Naturalistic Gardening

I recently had an opportunity to visit an amazing place in Scotland Neck, North Carolina called Sylvan Heights Waterfowl Park, "...the worlds largest collection of waterfowl." They had a large deck overlooking a low wetland area pictured above. I was taken by the beauty of it and thought about what it was that so pleased me. First the wetland is a defined space as an opening in the woodland. Secondly the stream makes a distinctive sinuous line  through the space. But of most interest to me was the manner in which the herbaceous plants distributed themselves. Sweeps, clumps, masses, textural contrasts, color variations all played into my fascination. I have been experimenting with naturalistic plantings in my garden, and I use these sorts of plant communities as inspiration. I have found it to be a very difficult task, so I was interested to read recently an article by George Schoellkopf who created a highly regarded garden at his home called Hollister House. He says, "The trouble is that the absence of formal structure does not automatically result in a convincingly natural garden." "A successful naturalistic garden is designed so that we are not aware of its structure because the plants themselves provide most of the structure. This sort of design demands a high degree of talent and effort." He goes on to explain his preference for formality in garden design and concludes by saying, "It's actually an aesthetic that is more attainable."

Every day that I work with what I call my "meadow garden" (see below) I come to appreciate the utility of figuratively hanging my plants (in other gardens) onto formal structural elements.

 

As I review the above photograph I am reminded that the blue Siberian iris and the red oriental poppy gradually faded away over a number of years under the competitive pressure of  the surrounding and naturally introduced plants. I also notice that the placement of the plants is very suggestive of the hand of man and lack the natural beauty of the wetland image at the top of this page. Where I have had the most success with the naturalistic aesthetic is where only one or two elements of the garden are permitted to naturalize such as biennials like Verbascum or Myosotis. They distribute themselves in very aesthetically pleasing ways within the context of a garden in a formal context. 

Orange Willows

Winter is a difficult time for me to write about gardening, so I have been delinquent with my posts. Looking through my recent photographs (recently saved, with cataloging, from a crashed hard drive!) I came across the willow, Salix alba 'Britzensis'. About fourteen years ago I started bringing home cut stems of the plant from spring coppicing at Kingwood Center where I work and sticking the stems in the mud at my home. The initial "plantings" worked very well for about the first three years and gradually my grove got bigger and bigger. Then we had a series of dry springs and I reached some gravelly soil resulting in a few years of failure, but eventually success resumed, and I finally exhausted my desire for more of these willows and this free and easy means of creating a little woodland. Now I just enjoy them.


This orange barked willow (Salix alba 'Britzensis' ) has been cut to the ground every year at Kingwood Center for about twenty years. It makes a wonderful shrub that is especially ornamental in the fall and winter. It was these spring cut stems that I used to stick in the mud in order to grow my grove seen below. 

 



The orange color of the bark is always tricky to catch in a photograph, but this grove of willows is very beautiful with the orange color covering the upper portions of the trees, especially when viewed from above in the house. In the foreground are the trees that were rooted about three years ago. The background is the front of a linear grove along a creek that were rooted about ten years ago. The ones that date back about fourteen years were cut to the ground once when I supposed I would coppice the whole planting. I later decided against that and the new sprouts are as tall as any. I think I will manage them more passively than I first thought after reading Ancient Woodland by Oliver Rackham.

Naturalizing Within a Stand of Ornamental Grass

I continue to be fascinated with the popular horticultural efforts to create ornamental plant communities inspired by naturally occurring plant communities such as meadows. One approach that has interested me for years and that I have experimented with repeatedly is to create a sort of matrix of a clumping ornamental grass and then introduce compatible flowering plants. (So far the grasses I have used include Deschampsia flexuosa, Deschampsia caespitosa, Calamagrostis brachytricha, Sporobolus heterolepis, and Festuca ovina, and I just started playing around with Sesleria autumnalis which I think is promising.)  Getting the grass established first will help to get ahead of the weeds, and I love the sweep of the grass matrix and the challenge of finding the right flowering plants to insert.

Above is a picture of turf that is mowed only two or three times a year. As you can see yarrow has established itself nicely in a portion of this field and represents a simple form of what I am talking about, but it is a bit rough for a garden.

Above is a picture I copied from William Robinson's 1881 edition of The Wild Garden in which he suggested planting peonies in the midst of a stand of grass. I experimented with that idea myself as can be seen below.

As is so often the case, I think I could do a better job if I could start all over from scratch, but instead I will continue to tweak it to get just the affect I am looking for.

Above is my first attempt (1990) at this type of planting which I thought went fairly well but my work colleagues never seemed very fond of it. The grass is Sporobolus heterolepis along with the blooming Allium cernuum on August 6th. Belamcanda seed pods are about to open. I think this made a nice late summer display, and earlier in the year Allium aflatunense, Liatris spicata, and Hemerocallis flava added seasonal floral interest. One problem was the encroachment of the adjoining turf grass, and I guess the other was that it never looked "composed." Perhaps placed in a location with lower expectations of cultivated splendor it would have been better received.

Another project, still in development, is to create a little community on about a 300 sq. ft. terrace between two rock retaining walls. Above Verbena 'Annie' proved a pleasant surprise in this dry sandy site, growing nicely with Festuca ovina. Judging by how quickly it established itself the Verbena may prove to be a bit aggressive.
Below is the same planting with another pleasant surprise. After having killed Incarvillea delavayi a couple of times this Festuca ovina planting proved to be a place for it to thrive. I will continue to search for suitable companions to join this little community.

Country Scene in What Country?

When I look at this picture without any background information about it at all I can tell that the likelihood of this being taken anywhere in the whole of the United States is so low that I would immediately conclude that it was not. Why is that?

Phipps Conservatory

I am not a big fan of conservatories. Admittedly, my spotty knowledge of non-hardy plants makes me less fascinated than I could be, but more to the point I think they tend to be expensive energy glutons featuring two kinds of displays, throw away seasonal displays and tired fixed tropical plant accumulations. It's not that I avoid them. I do enjoy walking through them fairly quickly, typically finding a handful of pause worthy items. And I love the fern house at Chicago's Garfield Park Conservatory, and the rockery, under glass at Calloway Gardens is very engaging. I also appreciate seeing plants I would not otherwise have the opportunity to see.

All this said, I loved my recent visit to Phipps Conservatory. What impressed me most about the place was how well it is cared for. It seems to have that rare combination of adequate funding, good horticultural care and some very nice design. They work aggressively to minimize their energy usage; their seasonal displays are artful and seem to be enhancements of existing gardens more than just temporary and expendable installations; and their permanent collections are fresh, vigorous and attractive. In fact Pittsburgh in general was a nice place to visit. I must get back there again.

Using Fall Blooming Crocus and Autumn Crocus

I think a gardener has to be clever to make effective use of fall blooming crocus and autumn crocus (Colchicum). They are hard to work into a planting scheme and to keep track of during the summer when they are dormant.  Below are some examples of their use:

Crocus ochroleucus on 10 October is growing in the shade of a large beech where little else competes with it. It leaves me a bit unsatisfied in this Kingwood Center location, because it emerges as a sort of curiosity with nothing else around.
 

I planted these Crocus kotschyanus in some rockery and quickly forgot about them. Fortunately they survived and were blooming on 4 October to my surprise and delight mixing in nicely with other plants in the garden.

Autumn crocus, Colchicum autumnale: Somebody on the Kingwood staff did a nice job of selecting this dark spot under a dawn redwood tree (Metasequoia glyptostroboides). With little competition they survive and brighten up the spot beautifully in the fall. This picture was taken on 28 September

Here is another good use for autumn crocus, coming up through a perennial; in this case it is a low growing Nepeta at Kingwood Center

Planting out in the lawn seems to be a very common use of autumn crocus. Here at Kingwood Center we mix them with daffodils. We get a few negative comments about the long grass that we have to tolerate in the spring until the leaves of the autumn crocus and the daffodils die down, and the turf takes a while to recover after being neglected, but the surprise of the autumn crocus in the lawn in the fall is very pleasant.

Promises Broken

Sold to me by The Lily Garden as Crocosmia 'Brilliant Sunset', a flower with a "distinctive cream to soft yellow eye". Clearly this picture is not of 'Brilliant Sunset' 

It is always disappointing to discover that a plant you bought was misidentified or misrepresented by the nursery selling it. Your loss is so much more than the cost of the plant. This year I discovered what was represented by J. E. Miller Nurseries as Himrod Seedless, a "white seedless" grape that I bought in 2009, was neither white nor seedless. It took four seasons to make that discovery. Now as I start over I can expect another three or four years to get to this point again with a correctly identified seedless grape. There isn't much point in asking for a replacement plant. How can you believe them? And the $9.00 plus shipping I paid for the plant seems insignificant at this point.

I had another similar disappointment this year that remains a bit of a mystery. The nursery called The Lily Garden included in their catalog the last couple of years or so a section on Crocosmias that really sound exciting. Where I live the only hardy Crocosmia is Lucifer. A plant breeder named Niels van Noort, the catalog says, has a new assortment of hardy Crocosmia said to be "generally hardy to zone 5". I bought some and one of the plants bloomed the first year. The problem was it didn't match any of the pictures in the catalog, especially the picture of the variety it is supposed to be (Brilliant Sunset). So I e-mailed them. No reply. I called and left a voice mail. No reply. I have called and e-mailed (with image) repeatedly over the last six weeks or more. No reply. What am I to think? It is very disappointing. I guess I will learn something when I see if the plant survives the winter. It is attractive even if I have no idea what variety it is. Unlike the grape, however, it didn't take four years to discover the problem, and if it proves hardy I will still have something of worth.