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Homing In On Winter: Part 2

 

 

Growing amaryllis in glass jars on a window sill is one way to keep the spirit of the garden going on in the winter months.  That said, gardeners like me are hard to persuade.   Those who insist that the garden is over at that moment we have a hard frost are selling their inclination to garden short.  Very short.  A gardener’s point of view is strong-all year long.  It doesn’t much matter whether you garden in Austin or Olympia or Chicago or Miami-a love of the garden can electrify a life.  Garden on-everyone.  If you garden in my zone, there are those “other six months”-like them or not. 

This might be my most favorite container I have ever planted at home.  For sure, it is my most favorite photograph of one of my containers.  How I loved how this looked, and how I regretted watching it succumb to the cold.  These Italian pots are in the basement now.  It is a quiet time for them.  Time for me to move on.

The winter season has its opportunities.  Winter arrangements in frostproof containers not only help stave off the off season blues, they are a delight to the eye.  Our shop is very busy-constructing winter gardens that reference the garden.  We produce an enormous amount of work for clients between mid November and mid December, but this post is not about my work.  I am interested in in passing along what all of that work, and all of that contact with people keenly interested in the garden, has taught me.  The upshot- every gardener has options.  All year round.  Every season.    

The moment any gardener decides to make something -and by this I mean envision, create, construct, edit, and install-is a good and satisfying series of moments.  As heartbreaking as it is to watch the garden go dormant, it is equally exciting to have a winter gardening season asking for a gardener’s best effort. Feeling low?  The best counter to that is to make something.  Make something be.  Make something happen.    

Winter container arrangements speak the language of the garden.  More importantly, they scoop up, engage, and occupy the heart of any serious gardener.  Be generous.  Go large.  

Those topiary forms that over the course of the summer that provide a form for hyacinth bean vines or mandevillea can provide a structure for winter lighting.   Lighting in the winter-essential.  Should you garden in my zone, the dark at 4pm is soon to come.  Light up the night.     

These pots are stuffed with greens.  Fresh evergreens.  In the center, variegated English boxwood.  The steel topiary forms are detailed with lights.  The time it takes to create a winter arrangement like this is time very well spent.  The process of coming to grips with the winter is every bit as important, maybe more important, than the passing of the summer garden.  Change is not so easy, but change is essential.

How do I handle the garden going dormant?  I get busy.  I decorate for the holiday-and the winter.  It helps sooth the sting that begins with the first hard frost.

Fresh boxwood is available at your local farmer’s market.  This 54 inch wide boxwood wreath-a request from a client.  Hew plans to decorate his client’s home in a big and positive way.  Spend more time making your winter season beautiful. 

Whenever I am making something, I am happy.  My advice?  Get busy.  Make something.  Make something beautiful.  I promise-the winter will fly by. 

 

 

 

Posted on: November 20, 2012 9 Comments
Filed Under: Winter, container planting Tagged With: ,

Bringing The Garden Indoors: Part 1

 

I am no fan of plants in the house.  Once the gardening season comes to a close, it is a relief not have to worry about keeping plants alive. Plants inside the house-what could possibly be more unnatural than that?  Would I really subject a perfectly well meaning and decent plant to the dry heat and lack of sun that characterizes an interior space?  Perhaps this is wrong, but I like the separation of my gardening life, and my personal life.  OK, my gardening life is my personal life, but the thought of a winter getaway from the demands of the plants is attractive.

I have a very good friend whose house is loaded with all manner of tropical plants.  Julia does a great job with them, and I marvel at how she is able to keep all of them looking great.  She cannot bear to be without the garden for any longer than a moment; her house/conservatory is proof of that.  I think if she had her choice, she would live in a conservatory situated in the middle of a giant property.    

 I have had friends bring me plants for the windowsill behind my desk.  One Valentine’s day my landscape superintendent gave me a dozen auricula primroses-how I love them. I spent a whole winter doing watercolor paintings of them, such is my enchantment with them.  It took me 3 months to kil them, but kill them I did.  Stationed in the windowsill behind my desk, I could not remember to water them until they were in a state of utter dessication.  After too many water crises, they finally gave up on me.  

 My friend and  grower Marlene Uhlianuk, whose unusual plants and vegetables are a mainstay of my local market, gave me a pot containing the smallest rose in the world.  She insisted it would be easy to take care of.  On my window sill.  It took a few months to prove her wrong, but prove her wrong I did.  I still feel guilty about it. 

Though the thought of trying to keep tropical plants alive, inside over a winter leaves me absolutely cold, I can be seduced.  By amaryllis, that is.  Bringing on amaryllis bulbs indoors late in the gardening year-a means by which even I can bring the garden indoors. 

 The bulbs are enormous.  The bigger the bulb, the more stalks, and flowers.  The blooms are just as enormous-startlingly so.  There are miniature varieties, like the amaryllis “Evergreen” pictured above.  Though it is a miniature, it’s effect is anything but.  Amaryllis is a very small genus of flowering bulbs made up of just two species.  Amaryllis belladonna is a species native to South Africa.  The taxomony aside,  these hefty bulbs can produce flowering stalks from December until April. 

Potted up, a solid two-thirds of the bulb needs to be above the soil line.  This makes sense-big juicy bulbs have no need of too much water.  As for “planting” amaryllis in soil in clay pots, with 2/3’s of the bulb above ground-this leaves me cold.  I don’t have a conservatory or greenhouse, just a house.  My idea of a household is a space unsullied by dirt.  Apart from what the corgis track in, that is.  Forcing bulbs in water is an alternative that sounds good. 

  

I like to grow amaryllis in water.  Water gardens are perfect for people who cannot remember to water-both inside and out.  A jar, a bulb, and a handful of stones is a simple and easy means of bringing the garden indoors.  The jar, and the stones-entirely up to you.  Rob bought canning jars for our amaryllis this year.  The capped jars from Fisk are so beautiful.   I am dubious of any idea about which might make my winter easier.  But in truth, the process of bringing the amaryllis into bloom indoors-simple and satisfying.

 The amaryllis Baby Doll is white, with the slightest hint of blush pink. If these pictures do not make you long to grow some on your windowsill, then nothing will.  The reward for your effort is considerable.  If you follow a few simple rules, amaryllis can be grown on, and kept for years.

Grumpy about the passing of the gardening season?  Growing amaryllis is guaranteed to help with that.  Set the bulb low in the jar.  The rim of the jar will help hold the heavy flowering stalks aloft.  Add water to just below the basal plate of the bulb-the water is for the roots to reach for.  Soaking the bulb itself in water is asking for rot.  Provide a warm place.  Amaryllis bulbs are ready and waiting to grow and bloom, meaning that even a haphazrd effort will probably produce flowers.  Not interested in hauling in jars and bags of stone?  Rob has all of these amaryllis ready and waiting.   

 

 

 

 

 

Posted on: November 18, 2012 9 Comments
Filed Under: Holiday, container planting, Plants Tagged With: , ,

Say Good Bye

Don’t you despise it-saying goodby? 

 Finishing a good book is a mixed blessing.  As much as the resolution of the story is eagerly anticipated, the closure is tinged with regret.  That experience has regretfully come to an end.  How many times did you read all of the Wizard of Oz books, hoping for yet another sequel?  Frank Baum reluctantly wrote several sequels to his first book of Oz-children everywhere did not want the story to end.  At one point, he wrote that Oz had lost touch with the world-there could be no more books.  The hue and cry was such that he wrote a new Oz book every year until his death in 1916, making 13 sequels to the original Wizard of Oz in all.  After his death, his publisher engaged the writer Ruth Plumly Thompkins to write another 21 Oz books.  There was a new book released every year at Christmas from 1913 until 1942-imagine.  35 books were written in all, as no child who read them ever wanted to say goodby.

I am sure you know where this is leading.  Though I have had gardened through 36 seasons, I still hate to say goodbye.  There are plenty of signs that make point to the end.  In a good year, the woody plants slow down gradually, so the state of being awake, and the state of being asleep is about the duration of a heartbeat.  The annual flowers fade.  The leaves turn color and finally drop.  The shortening of the day length is so gradual that the first day it is dark at 5pm is shocking to the bone.

But for a few cold days, we have had a long and mild fall.  Until just a few days ago, a neighbor had thick gorgeous hedges of mixed dwarf marigolds blooming.  My Japanese anemones went on and on.  However, the last sequel to this season is just about to come to a close.  A shockingly low 23 degrees yesterday made for an abrupt end to that long slide towards the end.

It was 33 degrees all day today.  My insulated fall jacket fell far short of keeping me warm.  Outside without gloves on, it felt like hands were about to fall off.  The perennial garden has been cut back to the ground.  The leaves from all of the trees have been collected, and added to a giant pile at the landscape yard.  Even the parrotias are shedding their leaves. 

 On the deck this morning, an ever so thin dusting of snow.  The sky was an unvarying shade of light lead all day.  The wind was biting.  All of the tulips are in the ground-where it is warmer than the air temperature.  They are rooting-not growing.  The trees are dark and skeletal.     

It is not my idea to leave any gardener with an image of dark and skeletal. The spirit of the garden can go on.  What goes on outside can come inside.  The memory of the garden can powerfully inform and lighten the burden of the winter season.  More on this to follow.

 

 

Posted on: November 15, 2012 8 Comments
Filed Under: Fall, container planting Tagged With: , ,

The Grapevine Deer 2012

We have offered these life size grapeview deer sculptures at Detroit Garden Works for many years now-I never tire of them.  Unlike the deer that can devastate a bed of hostas, or chew the bark from treasured trees, these deer sculptures are beautiful in almost any landscape or garden.

On the inside, they are heavy gauge welded steel rod.  This makes them incredibly strong and sturdy.  If we place one in a landscape bed, we drive steel rebar deep into the ground next to each leg, and wire the steel frame of each foot to the rebar pins.  This keeps them in place and upright, in all kinds of weather.

In spite of the steel inside, the sculptures are very graceful, and capture the spirit of the beast.  The long legs and overscaled ears of this pair instantly identifies them as fawns.

The grazing doe has a long graceful neck and petite sized legs.  The doe, buck and fawn are life size, and can be sculpted in a standing, grazing, or lying down position.  Whether a single deer, a trio,  or a herd, they are beautiful in a garden.  Some of that beauty has to do with the material itself.

Vitis, or grape, is hardy in many places in the US.  Wild concrod grapes are common in my area.  The vines, harvested after the leaves fall, are the basis for many natural sculptural forms.  We have had grapevine cones, spheres, garlands, baskets, trellises, plant climbers, rustic fencing and wreaths.  The vines dry a beautiful cinnamon brown color, and are amazingly durable.

We recommend sealing these sculptures once a year with WaterLox, or a similar sealer.  Properly sealed, they will give many years of service in the garden.  Only one client of mine has had one long enough to send it back to be redone

But the real beauty of the sculptures is the hand of the sculptor.  A small group of perople make these deer.  Once you see enough of them, you recognize the hand.  I do not know their process, but I would guess the vines are soaked until they are pliant, and then applied and worked around the forms one strand at a time.  Once vine section is parallel to the next, and very densely woven.

I feel sure the vines are sorted and graded.  The larger vines form the body of the deer.  Much smaller vines are used to finish the legs, and fashion the feet.  The forms are sinuous and rhythmic.

I am not sure what is so compelling about them, other than to say they are a story about nature in form, material and narrative.  They are not a graphic representation-they capture a certain wild spirit that is hard to ignore.

I still remember the year of the Christmas buck.

 

Posted on: November 12, 2012 7 Comments
Filed Under: Detroit Garden Works, Winter, Garden Ornament Tagged With: ,