White in the Garden

In clothing and home decor, I avoid white due to my unfortunate tendency to spill coffee. But in the garden, judicious use of white is striking and it often gives a focal point to the garden. Recently, I’ve been enjoying several white patches. In back, these lilies (Lilium ‘Casa Blanca’), which I bought at the MSHS booth at the St. Paul Home and Patio Show this winter,  just started blooming. They are later blooming than other lilies, which may be because the spot in which I’ve planted them is too shady. I will move them this fall into a sunnier spot and remember to stake them next year. These are tall and striking, a real eye-catcher in an otherwise green part of the garden.

Near the lily is this new Annabelle hydrangea bush I planted this spring. Here’s a case of putting the right plant in the right place. Ever since it was planted in this somewhat shady spot, it has looked healthy and happy, and for the past few weeks, it’s been putting out bunches of white blooms. Annabelle is an old-fashioned hydrangea and will get 5 feet tall and wide. It makes a lovely hedge and is a reliable bloomer as far north as USDA Zone 3.

Finally, in the front-door garden, I have white sweet alysum. I’ve had poor luck with alysum in the past, but this year’s relatively cool conditions have been perfect for it. The white color contrasts well with the deep purple of these Wave petunias and the sunny yellow of the coreopsis planted near it.

Some gardeners choose to isolate white in one part of the garden and this can be beautiful, especially at night. If you’d like to try a white garden, check out this article on principles of designing with white.

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Garden Inspiration

This week I’ve had the opportunity to visit three stunning private gardens in the Twin Cities. Each of these gardens is on a city lot (although large ones) and is primarily tended by the homeowners. While each is glorious, the gardens had very different ambiance and show how the owners’ personalities come through in long-tended gardens. One thing that all three had in common, however, was a sturdy fence around the perimeter. Bunnies, deer and other critters are kept out.

'Claude Shride' lily

A Scientist’s Garden

The first garden I visited is owned by a gentleman who loves martagon lilies and does a great deal of hybridizing. His large, shaded and hilly lot backs up to a pond. Amid the many beds of shade plants were the stars of the show, the lilies he studies, photographs, and breeds. His use of rock throughout the garden gives it real backbone and makes the garden interesting year-round.

Formal in the City

Yesterday I visited this garden in St. Paul. It’s owners take meticulous care of the many carefully designed beds. They mulch with only two things: pine needles and oak leaves. The smell of the garden with its roses, lilies, and that marvelous mulch is intoxicating. While the garden has curving beds and an impressive vegetable garden, its formal room was especially beautiful, symmetrical yet varied, formal but inviting. It also features a hidden gazebo, where the homeowners enjoy the many birds that make a home in the garden.

Artfully Arranged

The last garden I visited was in my hometown, Roseville. This large suburban lot has everything: beautiful conifers, undulating perennial beds, rock gardens, a charming shed, and a continually changing palette of color and blooms. This garden looks beautiful from May to October. The homeowners (the husband says it’s mostly his wife’s talent) have an artisitc sensibility that shows in how everything in the garden is arranged and displayed.

After visiting these gardens, I’m excited about this weekend’s Northfield Garden Club tour, where six Northfield gardens will be open to visitors.  See the Northfield News article for more information.

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What Would You Name Your Garden?

I’ve been reading Julie Moir Messervy’s excellent new book, Home Outside: Creating the Landscape You Love, which gives homeowners several techniques for figuring out what they want from their yard and garden and how to achieve it. One of her suggestions is to name your landscape. Here’s what she says:

Naming helps you establish a theme that will provide an underlying blueprint for the way you develop your property in the future. Sometimes a characteristic of the area or region you live in will suggest a theme; sometimes an attribute, style or feature of your house will give a clue, or a particular landscape or garden highlight from your experience will surface as a theme you’d like to develop on your land.

Messervy gives examples of names like Tight Squeeze (a narrow lot); The Back Forty (a Midwesterner reclaiming her roots in the city); or Rosecroft (a cottage with lots of roses). This prompted some thoughts about my own landscape, and I took a survey of those at home about what we might call our property. My husband suggested Hillside, since our house is built into a hill. Descriptive, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. The 16-year-old declined to participate, saying her brain was dead from studying for finals.

Wildflowers could inspire a name.

This exercise does prompt some hard thinking. What is it that’s special about our property? The ponds nearby (Pond Pinnacle?), the little meadow out back (Wildflower Ridge?), the plethora of critters that inhabit the garden (Mole Manor?), or maybe it’s our garage hanging off the front of the place (Snout House Haven?) Clearly, I need to think more about this.

What would you call your garden?

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P.O.V.

One day last fall, my neighbor from across the street stopped me to say how much she liked the Autumn Blaze maple in our front yard. Her son had recently commented that it was the biggest tree on the street, she said, and they really enjoyed watching it turn red in the fall. Her comments were nice to hear, but the truth is that I had not noticed. I had not really noticed how big the tree had gotten or how lovely it looked with the top leaves a deep burgundy red and the lower leaves still green.

Garden designers often talk about views and considering the views your yard and garden offer from various positions–both inside and outside the house. Sometimes the best positions for viewing are across the street.

Like many newer homes, the windows on my house are largely oriented toward the back, so the view I see most of the time–while doing dishes or sitting at the dinner table or reading in the living room–is a view of my backyard and my next door neighbor’s backyard. When I look out the two larger windows at the front of the house, the part of the big maple that I see is the trunk and a few lower branches. I enjoy its shade and it’s the perfect spot to to chain the dog to while I’m working in the yard, but the aspects of the tree that make it beautiful–its nice round crown, the way its leaves flicker in the wind, and its deep red fall color–are not part of the views I normally experience. To see those things, I have to step back and look up.

Like many gardeners, I’ve reached the end of the gardening season with thoughts of next year dancing in my head. But before I commit any of those plans to paper (or start digging), it’s time to step back, look up, and consider new points of view.

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Impulse Gardening

I don’t know what came over me, really I don’t. Saturday night, I had no major gardening plans for Sunday, except maybe to walk around picking weeds. Then Sunday around noon I started to think about one of the back flower beds–how lousy the old black-eyed Susans looked and how I really should do something to about that poor little peony that I stuck between two beds. An item on the web noted that dogwoods and azaleas do well together, and that got me mulling over the azaleas in the front and how they have never performed the way they should and how the single weigela I planted there looked fabulous.

Before I knew it, I was at Knecht’s buying weigelas and veronica, and a couple stray pots of milkweed just for fun.  Then I was in the back, first just planning to remove the black-eyed Susans and replace them with the azaleas and planting the new weigelas up front. Then suddenly, hoses were being moved into a shape that expanded the bed by more than a third, and I discovered the grass in the back was remarkably easy to peel off and, heck, I could dig the whole thing up in no time flat. Before I knew it, turf was flying, and daisies and daylilies were getting moved and divided, and another peony that I had been holding in a pot while figuring out where to plant it suddenly had a home, and I was on my way to Menards for cheap mulch.

It was 7:30 at night before I came back in the house, dirty, tired and sore. I’m not sure what my impulse garden will look like next year, though I’m hopeful it will be bright with bursts of color all summer long. But as my husband said while surveying the scene, “Good. Less to mow.”

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Summer Visit to Squire House Gardens

Yesterday, I took a side trip on my way home from the Twin Cities to Afton, Minnesota, to visit Squire House Gardens, a garden center specializing in unusual plants and accessories for home and garden. I visited the store last December to talk with co-owner Martin Stern and designer Kathy Oss about creating holiday pots. The garden was lovely then, under a coating of new snow, but it’s even more impressive in summer.

Martin, who designs and maintains the gardens with his partner, Richard Meacock, and a small crew of gardeners, describes his style as “English, but not formal.” The paths in the garden intersect at right angles, but each bed is less formally planted with perennials, annuals and shrubs that bloom in sequence. The peonies and iris are done for the year, but a few lilies were beginning to bloom. In another week or two, the garden will be filled with blooms, according to Martin, with more bursts of bloom in late summer and fall. Martin uses art and pots to create focal points. (I loved this statue and bench.) Martin will be sharing design advice in an upcoming issue of Northern Gardener.

If you are planning a short, scenic drive over the next few weeks, Afton’s a great place to visit. (They are having a Fourth of July celebration and parade.) My daughter, who was with me on the trip, enjoyed an iced tea in the local coffee shop, the Afton Bean while I visited the garden.

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Stella!!

That’s my garden blogger’s imitation of Stanley Kowalski. Stella is back–Stella d’Oro, that is, probably one of the most planted perennials of the past 20 years, a plant that is both loved and disdained. I’ve heard it called,”the most worthless perennial of all time,” by Northern Gardener’s own Don Engebretson, a.k.a., The Renegade Gardener, and praised as “the most popular daylily selection of all time.” Of course, it’s possible to be both: Think reality television, Cheetos or stiletto heels.

Here’s my take on Stella: If you’ve got a spot you don’t want to think about much, plant Stella d’Oro daylilies (Hemerocallis ‘Stella d’Oro’). They can handle full sun (see the planting circle in front of the Northfield Public Library for an example) or mostly shade. They bloom consistently and prolifically from late June through much of July. They will re-bloom again late in the summer. Last fall, I had Stellas off-and-on into October–with absolutely no effort on my part. The flowers are a pretty yellow, though the foliage is a non-starter. Mine are planted on the north side of the house near some hostas that also require next to no care. They get a few hours of morning sun, but that’s it. I’ve divided the daylilies once in nine years, though I think they could use it again.

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Gardening Like Monet

Not many of us can garden in the fashion of impressionist Claude Monet. Lacking the 5-acre garden, help from a full-time gardener and (most importantly) artistic genius, we instead look at Monet’s paintings, and sigh. There was a lot of sighing, and gasping, and general oohing and aahing at the Minneapolis Institute of Art this morning during photographer Derek Fell’s talk on Monet’s garden. The event was part of the MIA’s annual Art in Bloom, and the auditorium was packed with enthusiastic gardeners and art lovers.

In addition to photographing gardens, Fell designs them so he brings great knowledge and sympathy to his photographs of Monet’s garden. We’ve occasionally used his stock images in Northern Gardener. He recently completed a book on Monet called The Magic of Monet’s Garden: His Planting Plans and Color Harmonies.

At the MIA, he talked about how Monet used color and lines to create the depth and luminescence in his art. Some of these are techniques we regular gardeners can employ. For instance, in order to create the shimmer that impressionists are known for, Monet used white flowers or silver plants. But white shouldn’t be used in a clump, Fell said. A clump makes a hole in the garden; dotted throughout the garden, white plays off the other colors and brightens them. As Fell said (and he may have been quoting Monet), you’ve got to sprinkle it like salt and pepper. Monet used color harmonies throughout his garden. His plantings would be all in cool colors (such as in the painting above) or in hot colors. Cool harmonies include blues and purples, hot ones reds, oranges and yellows. Monet sometimes would plant beds of hot colored flowers in front of beds of cool colored flowers. From a certain angle, the cool behind the hot makes the bed look deeper. Monet also used only straight beds because he wanted to create deep perspective and a sense of walking into infinity.

His famous water garden took the opposite approach, according to Fell. That was a cup garden, where the visitor was called to introspection. Monet, like many smart gardeners, planted at least three of any of the water lilies he chose for his water gardens.

Monet’s interest in gardening grew from his painting. He gardened to create the kind of place he wanted to paint. In the process, he created the kind of garden many gardeners would like to visit.

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Garden Advice from a Pro

I will be doing most of the planting and installation on my new flower bed myself, but when it comes to garden design, I need help–preferably from a pro. So before I started digging the new bed (more on that in another post), I contacted Knecht’s Nurseries and Landscaping in Northfield for some design advice. Knecht’s offers a one-hour consultation for $50, and it’s amazing how much you can accomplish in one hour with a little preparation and forethought. Kristin Lucas, one of the Knecht’s designers, came out on Friday to talk about my plans. (That’s her adjusting the hose.)

Since I know where I want the bed to go and what kind of conditions (sunny, windy, decent soil) exist there, we were able to get a lot done. I’d already had a hose on the grass to show the position and shape of the bed. Kristin suggested we tweak the shape slightly and move the bed away from the sidewalk by the width of a mower to prevent dirt from washing away. My neighbor’s dog, Tipsy, showed up to inspect our work.

Once the position of the bed was set, the fun started–picking plants! I had a couple of perennials in mind for that garden: Russian sage, a grass or two, and sedum. I also roughly knew the color scheme. My house has burgundy trim, so it’s all about the purple around here. Kristin got out her book of plant “glamour shots” and we first made a list of plants that would do well given the conditions. Some plants caught my eye that I just can’t have. I covet cimicifuga, but the conditions in my yard are all wrong for it.

Kristin suggested chokeberry, a native shrub that’s very showy, not too large and has bright edible berries. For sedum, she recommended one of the new purple varieties, either ‘Black Jack‘ or ‘Maestro‘. For a grass, she likes prairie dropseed, which has a compact form and a cilantro-like fragrance. I’ve seen this grass used to good effect in many gardens that combine grasses with flowers and I like the idea of a garden that appeals to the senses of smell and touch as well as sight. I also wanted to get some white or silver plants into the bed and we settled on white garden phlox for flowers and artemisia (silver mound) for foliage. Throw in some deep pink bee balm (Monarda ‘Raspberry Wine’) and salvia and you have a striking bed.

We still had some time left, so Kristin did a rough drawing of how she might arrange the bed. Once the bed is dug, I’ll take exact measurements of it, figure out the mature sizes of the plants, and do a more precise drawing based on her design. It will no doubt be adjusted and changed along the way, but having a good starting point makes the design process easier. And, getting advice from a professional gives me the confidence to move ahead with the project.

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Negative Space

Natalie Goldberg, author of the groundbreaking writing book Writing Down the Bones, says writers need to see and describe negative spaces–what is not obviously present in a scene, the spaces in between what is there. Often, she says, that is where the meaning is. I thought about Goldberg’s negative space idea after my gardening flurry on Saturday. In addition to planting bulbs, I moved some hostas from my shady bed to a spot underneath the stairs that lead from our deck to the yard. This spot is hard to mow and shady, the perfect spot for some low-maintenance hostas. In another bed, I removed the diseased aster I wrote about in an earlier post.

Sunday morning, I was looking out at the back yard when I noticed how much better both of those beds looked. Removing the plants made the beds look neater, more pulled together, more like they had actually been designed as opposed to just planted. The spaces where the plants had been gave the eye a spot to rest. Removing the aster also created a space through which we can view a statue of St. Francis that we put in the garden last year. In many cases, less really is more.

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