Tranquil TimesSummer 2008 Newsletter |
The garden space between the street, driveway, walkway and your house offers a formidable first impression to someone arriving to your door. Thomas Church, landscape designer and author of Gardens are for People, wrote this about the importance of a well mannered entry garden:
Cultivate your entry garden to be a pleasurable experience and not inflict long lasting psychic sorrow. Select a planting palette that offers year-round beauty. Include evergreen trees and shrubs, sculptural branches, colorful twigs, fruits and foliage. Japanese maples (Acer palmatum) offer a variety of textured and colored foliage as well as sculptural silhouettes in the winter. Under plant with the evergreen foliage of lenten rose (Helleborus) offering early spring blooms. Witchhazel’s colorful flowers offer a cheery greeting even in the dead of winter. We grow Hamamelis ‘Jelena’ in a stoneware container by our front steps . ‘Jelena’ blooms with coppery orange tassels from January to March.Next to the witchhazel is one of my favorite broadleaf evergreen shrubs Mahonia bealii the Asian leatherleaf mahonia. The glossy bold leaves are topped with fragrant yellow flowers followed by blue fruit. Combine Mahonia with the fine textured chartreuse foliage of Spiraea thunbergii ‘Ogon’ and variegated compound leaves of five -leaf aralia (Acanthopanax sieboldianus ‘Variegatus’). Long stalk holly’s (Ilex pendunculosa) smooth margined evergreen leaves and pendulous red fruits anchors the corner of our entry planting.Herbaceous perennials play an important role aside from their colorful blooms. They vanish in the winter and are out of harms way of the snow plow. Bluestar (Amsonia x ‘Seaford Skies) is a excellent choice for planting near a street or driveway. Thriving in full sun to partial shade, Amsonia survives the worst droughts with indestructible foliage that is attractive all summer and turns a beautiful yellow in October. Combine with Geranium Rozanne whose purple flowers will accompany the coloring fall foliage. Add daylilies and daffodils for a full season of color.Fragrant flowers always offer a delightful greeting. Daphne x transatlanica offers fragrant flowers in late May and a heavy rebloom in September and October. Plant your entry garden for gracious greetings. Knock Knock. Warren Leach Days after our Daylily Festival in July, Debi and I flew off to Arizona. We drove from Bisbee near the Mexican border to Page in the north and to Zion National Park in Utah. We explored the Sonora Desert Museum, Saguaro National Park, Casa Grande Ruins National Monument, Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument and Grand Canyon National Park. We toured Botanic Gardens in Tucson and Phoenix, as well as a xeriscape nursery and landscape business in Clarkdale. We witnessed a unique and diverse landscape with an elevation variant of 7,000 feet. The plant communities ranged from desert cactus and agave to temperate forests of ponderosa pine. We even saw snow, still on a mountain peak over 12,000 feet. After twelve days of intense heat (+100 degrees F), horticulture, hiking, museums and monumental vistas, a strange image haunts my mind. It is at the Glen Canyon Dam Visitor's Center. The Glen Canyon Dam, itself a monumental engineering feat, impounds the waters of the Colorado River creating Lake Powell and supplies water to seven states and Mexico. In front of the visitor’s center, here in the arid, dry desert, is a luxuriant, irrigated and fertilized green lawn. It is the glaring manifestation of Michael Pollan’s words published sixteen years ago: "What can you say about a country whose two most important contributions to the history of landscape consist of the front lawn and the wilderness park? One safe conclusion would be that this is a culture whose thinking on the subject of nature is somewhat schizophrenic - that it is unsure whether it wants to dominate nature in the name of civilization or to worship it, untouched, as a means of escape from civilization."Schizophrenic culture indeed. Environmental educational displays inside the Glen Canyon Dam Visitor’s Center encourages water conservation, developing xeric landscapes and documents historic drought patterns and the current low water level of Lake Powell. Our federal government’s Department of Interior should be more enlightened and demonstrate a sustainable landscape instead of the incongruous green lawn and insane wasted water use in the desert. Even in wet, green New England we are not innocent of similar transgressions of urban sprawl and poor use of our land and water resources. Our horticultural schizophrenia is just more subtle. We have become subject to erratic weather patterns that scorch our landscapes with weeks and months of drought. Seasonal water use restriction imposed by water districts and municipalities are common. In areas with light, sandy soils, like at Tranquil Lake Nursery, drought conditions are perennial.Perhaps because the Arizona landscape was so foreign to us, water consumption was always in our peripheral consciousness throughout our horticultural and ethnobotanical rambling. We can implement similar water husbandry practices inspired by the aboriginal Arizona desert farmers. They foraged as well as cultivated crops, utilizing many native plants for food, fiber, fuel and construction materials. Mesquite, pinyon pine and agave are a few of these life sustaining desert staples. They also engineered and constructed irrigation canals, water control gates and diversion channels to water cultivated crops or corn, squash, beans and cotton. An example of planting beds sunk below grade to catch and focus sporadic rainfalls to crops was most interesting. ‘Rain gardens’ are replacing old engineering practices of piping water away and wasting it. Embracing precious water recharges underground aquifers and sustains garden planting. We have integrated rain garden techniques into the display gardens at the nursery and plan another desert inspired project for our Fall Festival. While listening to a guide at the Sonora Desert Museum and Botanic Garden ask children to observe the native desert plants and tell what was different about them; we were reminded of our exemplar ‘Silver Garden’ exhibit at the Spring Flower Show. Here was a display of many of the plant adaptations for survival in a dry environment. The array of foliage features included the vertical orientation of leaves, silver and white fuzzy hairs, thick waxy cuticles, as well as green stems that photosynthesize in place of leaves. It was a landscape composition of uncommon beauty. I fell for the silver felted compound leaves of Sophora secundiflora ‘Silver Peso’ and had to bring one back to Massachusetts to complement our silver plant collection! Many of the plants fit for desert survival; Mesquite, Palo Verde and Acacia, to list only a few, belong to the Leguminosae family. This was not surprising. We are familiar with many hardy, drought tolerant members of the Pea family; like false indigo (Baptisia australis), sienna (Cassia marilandica), Indigofera and bush cover (Lespedeza thunbergii). Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument presented one of the most dramatic and phenomenal examples of a legume’s adaptiveness. The crater’s black volcanic cone was veiled in a low green haze. We keyed it out to be Locoweed (Astragalus mollissimus) growing all through the depths of black volcanic aggregate. What fortitude.At elevations from three to seven thousand feet we encountered many temperate plants with equivalent east coast species. Familiar genera were juniper, oak, pine, sumac, potentilla, poplar, ash, willow and others. The shrub live-oak (Quercus dumosa var. turbinella) was enchantingly beautiful. This oak is a shrub or small tree growing from five to fifteen feet tall. The evergreen leaves are holly like with a grey bloom. I fell in love with it at the Sonora Desert Museum. Though not similar at all in appearance, shrub live-oak’s habit reminds me of an eastern native, the shrubby bear oak (Quercus ilicifolia) that grows out of rocky crevices in Bar Harbor, Maine. I found a three foot specimen for sale at a Botanic Garden in Tucson, (more creative packing for the plane). It will make a great bonsai, and will have to overwinter in a cool greenhouse. What did I learn from touring and botanizing in Arizona? I am still processing it all. The landscape is an abstraction of geological novelties colored in red, black and tan. It is a landscape of great contrasts, horizontal open expanses spaces, magnificent mountains and vertical canyons. Green is sparse. Vermillion penstemon flowers play against ancient black lava flows. The definition of urban sprawl. Add to your summer reading list these two insightful books: Cities in the Wilderness: A New Vision of Land Use in America by Bruce Babbitt and No Man’s Garden; Thoreau and a New Vision for Civilization and Nature, by Daniel Botkin. Arizona was an adventure for sure, I look forward to Maine. Warren Leach
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