Turning Toward the Light

Garden in the Woods - May 27

In the woods: Yellow Lady's-slipper (with Blue Wood Phlox), Showy Trillium, Caroline Silverbell, Torch Azalea

By the pond: Turtle, Bullfrog, Interrupted Fern, Swamp Pink and Cammas, Royal Fern

(The bullfrog seems to be sitting in a mass of salamander eggs.)

The Interrupted Fern gets its name from the way the brown spore-bearing fronds "interrupt" the normal green fronds along the stem. Swamp Pink is a rare plant that is considered to be a wetlands indicator plant. It is very stricking, with bright pink flowers and blue pollen.

More rain and more writings

A chart on the front page of The Boston Globe made it really clear just what a rainy May we've been having in the Boston area. So far (and it doesn't appear to be getting much better before the end of the month), it has rained every single Saturday and Sunday with only one exception. Only 5 days have had more than 75% sun, and only 8 days have had more than 50% sun, and all but one of these days were in the first two weeks of the month. Yech.

Since I am trapped indoors most of this week, I've uploaded a few more landscape design papers. Today's offering is from a course on the British Arts and Crafts Garden. The Arts and Crafts movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was an attempt to reject the mass production of the industrial era and to return to individually hand-crafted products. Some of the big names of the movement were William Morris and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and it was a direct influence on Frank Lloyd Wright and the Prairie School of architecture in the United States.

In gardening, the Arts and Crafts principles resulted in gardens with a strong underlying structure, usually more formal near the house and less formal further away, the use of traditional building materials, and the artistic use of plants, with careful attention to form and color. Some prominent examples of the Arts and Crafts garden were Gertrude Jekyll's Munstead Wood, Victoria Sackville-West's Sissinghurst, Lawrence Johnston's Hidcote Manor, and Christopher Lloyd's Great Dixter.

I think the Arts and Crafts garden is one of my favorite garden styles. In my visits to England I've managed to visit o the latter three of the gardens listed above, and I've loved each of them. (In fact, one of the papers I'll be adding to the collection later is a major research paper on Great Dixter.)

Today's papers are The Wild Garden, by William Robinson, about a 1899 book which was a strong influence on the Arts and Crafts style, and Garden Rooms in the Arts and Crafts Garden, describing how enclosures, usually of hedges, are used to create garden rooms with different themes.

Rain and Mesclun Geens

It's been wet for three days now, and will continue that way for most of the week. We're all wondering if Boston has been mysteriously transmuted to Seattle. So it's been hard to do much gardening. Just before the rains hit, I was able to cut down most of a juniper near my driveway that mysteriously died this winter. I never much liked it anyway, so was happy to see it go, but getting rid of the skeleton has been an effort. I've removed most of the brushy parts and just need to take a saw to the remaining stumps. Luckily, the base is sort of hidden by some other shrubs so it doesn't look too bad.

Meanwhile, I've been running out in the rain each day to harvest a handful of mesclun for dinner. Meslun is a misture of lettuce and other greens that you grow in a wide row, then cut as you need it. It's particularly nice for a one-person household because you don't have to wait to harvest a big head of lettuce, but can just pick a little at a time. And after you cut it, it will grow back, at least until the hot summer weather hits and everything goes to seed. (The picture shows my row of mesclun just before the first cutting.)

You can make your own seed mix, or buy prepared mesclun mixes, which range in flavor from mild to spicy, depending on the ratios of lettuce to more pungent greens. The one pictured is from Johnny's Selected Seeds, "Mild Meclun Mix", and contains Rosalita, Red Sails, and Saladbowl lettuce, Kyona, Hon Tsai Tai, and Chinese pac choi Oriental greens, and Red Russian kale. Mesclun is very fast growing and easy to grow; you could probably grow it in a windowbox or a patio planter if you didn't have access to a garden.

I like to eat mesclun with just a sprinkle of homemade raspberry vinegar. (Very easy to make; recipe to follow when raspberries are in season. It keeps forever, too - I'm still using some of the 2000 batch.) It tastes as fresh as spring, and is packed with vitamins.

I managed to plant some tomatoes just before the rain started, but they're just sitting there in shock at the cloudy, chilly weather. I was lazy and didn't start my own seeds this year, but Russell's sells variety packs, so I was able to get an assortment of types without having to discard a lot of extras. I put in two plum tomatoes, two early, and two beefstake plants. I also have some broccoli and sugar snap peas coming up, but didn't get to planting the green beans and squash before the bad weather hit. So my vegetables are going to be a little late this year. So it goes.

Researching the Pagoda Tree

When I was a landscape design student, I wrote a number of research papers on various subjects. The Boston area is a great location for horticultural research, because we have the marvelous resources of the Boston Public Library, the Arnold Arboretum and the Horticultural Society Library. Or perhaps I should say "had" because I understand that in recent years the Horticultural Society has sold a large part of its wonderful book collection to pay for its new headquarters at Elm Bank. But when I was a student, they had all sorts of wonderful old documents, and I really enjoyed digging through old books, magazines, nursery catalogs, and botanical garden plant lists.

So I'm planning to start posting some of these research efforts on the web. The first one up is my favorite, a discussion of the history of the Japanese Pagoda Tree. It's quite a story, following the tree from the court of a Chinese emperor, to camel caravans across the Gobi desert, Paris and Kew Gardens and the Schoenbrun in Vienna, the first (and ill-fated) botanical garden in New York (on the site of the current Rockefeller Center, run by the doctor who treated Aaron Burr in his fatal duel), and the home of two Quaker brothers in Pennsylvania who liked trees, before finding a new role as a pollution-resistant street tree in the United States. I've printed it intact, complete with all the citations and bibliography, but missing the pictures until I get a chance to scan them in. (It was written before I went to digital photography.) I hope you find it interesting.

In the shade

It's a grey cloudy day today, but there are some lovely things going on in the shade.

Variagated Solomon's Seal (Polygonatum multiflorum ‘Variegatum')

Hosta, Japanese Painted Fern (Athyrium niponicum 'Pictum'), and Green and Gold (Chrysoganum virginianum)

Newly-planted Dwarf Crested Iris (Iris cristata)

Foamflower (Tiarella cordifolia) and Heuchera 'Amethyst Mist'

Rhubarb

If your grandmother had a garden, she probably had rhubarb growing off in a quiet corner. I don't have a whole lot to say about growing rhubarb because there really isn't much to it. Just buy a plant or three and stick them somewhere in reasonably decent soil, and they will come up year after year with little attention. The large leaves are attractive, and the red stems, although sour, are precious because they're one of the earliest things you'll harvest from your garden.

Rhubarb will grow in sun or light shade, and does appreciate a rich soil and a handful of fertilizer in the spring. For better yields, you should cut off any flower stems that appear, and lift and divide the plants after 5 or 6 years. But even if you don't do this, the plants will likely survive. One warning: eat only the stems and not the leaves, as the leaves are poisonous.

As to what to do with it once you have it, you can find a recipe for strawberry/rhubarb pie in any reasonably complete cookbook. But my favorite recipe for rhubarb is this one, which is as easy to make as the rhubarb is to grow:

Warm Rubarb Pudding

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Whisk together 2 eggs, 1 cup sugar, 1/2 cup flour, and 1 ts vanilla. Stir in 4 cups chopped rhubarb. Pour into a buttered 1 1/2 quart baking dish. Bake for 40 minutes and serve warm.

Endangering endangered species

The House Republicans are going after the Endangered Species Act now, on the grounds that it doesn't work fast enough, so we should get rid of it. Here's a rebuttal in The Daily Kos.

Garden in the Woods

Here are a few pictures from my walk through Garden in the Woods last Friday. Pinkshell Azalea, Crested Iris, Jack-in-the-Pulpit, and emerging Ostrich Ferns..

Talking about compost...

I just spent a half hour turning my compost piles, so I thought it would be a good time to talk about compost. Sooner or later, most serious gardeners who have any sort of space available for it start their own compost piles. Making compost is a win-win situation - it helps you to cut down on the amount of garden debris that you put into the waste stream, and it makes your soil richer at the same time.

There's no big mystery to make compost. Well, there is a little bit of mystery if you want to make your compost fast. In that case, you may need to pay careful attention to what you put into your pile and how wet it is and what type of container it's in. But if you're willing to just let it sit and decompose for a season or two, then it's really pretty easy.

The first question is what type of compost bin to use. I started out with a wooden plywood bin that the previous owners of the house had created. You put things in the top and then removed the finished compost through a tiny little door in the bottom. I found this didn't work at all, as the compost took forever to decompose and it was a pain to try to get it out of the little door.

I finally settled on a 3-bin system, which seems to really be optimal. The new material goes into the bin on the right (assuming you're right-handed). When that's filled you pitchfork it over to the middle bin and continue filling the right-hand bin. And when it's full again, you more everything down the line once more. You eventually get finished compost out of the third bin. (The order is important because, depending on your handedness, it's a lot easier to toss the pile in one direction than in the other.) The process of moving the piles from bin to bin aerates the piles, breaks up lumps, and remixes the material, all of which help the composting process. The picture above shows my bins after I just finished moving everything down, so there's almost nothing in the first bin. The big pile in the second bin is partially broken down and will compress in size by the time it moves on to the third bin, which is pretty much ready to use compost.

What's going on in there is really a complicated biological process whereby soil bacteria break down the vegetation into humus. To do their thing, the bacteria need both carbon (which comes from dried plant materials) and nitrogen (which comes from green plant materials). If you're going for speed, there are optimum ratios to aim for, but if you're being casual about it, it's sufficient to just try to have a mixture of both types of materials. For example, don't put in a huge pile of grass clippings without mixing in some dried leaves or other dried materials.

I usually have more garden debris over the season than I have room for in my bins, so I just put the material most likely to break down quickly into the compost. If you want to compost twigs or other woody stuff, it would be best to run it through a chipper/shredder first, to break it up into smaller pieces. I just give up and put the woody stuff out for my town's yard waste collection days.

After giving up on the wooden bin, I eventually found these wonderful plastic-coated wire-frame bins that are just the greatest. I don't know how old they are - probably about 15 years or so - and they are still in perfect condition. Each bin is formed from four panels that are held together by a pin that goes down the corner. I don't know if you can see it in the closeup picture, but each side curves outward at the edge, so when you push two sides up against each other, they cross over and make a space that the pin gets pushed down through. It's a very simple and elegant system and works perfectly. And you can just pull the pins out to open up the entire front, like in this next picture, which makes it much easier to get at the bottom half of the pile.

This system produces more than enough compost for me each year. I spread a few buckets each time I turn over a bed in my vegetable garden, and add compost to the soil anytime I dig it up to plant anything anywhere.

Why is it good to add compost to the soil? The main reason is that it improves the soil structure. The soil in my area is heavy clay, which means the soil particles are very small and packed together, leaving little room in between the particles for air, water, or roots to penetrate. Adding humus to the soil lightens it up and adds little air pockets, which makes it easier for the plants' roots to penetrate and take up moisture and nutrients.

One thing to watch out for, by the way, when working with compost is what critters may be lurking inside. This morning I was scooping up a pile of grass clippings left over from last fall, and first found a small snake, and then got my thumb stung by a bee. In fact, there was a whole colony of bees that had built a nest under the pile. It hurt like the dickens, so I stuck my thumb in ice water for about an hour, and that seems to have done the trick.

Celandine Poppy

I had a picture of Celandine Poppies (Stylophorum diphyllum) at Garden in the Woods a few days ago, but this closeup is from my own garden. I love their bright yellow flowers and the way they self-seed and pop up all over in the shade without becoming agressive about it. The bloom time is fairly long, extending through May and into June, and the foliage is bright green and quite attractive also. I think the seed pods look nice, but if you want to slow down their spread, you could pick the pods off before they scatter their seed..

I think they look particularly nice when paired up with something blue. Here it's Pulmonaria angustifolia.