Plants | Deborah Silver & Co.

Stick Work

Mid November is a good time to be planning what you might do to interpret the garden and landscape for the holiday and the winter. Early is the best time to get going on a scheme. The most compelling reason has to do with weather. The past few years, our late fall was very mild. Mild means it is reasonably easy to work outdoors. A really cold late fall makes so much work of any installation outdoors. For those gardeners that do their own work, dramatically cold fall temperatures is enough to make anyone consider skipping the winter work altogether.

My advice-don’t skip any experience of the garden. Plant roses, peonies, trees, and wildflowers. Plant bulbs in the ground, or in pots. Grow topiaries and espaliers. Plant clematis and tomatoes. Take a liking to asters, and amass a collection. Make enthusiasm for the garden and landscape a way of life. Plan to express a winter idea-you will not be sorry. On and off, we have had extremely cold temperatures in November. The temperature today when I came to work was 20 degrees. This is unseasonably cold, but by no means unheard of. I remember those years when we had to chop frozen soil out of pots in order to install a winter arrangement. Should night temperatures this low persist for much longer, our winter installations will be arduous. Tough conditions in the landscape are my problem-not my client’s problem.

If your winter garden is all your own to create, I would urge you to get dressed, and get out there. The forecast for our coming weekend calls for 50 degrees both days. All you need for a stellar winter arrangement in your pots are some great materials, a load of lights, and an atmosphere in which you have time to concentrate. Once I am in the process of stuffing a pot with sticks for the winter, I do not much notice the cold. The fresh cut branches we bring in for the winter season shrug off the cold-why shouldn’t I? I spent the entire day today outdoors, installing our first winter/holiday pots of the season.

Stick week-we take possession of so many beautiful fresh cut twigs. The stick work is what comes next. Those sticks can be bound together. They can provide the bulk and mass of a beautiful centerpiece. They can be stuck into the soil, one at a time. They can provide the stalk of a great winter topiary for a sideboard in the dining room. They can be woven around a form. Our bunches of fresh cut twigs delight and challenge me, in the beginning of that season when the landscape is going dormant. I find that the best antidote to loss is taking on the responsibility for a life that goes on. A gorgeous winter garden helps to take the sting out of experiencing a garden going down for the winter.

Nature provides a backdrop which is always interesting, and regularly spectacular. Figure in the wind, the snow, the sunny days, the gray days, the cold, the ice, and that special quality which we call natural. I have always posted entries to this online gardening journal of mine in real time. This year, my idea is to pose the questions, post the pictures, and speak to the season, ahead of time. In time for a reader to have time to consider all their options. Rob loads in all manner of materials for the holiday and winter season. I shop what he stocks at Detroit Garden Works for my projects. Sticks, picks, greens, garlands, magnolia, grapevine, sinamay, weather proof ornament-his selections are beautiful. Better than the beauty is the depth. He takes great care to represent a wide range of interests. Gardeners comprise a very big group with very diverse interests. Rob aims to engage each and every gardener.

We do anticipate the season to come-we have to. Rob and I shop for the holiday to come the previous January. We order materials in small numbers. We hope that each gardener will draw from a large group of a limited stock of materials to create a holiday and winter that produces an original and personal result. The order we place for sticks for your works happens in August. The holiday display at Detroit Garden Works takes weeks to create. We think ahead, so you do not have to. But this year, the weather may close out early. Our winter usually commences in January sometime. I am thinking the winter will come early this year. There is much stick work to do. If you plan to harvest materials from your yard, or from the roadside, or the empty lot next door-now is the time.

The curly copper willow that we installed in 12 pots downtown today is exuberant. Lively. I do so like the warm color. All of those curly stems are airy in a way only nature could create. Our part was to put together an arrangement in which the twigs would celebrate winter season in a striking way.

Our expression of the winter season for this client is a relationship forged from cut twigs, fresh cut greens, dyed kiwi vine, sugar pine cones, gold sinamay, and fresh cut magnolia. Any expression in the landscape revolves around a conversation. If you are a gardener, you have a voice. The season is another voice. Nature is the first and foremost voice. Multiple voices-harmonic.

All the voices interacting-love this.

Your winter season-love it up.

Posted on: November 14, 2013 16 Comments

Filed Under: Winter, container planting, Plants, Holiday, Detroit Garden Works Tagged With: winter garden, winter arrangements, holiday containers, winter containers, holiday decor

At A Glance: Late Fall

maples shedding

bleached maples leaves

maple leaves

Japanese maple in late November

Gingko and hydrangea

parrotias

pear tree

pear espalier

Venus dogwood

old oak

snow today

Posted on: November 12, 2013 5 Comments

Filed Under: Woody Plants, Fall, Plants, Picture This Tagged With: November, fall color

Leaf Me Alone

Why is it that the moment you want something the worst is that very moment you are destined to loose it? I mourn the loss of the leaves, come fall. It is the end of a story that has unfolded over many months. Once the plants have leaved out in the spring, we are awash in the green that leaves provide. Everywhere I look in my little garden, I see green leaves. The stiff little boxwood leaves all precisely laid along the stems. The big lax rhododendron leaves flopping this way and that. The big handed Princeton Gold maple leaves are held parallel to the ground, and shade every plant and every person beneath them. The curly fronds beech ferns have that missing front tooth look. The magnolia leaves are simple, big, and strong.

The hellebore leaves fan out, whorled around their stems. The hydrangeas leaves are ovate-each shrub is smothered with them. The rose leaves are glossy, and subtly serrated. Perennial geranium leaves-they are the most astonishing clubby shape, and heavily veined. The leaves of grass we refer to as blades. The leaves of the Parrotia are stiff, and marked with strong parallel veins. The dogwood leaves are softer, more subtle. The leaves of the hardy hibiscus-large and thin. The leaves of butterburr-the elephant in the garden room. Yews do not have leaves. They have needles. Those green needily configured leaves grace the garden year round.

The leaves of the Palabin lilac are short and pert. Snakeroot has large and dramatically serrated leaves. The peonies feature thick glossy leaves that endow the garden long after they have finished blooming. Thyme leaves-so small. Dandelion leaves-coarse and uncouth. Horseradish leaves-the ultimate height and breadth of uncouth. Scotch moss leaves are soft and mossy in appearance. The platycodon leaves are thick and stiff as a board and quite blue in color. The big sail like delphinium leaves are all a spring storm needs to blow a stand of tall and ethereal blue blossoms over and onto to its knees.

Creeping jenny has round leaves-the lime version can cover the ground in no time. The lime leaves of the hosta Sum and Substance are stiff and heavily veined-in the summer. Regal, this plant. At the first frost they collapse in a heap. Not so regal, how they melt in the cold, and go down. Russian sage, lavender and dusty miller have silvery gray leaves.

There are those leaves in colors other than green. This list is long. Red leaves. Variegated leaves. Yellow leaves. White leaves. But the leaves do more than delight a gardener with their shape, mass and color. Leaves photosynthesize, meaning that they absorb, and convert sunlight into energy. The leaves of a plant fuel its growth and health. In the fall, those food makers are shed from the plants about to go dormant. The process by which a leaf provides a plant with energy all summer, matures, colors up, and drops, is an extraordinary story.

Fall color is all about the leaves. The lime green shoot that leafed out in the spring, and energized a plant all season long, matures in the fall. The life cycle of a leaf represents the life cycle of a garden. How astonishing that the leaves turn such beautiful color in the fall before they drop. That garden day that I treasure the leaves the most is the the spring. The leafing out in spring is all about the hope for the future of the garden. My second most treasured day? That moment when all of the leaves in my garden have colored up, and are about to fall.

Once fall comes, the leaves have done their job. No leaves make a better show of the end of the season than Boston Ivy. They make a party, in celebration of a season well lived. The close of their season-fiery. Just look at the leaves.

All that remains now of these Boston ivy leaves are the stems. How could I miss them-they are the most astonishing shade of pink imaginable. They come away from the wall in a way that stops me dead in my tracks. All summer and fall long I look at these leaves, and marvel. The garden asks for a lot, but the story it delivers is delightful. Epic.

Posted on: November 11, 2013 18 Comments

Filed Under: Fall, Plants Tagged With: fall leaves, fall color, boston ivy, Leaves

The Pumpkin Patch

The pictures from Rob’s trip to the pumpkin patch are eloquent in their description of the change of the season. The pumpkins and squash are brilliant in their mature coloration. The fruits of the harvest are juicy and robust.

At the same time that the pumpkins are coming into their glory, the vines that nourished them are fading and blackening from cold. At the time of the harvest, the vines have completed their life span.

Rob says this annual trip to cut pumpkins is one of his favorite moments in the gardening year. As usual, he chooses materials for the shop that reflect his point of view about what is beautiful. There’s not much more to say, other than the fact that his photographs tell a story I never tire of hearing.