#garden rant

Baltimore may be best known nationally for its murder rate and The Wire on HBO, but in horticulture circles it’s known for plants and gardens. So I happily signed up for a regional Garden Writers Association event featuring some top drawer gardens in and just outside of Baltimore.

Here are my favorite shots from the day.

Above, author Kathy Hudson (left) with Penney and A.C. Hubbard, owners of the garden at the center of the gorgeous book On Walnut Hill (foreword by our own Allen Bush).  The garden was designed by the renowned plantsman largely responsible for Baltimore’s critical role in horticulture – the late Kurt Bluemel.

Caryopteris

This little courtyard sits just outside Penney Hubbard’s office, from which she enjoys the soothing sounds of the waterfall.

I love how a potted Japanese maple fills this corner of the court, and probably looks interesting all winter.

Next, the garden of landscape architect Carol Macht. We eagerly explored the long views from inside the home, especially from Carol’s kitchen window.

Stepping down from a large seating and dining area is a large deck with a small pool designed for wading when Carol’s kids were young and its home today for fish.

I’d seen the lovely garden of Nell Strachan and Peter Ward several times before, which may be why my only photo is of this glorious mass of asters. It reminded me not to give up on asters in my own garden, where they’re always too tall and ugly at the bottom. (I’m hopeful, though, that the Nepeta I recently planted in front of them will do the job of hiding the aster’s ratty-looking stalks.)

Finally, the humongous estate called LongView in Reistertown, MD.

Pretty grand, huh?

Love this gate into the kitchen garden.

And the cutting garden.

Most of the garden writers on the tour gathered here for a group shot. Photo credit to Washington Gardener Magazine and a big thanks to publisher Kathy Jentz for organizing a fabulous event!

The Grand Gardens of Baltimore originally appeared on Garden Rant on October 5, 2018.

Louise Jones, Wildflowers for Buffalo

Recently, several Facebook friends have issued pleas for “palate cleansing” posts, preferably containing puppies and other cute animals or anything innocently funny or endearing. The idea is to get a break from the barrage of horrifying/despicable/sinister images and information that have been flashing through our social media feeds for the last twenty months or so.

São Paulo mural by Mona Caron

At the same time, I have noticed an increase in botanically themed murals. There are several artists who are creating spectacular examples of these, including Mona Caron, who is perhaps best known for gigantic murals of commonly occurring wildflowers in her Weeds series. These include a mural of Chamerion angustifolium on the side of building in Portland, and a mural loosely based on Achyranthes aspera in São Paulo (shown above). The first mural in the series, The Botanical Mural, in San Francisco, is 292 x 4–17 feet in size.

By hugely magnifying and beautifully depicting tiny plants often found growing in sidewalk cracks, Caron pays tribute to their resilience and prompts passers-by to maybe pay a little more attention to urban vegetation they’d otherwise ignore.

Wildflowers for Buffalo, detail

Some of us had been hoping for a Caron mural in Buffalo, but we were surprised this summer with equally beautiful wall art from another artist, Detroit-based Louise Jones, whose Wildflowers for Buffalo, located near our downtown library, is, at 80 feet tall by 160 feet wide, the largest piece of wall art (and there are many) yet seen here. It’s been a social media darling for weeks now, deservedly so. Jones chose wildflowers she knew to be native to the area, as well as some personal choices inspired by what she saw in local gardens. You can see more examples of her art here.

I think that huge paintings of flowers where they’re not expected—on urban walls, often where the nearest park might be a couple miles away—serve many purposes. They do remind us what we’re missing when we’re immersed in the built environment, as we so often are. And they remind us of what we’re deliberately destroying when we choose to prioritize human convenience over the natural environment. As an overstressed planet reacts to increasingly severe hurricanes, floods, wildfires, and other instances of natural disasters, the built environment suffers accordingly. Will painting flowers on our walls mitigate anything? No, but they are pretty—and perhaps useful reminders that are hard to miss.

How about a wall of flowers? originally appeared on Garden Rant on October 2, 2018.

I visited a fascinating native plants garden this past week, the Mount Cuba Center in Hockessin, Delaware.  A botanical garden devoted to the native plants of Delaware’s Piedmont plateau, Mt. Cuba is preserving 1,000 acres of this special habitat.  It also provides object lessons about how you can use native plants in your own landscape, whether formal or informal.

I was especially interested in the container plantings, which had, to my eye, a special kind of beauty.  They also provided examples of ways a novice might get started with natives. They would fit into any kind of garden, even the sort of formal landscape into which a gardener might be reluctant, at least initially, to invite native plants with their less refined, more naturalistic look.

Leucithoe (top) with heucheras

I took the opportunity to meet with the Mt. Cuba gardener who is responsible for designing, planting and maintaining the containers, Donna Wiley. She offered several useful tips for a gardener who is beginning to work with natives in containers.

First, she recommended working with compact cultivars of the natives. The species type plants fresh from the wild can be expansive, which makes them more of a challenge to work with, although with sufficiently large containers, they can be accommodated.

Donna also recommended starting with good sized plants, such those sold in 1-gallon nursery pots.  Because most of the natives she uses are perennials, they don’t come on as fast from plugs as do the annuals which serve as filler for more conventional containers.

And because the plants Donna works with tend to be perennials, their season of bloom is relatively brief, so that foliage texture and color become more important to the container display.

Top: ‘Amber Blush’ upright scarlet calamint Below: Rudbeckia hirta ‘Indian Summer’

Finally, because the native plants tend to be closely adapted to certain habitats, it is essential to consult their needs when selecting the plants for a particular container.  Many of the traditional garden plants have been selected and bred to tolerate a wide range of conditions, from sun to shade and spring cool to summer heat.  The natives are, as a group, less accommodating and must be matched more carefully to the setting.

Native Plants in Containers originally appeared on Garden Rant on October 1, 2018.

Walking across the University of Maryland campus last week*, I happened upon the school’s National Park(ing) Day exhibit.

I’ve never quite gotten National Park(ing) Day, but now I understand that at least in this case it’s a day for the Landscape Architecture Department to promote the profession, which no doubt could use some public exposure.

But naturally there’s more to it. This post on The Dirt, the blog of the American Society of Landscape Architects, describes it like this:

On Friday, September 21, landscape architects and designers around the world participated in the 14th annual PARK(ing) Day to demonstrate the power of public space. PARK(ing) Day helps the public see the difference a designed space, even one as small as a metered parking spot, can make in their community.

To see how creative the results can be, peruse the 424 entries by ASLA members  on this tagboard.

There was no budget for this exhibit, so they borrowed newly bought plants from the campus grounds department. Now a week later, they’ve probably all been planted in the gardens on campus.

Supervising the exhibit was Professor Jack Sullivan, shown taking advantage of the park bench. I took the opportunity to pitch him a doctoral thesis idea for one of his  students – to assess the original Utopian New Deal vision of Greenbelt MD, now 80 years after its founding. While the plan is heralded for its greenness and walkability, residents like myself can testify to the results being mixed. Very worthy of study.

Educational banners on display for the Park(ing) Day helped me understand (finally) that Park(ing) Day isn’t about parking at all! It’s about the potential of designed spaces (and the profession), demonstrated temporarily along city streets.

So let’s see how they do that. With the designed parking spaces, students chatting up passersby about the deparatment, and some ecological instruction.

This banner I found instructive, as it displays the primary fields within landscape architecture. They are: ecological restoration; parks and open spaces; urban design; plazas and streetscapes.

What’s not there? Gardens, or residential landscapes. Which surprised me only a bit.

*Why I’m on campus these days is because I’m a fully matriculated college student again! I’m happily partaking of the school’s Golden ID program, which allows retired residents over 60 to take classes tuition-free. This semester I’m taking a terrific class in Art History and am eyeing one or two Film Studies classes for next semester.

Back on Campus, Figuring out Park(ing) Day originally appeared on Garden Rant on September 28, 2018.

As anyone who has ever opened a small, home-grown retail nursery can tell you, the economic reality for such is straight out of the veteran horse gambler’s prayer: Lord, I hope I break even, I need the money.

So it went as we opened our Hidden Hill Nursery & Sculpture Garden 19 years ago on a hopeful wing, happy ignorance and a prayer. History was not in my favor. My obligatory role as a newspaper columnist had always been to make cheerful fun of capitalists, not become one.

Yet I had grown to love plants; a sweet addiction with no known cure – had I even been interested in one. I had eight acres of relatively open Southern Indiana land and an old barn, a modicum of plant knowledge and a yen for the nursery business.

I had growing connections to the specialty wholesale nurseries and companies that catered to the needs of we the possessed; tiny exotic hostas, glorious blooming shrubs, weeping trees, stone owls and fountains from which water fell in rhythmic wonder.

My plant enablers would be located in Tennessee, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, West Virginia, North Carolina, the Pacific Northwest, and Wisconsin. They would supply me with the plants and owls and fountains unavailable at the local box stores, the very products for which my equally possessed customers would lust. Could our newly graveled parking lot contain the rush of customers?

My business, as I became much too fond of saying, was a hobby run amuck. It was mine. It would be free from those silly, too-constraining economic rules faced by other small businesses. Little thought was given to supply and demand, inventory control, balance sheets, insurance needs, digital knowledge, accounting expertise, employee payrolls, mandatory taxes, water bills, famine, pestilence, plant death and one-year-guarantee customer destruction.

We were off; our race begun. Our land – which included our 1860s farmhouse – became our retail nursery and living plant museum. It was soon home to Persian ironwood, ‘Wolf Eyes’ dogwood, weeping katsura, weeping ginkgo, weeping Alaskan cedar, balsam fir, Cedar of Lebanon, ‘Summer Chocolate’ mimosa, striped-bark maple and variegated zelkova. We sold and grew croton ‘Alabamensis,’ paperbark maple, sweet shrub ‘Michael Lindsey,’ sweetgum ‘Slender Silhouette’ and the lovely and historic Franklinia.

Our shrubs included bright-yellow kerria, pale-yellow weigela, purple beautyberry, red-berried deciduous holly, red-and-yellow berried viburnum, purple lespedeza, pale-pink buttonbush globes and feisty white bottlebrush flowers.

Our perennial selection offered Arum for the winter, moved on in spring to hard-to-find cultivars of hellebores, candytuft, pinks, astilbe, heuchera, phlox, iris and peony. Summer brought the more freaky cultivars; daisy, coneflower, coreopsis, hardy hibiscus, rudbeckia, geranium, bee balm and allium – with new echinacea cultivars showing up every 15 minutes.

Hidden Hill in fall

Fall brought helenium, Japanese anemone, Korean mums, asters, solidago, balloon flowers, caryopteris, sage, sedum and chelone. Then the Arum repeated itself; the plant parade come full cycle. We were all about fun and whimsey and plant knowledge and fine, hard-to-find plants.

On we rolled, year after year, but only open four days a week from April to October. Our fan base grew. Our eight-acre arboretum flourished. We added ponds, new gardens, music events, horticultural classes, whimsical art, theatrical art and beautiful, lovingly created art.

We created a full-sized door to our meadow; joking with our customers if they didn’t use it they would disappear the following Tuesday. People would come out to just wander our eight acres; happy to be there. We were happy to have them.

Our financial advisor, a good and sensible man who would hide a cash register from his mother if he thought it necessary, did understand and accommodate my passion. Yet he would annually peer at me over his desk and suggest a little more financial caution, perhaps more thought toward our old age needs, our true retirement, our bottom line.

Janet Hill, my wife of 56 years, my forever partner in life, our company bookkeeper and diligent gardener herself, would indulge me. We created “Janet’s Garden” in her honor, a circular, quiet oasis in the middle of our larger madness with fountain, flowers, bench, large antique containers and a dangling, yellow brugmansia.

In soft summer evenings, after all the customers had left, we would ride around in a golf cart. I would admire what we had created. She would look for weeds. Her mind also began to lean toward a patio home with several thousand fewer plants to water.

The years rolled on. We were able to recruit terrific help; we all became a garden family. In the winters we would visit those consonant-laden gardens shows – CENTS and MANTS – to check out what was new in plants, fountains and stone owls. In early spring I leafed through 500 pounds of plant catalogs.

I had no desire to get bigger – just better. We looked forward to March, the potting up of the new perennial cultivars, the latest in a ridiculous series of ninebarks, the newer dogwoods and redbud trees that would arrive bare-root and eager for their new lives.

All seemed good until it didn’t. We had our devoted regulars. But on our slower days I would drop by the local Lowes and see people lined up 10 deep at two cash registers buying plants – most of them already in bloom. I had to admit Lowes’s selections looked pretty good – even if it seemed the help was 17-years-old not really looking happy to be there.

We had created a 5,000-follower Facebook presence and a 2,500-person email list as our promotion materials, but it seemed the average age of our customers was about 86. Are plant geeks dying off? Do millennials plant anything besides herbs and lettuce?

We had slowly become a nursery better known than shopped. I kept running into people who would tell me “I have always wanted to go to you place” but never showed up. I continually had to resist the urge to fire back: “Well what the hell is stopping you?”

But it was never said with bitterness. I knew I was a lousy capitalist. I had always known my dream was not economically sustainable; the box stores were open seven days a week until 9 p.m. I wanted that early evening time sharing our land with my wife in a golf cart.

The bottom-line truth outed itself a few weeks ago as I went over our years of financial statements. It followed a 95-degree September afternoon in which Janet and I had spent hours watering needy plants in black plastic pots.

We are both 75 years old. We were tired. It was time to go. The financials showed our gross income was greater five years ago than it was in 2018. We talked it over, called it quits and looked ahead to more travel, more fun with friends and family, more selective use of our now sculpted land.

Sure, some maintenance is still required. But Janet could work on her quilts and spend more time with her church ladies. I could finish writing my children’s books, maybe finally write that first bad novel. We were at total peace with our decision – Janet perhaps even closer to ecstatic.

Our closure announcement brought an outpouring on genuine affection; hundreds of people sent messages or came out to tell us how much Hidden Hill had meant to them, too. One former employee – covering all the bases – brought us a six-pack of beer and a bottle of champagne.

The horse-players prayer has it all wrong. We did much better than break even. We have our family and a growing list of friends. We have our memories. We have the satisfaction and thanks that come with building something good together. We have already won.

It’s Over: Ending 19 Wonderful Years in the Nursery Business originally appeared on Garden Rant on September 23, 2018.

Anyone else bothered by the term “ornamental” to distinguish certain plants from those that are considered useful, usually edibles?

For example,Wikipedia uses this petunia to illustrate the term and offers this definition:

Ornamental plants are plants that are grown for decorative purposes in gardens and landscape design projects, as houseplants, for cut flowers, and specimen display.

The Wiki authors (and I’ve noticed, users of the term generally) make it clear that the plants are for aesthetics only:

Commonly, ornamental [garden] plants are grown for the display of aesthetic features. In all cases, their purpose is for the enjoyment of gardeners, visitors, and the public institutions.

If we hadn’t already gotten the point: (bold in the original)

Ornamental plants are plants which are grown for display purposes, rather than functional ones.  While some plants are both ornamental and functional, people usually use the term “ornamental plants” to refer to plants which have no value beyond being attractive, although many people feel that this is value enough.

At Buddy Attick Park in Greenbelt, MD

So to challenge the notion that they have “no value beyond being attractive,” here are some of my favorite ornamental gardens. Obviously they do more than beautify.

Lurie Garden in Chicago

Conifer Collection at the National Arboretum

Chanticleer Garden

Even on a tiny scale, like the front garden of my townhouse (above), where I ripped out the lawn and replaced it with a mix of native and nonnative ornamental plants, the plants serve a variety of ecological purposes – food and shelter for wildlife, stormwater management, and cleaning the air.

While today’s gardeners are well aware of the eco-services their ornamental plants perform, the Wiki entry is silent on them, referring simply to the “many people” who feel there’s value “enough” in being attractive.

So my second complaint is with this dismissive attitude toward attractiveness, which is then thoroughly debunked by another Google result for the term “ornamental plant.” It’s the article “Ornamental Plants and their Role in Human Psychology” in the journal Agrotechnololgy. These researchers in India see the whole picture, as evidenced in the Abstract:

ornamental plants play important role in human health and psychology. Human health depends on well-functioning ecosystems. We cannot live without the goods and services that nature provides to purify our air and water, maintain soil fertility, pollinate plants, break down waste, provide food and fuel and keep diseases in check.

They cite some of the myriad studies proving the benefits of beautiful plants to our psyches:

Exposed to plant settings, people have more positive emotions. In a plantscaped office, people recover from stress quicker and employees show a significant improvement in their efficiency and concentration. Problem solving skills, ideation and creative performance all improve substantially. In a workplace with plants and flowers we are more productive and green workplaces help recruit and retain workers.

When plants were added to an interior office space, the employees were more productive (12% quicker reaction time on the computer task) and less stressed (systolic blood pressure readings lowered by one to four units). Immediately after completing the task, participants in the room with plants present reported feeling more attentive than people in the room with no plants.

When we shop in a plantscaped environment, we visit more frequently, stay longer, rate quality higher and are willing to pay more. Hence, interaction with plants, both outdoor and indoor, can change human attitudes, behaviours and psychological responses.

Imagine how office workers in Lower Manhattan must feel after strolling the High Line (above) on their lunch hour.

So what’s a better term than “ornamental”? I like the simple, less judgmental “nonedible” to describe plants we don’t normally eat.

MORE Dissing There’s one more use of the term “ornamental plants” that bugs me and that’s to contrast them with natives, a usage that manages to insult both types of plants at once. To state the obvious, natives can be beautiful!

On the Dissing of “Ornamental Plants” originally appeared on Garden Rant on September 21, 2018.

This is some stage of Arthur, off Topsail Island, NC, July 2014

We’re drawn to water and connected through water, especially gardeners. Most of the gardeners I know—not just in WNY but all over the US—spend half their growing seasons hoping for water in the form of rain. They have rain gauges and weather stations and use apps and websites to monitor annual rainfall in their areas. They have become amateur rain scientists. Gardeners try to save rain with rain barrels and to stop it from running out into storm gutters—as much as they can—through creating rain gardens and other plantings that capture water.

We revel in water as humans, seeking out opportunities to swim, splash, and float. I’m often scheming about how I could get a small, good-looking pool installed, and I haven’t given up. I love beaches even more. For years, we have spent at least one summer week on the beautiful coast of North Carolina, a place very familiar to me from childhood summers spent there when my father was in the USMC Reserve. Given the number of summers, and, later, visits, it’s inevitable that we’d encounter hurricanes now and then, and we have; our family started coming down just after the one everybody still talks about, Hazel. None of the storms we’ve encountered called for evacuations or drastic measures; as a child, I found them exciting.

Over the past 20 years, however, the number of hurricanes hitting NC and throughout the US are having increasingly devastating effects on property and ecosystems. University-based studies confirm that storm surges are getting bigger and bigger, though a 2010 NC Coastal Resources Commission study about the surges was banned by state government. The question of whether climate change increases the chances of these storms is in some ways not even relevant; a bigger factor is that far greater numbers of residential and business populations are in the path of this weather, whatever is causing it. And they’re not ready for it.

One does not judge where people choose to live or need to live. I can’t imagine dealing with yearly incidences of tornadoes, wildfires, and earthquakes, which are not common where I live. But then, many others cannot face the possibilities of freezing cold weather, snow, and occasional blizzards. So be it.

However, to ignore weather and climate trends in the face of loss of human life, damage to ecosystems, and destruction of property makes no sense. In 2012, North Carolina passed a law that effectively ordered state and local agencies that develop coastal policies to ignore scientific models showing an alarming acceleration in sea level rise. Since then, storm surges (including Florence, the most recent) have engulfed homes and flooded areas with waste from pig farms and toxic disposal sites. These events also cause fish kills and algae blooms.

If the study had been accepted and measures taken to adjust developments, reinforce at-risk infrastructure, and take other precautions specific to storm surges of a nature never before anticipated, could the disaster we’re now seeing unfold (and have seen unfold so many times elsewhere) be averted? I suppose we don’t know. And we’ll never know as long as the denial of science continues to be government policy at so many levels. Maybe once we’re all under water, we’ll figure it out.

Thoughts on water, living with water, and storms originally appeared on Garden Rant on September 19, 2018.

Way back in 1914, an awful calamity happened that would ruin gardening in America forever. With the seemingly benevolent stroke of his pen, Woodrow Wilson foisted the Tyranny of Mother’s Day upon us all. Soon after came the backhanded slap from the long arm of the law of unintended consequences.

To be clear, I’m actually fairly okay with honoring moms.  I’ve got one, and my wife even became one too. Willingly. What I don’t like, however, is that this holiday has established the second Sunday in May as the one and only epicenter of the entire Horticultural Universe. As if graven on stone tablets, it was apparently ordained that every homeowner in America must cram a year’s worth of yard work, and do all their garden shopping, within two or three days of that holiest of holy days.

As you can imagine, because people inherently buy from garden centers things that are in flower, this has ensured that every last homeowner’s yard explodes into bloom right on Mother’s Day and sheepishly goes out of bloom a week later. Therefore, the rest of the growing season–from June to frost–the vast expanse of American suburbs is a sad, flowerless wasteland, bereft of color, wondering what life is about and why it always feels so empty inside.

Here is what this has cost us. The fun perennials, the really good stuff, all bloom later and, in fact, look absolutely fabulous on garden center shelves right this very minute when absolutely no one is there to see them. Hence, they’re not bought, not in gardens, and not bringing boundless joy to people in their everyday lives.

Late summer and fall blooming perennials tend to be bigger, bolder, and way more impactful. They also usually bloom longer, and they do so with all the star spangled colors of a big refinery fire. They invariably maintain a great form all season–not going to seed and not going limp too early, and they also attract loads of pollinators, which bring their own spastic fun to the party.

So do this. Be a lunatic. A rebel. Be contrary. Log off your computer right now and go to your favorite garden center and buy a bunch of stuff. Your garden and your life will be improved. Your late season garden will look so amazing you’ll want to show it to your mother. You might even invite her over. In September. Maybe October.

The Iconoclastic Gardener – Breaking May’s Stranglehold originally appeared on Garden Rant on September 18, 2018.