minutes before  pointed out. "See, she's only stepping on the flagstones now, and being very gentle with the broom.  We'll be alright."

Amaryllis

        I've been thinking about the many things that start out life in an unappealing fashion but eventually turn out to be a delight.  What could be more unattractive than a scrawny baby bird, unadorned with feathers? But soon it is transformed into an eye-catching cardinal or a bluebird.  How about the first scraping of the bow by a beginning violinist?  Maybe he will turn into another Yahudi Menuhin.   Even a wrinkled and bald newborn baby isn't very appealing - provided, of course, that it isn't your own -  but everyone loves a smiling little two-year-old. 
        One of the homeliest  newborns I can think of is the amaryllis. It's hard to believe that that naked phallic-looking stalk will ever turn into a beautiful plant.  I was given my first amaryllis one Christmas many years ago.  It was so ugly I hid it behind a spider plant and almost killed it by forgetting to give it any water.  What a shock to suddenly notice two  huge pink blooms poking up above the spider's graceful leaves.
        I still wasn't very enthusiastic about the amaryllis, however, and discarded it once it had finished blooming. Because I'm inclined to use a few white lies in my Christmas thank-you notes,  I enthused to my friend about her thoughtful gift, and as a result I received another amaryllis the following year. Because I had a nice Boston fern that needed repotting, I  transplanted both the fern and the amaryllis to a larger pot, the phallic stalk nicely hidden at the back.  It produced not two, but four giant white blossoms over the Christmas holiday.
        Since I'm a great believer in "Waste-not, want-not" and as  a beginning garden columnist needing subjects for my weekly columns, I got a few houseplant books off the shelf and began reading about how to care for that fat bulb so it would survive and bloom another year.  Following the directions, I cut the stalk off near its base when the blooms faded and continued to grow the plant in a sunny window.  In June I transplanted the bulb to a new pot and watered it freely through the summer, fertilizing it regularly.
        In September I stopped fertilizing, reduced my watering and brought the pot indoors, storing it  in a cool room.  I'm not sure how well I followed all those tedious directions, but I never saw any indication that the bulb was still alive.  No ugly stalk emerged, and as I recall, I finally threw out the bulb. What a waste of time.  Back then buying an  amaryllis already started and ready to bloom cost about $5.00.
        The amaryllis is a native of South Africa. Its lily-like blooms are probably the most  spectacular 
of all houseplants. They've beome an extremely popular Christmas gift. For the first time in many years I was given one this Christmas.  It had two phallic stalks rearing up from its pot, so I quickly put it behind a large
maidenhair fern.  When the blooms exploded from those stalks, they were absolutely beautiful and at last count there were six of them!
          Trying to get the bulb to bloom a second year is complcated.  I've tried only once and had no success.  If you received an amaryllis this year, and you're the sort of meticulous person who bothers to remove the skins from your tomatoes for your salad, dusts around your knickknacks once a week and always makes the beds every morning even when you have a headache, you can read the directions in any good garden book, and you'll probably have great success.  I've been told that some gardeners have amaryllis bulbs that are entering their third decade!

The Asian Lilies

                                                

        Happy Easter! Look what I got! Hank bought it, not for Easter but for our 50th wedding anniversary, a once-in-a-lifetime event. I read somewhere that you should remove the stamens before they shed their pollen so they won't stain those pristine white petals, but I think that removes the sweet perfume as well, so I've left them alone. 

        Back in 1989 (I do keep a garden diary sometimes) I bought my first lily.  We're not talking day lilies here, the large clumps of narrow leaves whose flowers bloom in succession, each one lasting only a day. These belong to the genus Hemerocallis.  Since they can be multiplied by division, daylilies are usually easy to obtain for free.

     No, I'm talking about the lilies like the Easter lily that rise from a bulb on a single stem clothed in narrow 3 to 5 inch leaves.  These lilies, which include dozens of species, belong to the genus Lilium. The most common and easiest to grow are the Asiatic hybrids.  Their blooms last for many weeks, and continue producing for many years.  Unlike dahlias and gladiolas, all but tender varieties survive the winter in the ground. 

     Usually only lily plants already started in containers can be found in local garden nurseries.  That's because the bulbs don't keep well on store shelves. Ordering bulbs from a catalog means they will be dug fresh, refrigerated to keep their roots alive, and then shipped at planting time. Because the first lily I purchased came in a pot I was paying for someone else's planting efforts.

     I liked it so well that I turned into a spendthrift and purchased two more the next year, also pre-started in pots.  A few years later I saw an offer in the Park Seed catalog for a tempting collection of 40 lily bulbs, five each of eight different varieties for $45.00. 

     I was not quite ready to get quite that many, but having decided lilies were a great addition to the garden,  I called two friends and asked if they'd be interested in splitting the collection - $15.00 each for approximately 13 bulbs, a real bargain.  We could fight about the colors when the bulbs arrived. Both friends agreed.

     Unfortunately when the bulbs arrived, there were not eight packages of five, but fifty loose bulbs in a box  designated "landscaping lilies." I'd ordered the wrong collection by mistake. Both of my friends allowed as how they really didn't want their share of a bunch of lily bulbs in unknown colors, and who could blame them?

     It was too late to exchange them, since Jack Frost would undoubtedly have turned the earth rock-hard by the time the correct bulbs arrived, so I found myself with all 50 bulbs and a bill for $45.00. Having just planted dozens of crocus and daffodil bulbs the previous week, I was none too enthusiastic about planting fifty more bulbs.  And like my friends, I wasn't eager to cope with all those mixed colors.  I'd not envisioned a "landscape" of lilies.  I'd planned to space mine along the perennial border.

     Lilies require light porous soil and good drainage.  They prefer full sun on their blooms but shade at soil level so the ground will remain moist.  Bulbs should be planted to a depth three times their height, nine inches for a three-inch bulb! Since the plants do not show above ground until late spring, markers should be used so the bulbs won't be damaged by the forgetful gardener, happily planting other flowers in those spaces by mistake. 

     I planted a dozen of the largest bulbs in the perennial border, but I doubt if I managed to plant any deeper than six inches. I naturalized a bunch more beyond the dam of the pond. I gave away the rest to the first two people who drove in the yard - a deer hunter, who thought his wife might like them, and the UPS man, who happened to be a girl as well as a gardener.

        These lilies were really spectacular in bloom. The first year those I'd planted in the border all produced large flowers.  Naturally I'd managed to plant a brilliant red one right next to a tangerine, a deep purple  just in back of a red astilbe, and of course two white ones right in front of a white phlox. A few years later I remembered to mark them when they were in bloom and transplanted them in more harmonious locations that fall.

        Easter lilies are one of the tender varieties and rarely survive the fridgid temperatures of our New England winters.  I plan to try planting  mine anyway, as soon as spring warms up the earth.  Who knows, maybe it will prove to be a once-in-a-lifetime success.