Turning Toward the Light

Scotland Gardens - Broughton House, Kirkcudbright

On Thursday afternoon, we drove a short distance south to the town of Kirkcudbright, which is on the Dee River estuary. Kirkcudbright (pronounced KIR-COO-BREE) became the home of a group of artists from Glasgow in the early 20th century, so now has a reputation as an artists' colony. It was a good place to spend the afternoon, because there was a lot of intermittent rain, so there were a number of things we could do indoors.

We visited the townhouse of the artist Edward Atkinson Hornel, one of the leading lights of the "Glasgow Boys" group of artists. I had not heard of Hornel before, and I wasn't all that crazy about his artwork, which was on exhibit in his studio. He liked to paint sentimental pictures of young girls at play in rural settings, and his style was very busy and featured heavy, textured brushwork. The house was interesting, though, and the garden in back was a real gem. It's really too bad that the rain chose that moment to come pouring down, as I could have spent a lot more time exploring it.

The garden was long and narrow, and was packed with interesting colors and textures, with lots of garden rooms in different styles with interconnecting pathways between them. Lots of little tricks of perspective made the garden seem much bigger than it was, since most areas could be viewed either from inside the "room", or from a neighboring segment, by looking over a hedge or down a path. I would love to see a plan for this garden, to figure out how it did so much with such a small space!

Looking from the garden to the back of the house, with a lovely paperbark maple on the left.
A small lily pond.

Alex in the rain in one of the garden rooms.

We took refuge from the rain inside a little summer house.
Fall anemones.

Rose garden with clipped hedges.
View of the River Dee from the foot of the garden.

Spring in Watertown

I think spring has finally made it up into the Boston area. I planted my peas this morning, and took a bunch of pictures of little things in bloom, or about to bloom.

Sale of invasive plants banned in Massachusetts

The Garden in the Woods training for guides has begun, and this week the Conservation Department told us about a major new Massachusetts ban on the importation and propagation of 140 invasive plants, some of them common garden plants. The ban applies to most of the plants on the list as of January 1, 2006, but a few notable species commonly used in landscaping have been given an extension to allow time for nurseries to sell down existing stocks.

The list of plants has been in development for three years in collaboration with a number of agricultural organizations including Massachusetts Nursery and Landscape Association (MNLA) and the Massachusetts Invasive Plants Advisory Group (MIPAG).

Some of the plants on the list include things I have in my own garden, so I'm going to have to give some serious thought to whether or not to retain them. (The ban does not apply to existing plantings, just to the importation and sale of new plants, but it does make me feel guilty for harboring them.)

Banned now:
Aegopodium pdagraria (Bishop's weed, goutweed)
Ailanthus altissima (Tree of Heaven)
Elaeagnus umbellata (Autumn Olive)
Lythrum slicaria (Purple loosestrife)
Phragmites australis (Common reed)
Polygonum cuspidatum (Japanese knotweed)
Pueraria montana (Kudzu)
Robinia pseudoacacia (Black locust)

Banned after 1 year
Iris pseudacorus (Yellow Iris)
Myosotis scorpioides (Forget-me-not)

Banned after 3 years:
Acer platanoides (Norway Maple)
Lonicera japonica and others (Japanese and other honeysuckles)
Berberis thunbergii (Japanese Barberry)
Euonymus alatus (Burning bush)

One of the points to note is that plants that may be invasive in Massachusetts may not be invasive in other states, due to different climate and habitats. So this list should not be taken as applicable to the entire country, just to Massachusetts. I believe each state has developed or is developing its own list of invasive species, and even if they haven't gone so far as to ban them outright, responsible gardeners might want to take this into consideration when choosing plants for their gardesn. The USDA has a good index to state-by-state resources here.

Me, I'm willing to give up the goutweed and the burning bush, but I'm going to find it hard to live without the scent of Japanese honeysuckle.

New 'Crops of America' Stamps

I went to the Post Office today to stock up on 39-cent stamps, and found these lovely, colorful stamps depicting "Crops of America". Here's some information from the USPS web site:

The crops depicted in this stamp booklet — corn, chili peppers, beans, squashes and sunflowers — had been cultivated in the Americas for centuries when Europeans first arrived in the New World.

Artist Steve Buchanan created each of the five stamp designs. As reference, he used slide photographs made by his wife Rita, a consultant for the stamp project. The slides document Rita Buchanan's research in the late 1970s on indigenous agricultural methods in the southwestern United States.

The stamp art includes ears of corn (Zea mays); red and green chilies (Capsicum annuum); lima beans (Phaseolus lunatus), scarlet runner beans (P. coccineus), and pintos and other common beans (P. vulgaris); various squashes (Cucurbita spp.); and a sunflower and seeds (Helianthus annuus).

Scotland Gardens - Threave

(The second installment of my series on Scottish gardens visited in August, 2005.)

On Thursday morning we went to Threave Gardens, which is an old estate that is now the training ground for the Scottish National Trust gardeners. It was a lovely garden, with lots of exotic plants, some of which were labeled. But a lot weren't, which I found very frustrating. It was the kind of garden that I wished we'd been able to come for a guided tour, as I'm sure I would have learned a lot more with someone there to answer questions. But it was lovely just to walk around, and I got pretty exhausted from hiking over the whole estate.

Giant gunnera leaves near a small pond

Lots of perennial borders.

Due to the harsh climate, you find many walled gardens in Scotland. The stone walls are beautifully crafted.

A paperbark maple and another great flower border.

A naturalistic rockgarden and an arts and crafts garden room.

Not sure what these are.

Hydrangea and phlox

Buddleia and fir cones.

An arboretum, marked by a wooden sculpture of a giant pine cone.

And some natural woodland, leading up to a panoramic view at the top of the hill. (You can see it was pretty cloudy, but didn't start raining until later in the day.)

I noticed a few familiar North American natives among the woodland plants - baneberry and goatsbeard.

I liked this stone sculpture a lot.

This one was interesting, but we weren't quite sure what to make of it.

We signed up for a guided hour of the house, and in retrospect, I think this was something I would have been happy to skip. The tour guide (the lady on the right in the picture below) was very enthusiastic and told me a lot more than I really needed to know about the Scottish family who lived in the house, which was originally built as a hunting lodge in 1872.

Garden Voices weblog

I've discovered a wonderful garden resource on the web, the Garden Voices weblog. Actually, they found me, as they asked me if they could repost items from Turning Toward the Light on their site. What they do is pull together garden-related posts from all over the net - sort of a garden-oriented rss reader, but with commentary and pictures. They also have a great keyword indexing feature, so if you click on one of the Category words in the right-hand column, you can see all the posts on a given topic, like "spring", or "landscape" or "trillium". Or you can click on dates in the calendar to see posts from previous days. This one is definitely going onto my daily visit list.

Scotland Gardens - Culzean Castle

(This is the first in a series of photo essays about gardens I visited on my trip to Scotland last August.)

Culzean Castle is a lovely estate on the west coast of Scotland, southwest of Glasgow. The current stately home was designed by Robert Adam for the tenth Earl of Cassillis in the late 18th century, and is now operated by the National Trust for Scotland.

This picture shows just a small part of the 4-sided Home Farm that now houses the visitor center, gift shop, and lunchroom.

Then you take a short walk and approach the grand house through this ruined arch (one of those silly 18th-century follies that were actually built as a ruin).

We toured the inside of the house, but were not allowed to take pictures inside. We avoided the formal tour group, which was just too big and crowded, and made our own way around. I particularly remember the lovely central staircase, and the bright circular salon with its ocean views. There was also an exhibit in honor of President Eisenhower and his connection with Culzean; the top floor of the castle was gifted to President Eisenhower during his lifetime as a thank-you for his war leadership, and he visited several time over the years. Now the top floor has a number of very luxurious bed and breakfast suites - that would be a great place to stay, if a bit expensive.

There was quite a lovely formal garden with palm trees and a big fountain along the back of the castle.

I really enjoyed my first chance to enjoy viewing flowers.

Alex took a lot of lovely closeup pictures of the exotic flowers.

Culzean is set in extensive grounds, and many people visit the castle just to enjoy the country park. There was a long walk along the cliff edge with great views of the ocean, back to the castle, and to sea birds down on the rocks. That building down at the shore below the castle used to be the laundry house, and the small round turreted building is the boat house.

At the far end of the cliff path, we found a picnic area with a huge duck pond, aviary, and ice cream stand. We indulged in the ice cream, which was great, and one of the few things we found that was cheaper in Scotland than in the U.S. (must be all those cows).

And we ran into more follies here. There was a Chinese-style pagoda, and then further back in the woods, the Cat Gates, topped with lounging felines.

After walking for quite a ways back through the woods, we encountered a huge walled garden with a greenhouse, grotto rock garden, and lovely perennial borders.

One of the striking flowers I recognized here was one that we have in bloom at Garden in the Woods in Massachusetts, the Desert Five-Spot, a native North American plant of the western deserts.

At this point, after so much walking, my legs were getting really sore, so I spent a little time sitting on this garden bench, enjoying the sun which had finally come out. Alex took pity on me, and volunteered to hike back to the car park and bring the car back to pick me up.

On his way back, he stopped to explore this lovely Camelia House, and the red deer park across the way. I settled for seeing them from the car as we drove out. I was just to beat at that point to walk any more.