Tranquil TimesSpring 2006 Newsletter
Twenty Years - Time Flies"If you wish to make anything grow you must understand it, and understand it in a very real sense. ‘Green fingers’ are a fact, and a mystery only to the unpracticed. But green fingers are the extensions of a verdant heart. A good garden cannot be made by someone who has not developed the capacity to know and love growing things." From Russell Page’s, The Education of a Gardener . Horticulturists Philip Boucher and Warren Leach have a passion for growing plants and making gardens. This passion blossomed with the purchase of Tranquil Lake Nursery in the fall of 1986. It was a suiting transition of owners. The nursery was started in 1970 by ardent plant collector and dye chemist, Charles Trommer. Charlie’s green fingers were attracted to a wide range of plants, creating an eclectic menagerie of hostas, boxwoods, rhododendrons, dwarf conifers, as well as the prominent collection of thousands of cultivars of daylilies and hundreds of varieties of Siberian and Japanese iris. This spectacular collection of hardy perennials, daylilies and iris became the focus of a mail-order business that shipped bare-root, field-grown plants across the country and even internationally. Despite the broad range of plants shipped by the nursery twenty years ago, it was not well known locally and there were no gardens. The new owners changed that, expanded the business to include retail sales of quality plants and a custom landscape design business. Along with the expansion of production fields and irrigation lines, outlines of new garden beds were struck. The neglected menagerie of box, fastigiated yew, dwarf spruce, pine and hemlock would find new homes as specimens starring in distinctive display gardens. They found some plants still in liner rows or growing out of a rotted propagation flat set down years ago. Undaunted the partners hand dug and transplanted scores of lost treasures. Some large specimens of weeping hemlock (Tsuga canadensis ‘Pendula’), dogwood (Cornus florida) and white pine (Pinus strobus) found new homes in Concord, Westport and Dartmouth to enhance landscapes designed and created by Warren. The biggest to be dug and moved, just three years ago, was a Kentucky Coffee Tree (Gymnocladus dioicus) with a height of 50 feet and an eight foot diameter root ball! It is now happy in a low maintenance landscape on the island of Jamestown, RI. Frequent visitors to the nursery can attest to the physical changes. There is a new garden or garden feature every year. You can explore a dozen different display gardens featuring permanent containers, mosaic paths, mixed borders of shrubs and perennials, water gardens and distinguished mature dwarf conifers. Looking back a score of years, it seems that what we’ve accomplished was a Herculean task. Time flies when you’re having fun. We are still passionate about plants. Although the cycle of the seasons repeats itself annually, every year is a new adventure for us. It is always a thrill when daylilies reach peak bloom in July. The last September blooms of H. "Back to School" are just as exciting as the first blooms of H. "Elizabeth" in May. Sharing gardening knowledge and skills is always rewarding. It is our hope that Tranquil Lake Nursery has helped your own green fingers weave the fabric of your own garden. Philip Boucher and Warren Leach Although On the Making of Gardens, was first published in 1909, Sir George Sitwell’s enlightened observation that "the danger is not that one should be too imaginative but that one should not be imaginative enough," is advise well worth heeding in making our own contemporary gardens. Sitwell’s masterful and poetic insights of Italian renaissance gardens call us to respond emotionally and intuitively to color, line, form and abstract composition. We have all experienced magical places, from breathtaking scenery to the enclosed intimacy of a woodland glade carpeted in moss or the sound and smell of crashing ocean waves on basalt ledges worn smooth by eons, overlooking an infinite view to the horizon. Acadia National Park and Mt. Desert Island, on the coast of Maine, and the gardens there are very dear to me. Although familiar, I am always captivated by their magic. It is not so much the spectacular views that is the focus of these experiences. I think the magical essence of the Abbey Aldrich Rockefeller Garden in Seal Harbor is intrinsic in Beatrix Farrand’s design and its relationship to the site. The linear walk of the ‘Spirit Path’ is much more than a symmetrical axial plan with a vertical accent at the terminus. The straight lines of the path are blurred by the haircap moss and bunchberry (Cornus canadensis) creeping at the edges of the native pink granite crushed stone surface. The whole garden, carved out of the coastal forest of spruce and fir, is a harmony of contrasts. Pink-stucco walls are capped with ochre tiles from China. Stone walls are made of pink granite hewn from local quarries. A quiet greensward is framed by magnificent borders of perennials and annuals in both riotous bright and peaceful pastel colors, on which is centered a large spruce and a circular Moon Gate which serves as a fundamental focal point. Fletcher Steele’s Camden Library Amphitheater, though not a garden in the traditional sense, is an especially intriguing landscape composition. Steele balances the classical library facade by bending its axis against a rhythm of concentric curves to salute the spectacular view of Camden Harbor. The structure of the amphitheater, concentric, level walls punctuated with native boulders and planted with groves of paper birch (Betula papyrifera), would make a wondrous space for a mixed perennial border. Creating gardens that pay homage to the ‘Genus Loci’, the Spirit of the site is a principle recognized by Sitwell and practiced by Steele and Farrand. We try to instill some magic into the many display gardens at Tranquil Lake Nursery. The roof of a garden shed is planted in blue dune grass (Leymus glaucus). A pavilion roof, sprouting sedums and hens and chicks, (Sempervivum) stretches ones imagination but still provides the cultural conditions to sustain these tough perennials. Purple columns laid the groundwork for a garden scheme of violet and purple flowers and foliage with chartreuse and silver foliage accents. The columns are painted, 12" PVC pipe. They were originally displayed cascading water in our award winning garden exhibit in the 2000 New England Spring Flower Show. Now these vertical accents are embraced by the chartreuse leaves of the golden full-moon Japanese maple (Acer shirasawanum ‘Aureum’) and Weigela florida ‘Rubidor’. The burgundy foliage of snakeroot (Cimicifuga ramosa ‘Brunette’) is an accent for spring bulbs and Siberian iris. It is still beautiful in late summer when four-foot tall fragrant white spires bloom forth. The self sown airy violet blooms of Verbena bonariensis add to the late-summer purple haze. Two tender tropicals, Persian Shield (Stobilanthes) and Heiliotrope offer a season of color. The Strobilanthes has an iridescent metallic overlay on its purple leaves. The purple flowers of heliotrope are sweetly fragrant and add a delightful bit of magic when seated on eggplant colored benches in the shade beneath a purple leafed plum tree. Our newest garden, still in the making, is inspired by the power of a circle to create a magical space. A ring of stone frames glass and granite mosaic dragonflies. This is partially enclosed by a semi-circular stone seat you may have seen being built at last fall’s festival. The concentric circles are nestled within a border behind a towering twenty-foot tall fastigiated yew moved nearly twenty years ago. A large specimen of a dwarf blue spruce (Picea pungens ‘Montgomery’) flanks one side and sets the tone for a color scheme of silver, blue, grey. Come and explore our gardens, we hope it will live up to Sitwell’s commentary that - "Indeed, in every great garden there should be some element of wonder or surprise, if only to make recollection more vivid." Warren Leach
Perennial Plant of the Year
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
