Tranquil Times

Autumn 2010 Newsletter

When we purchased the nursery twenty-four years ago, it was simply a catalog business. We began building gardens that very first year and within five years we had added a retail operation for the daylilies and iris as well as the distinctive and unusual perennials, grasses, shrubs and trees that we grow in our gardens. All of them have been tested and proven hardy here in southern New England.

The gardens at Tranquil Lake are true gems. With one or more added each year over the past twenty-four years, they showcase a distinctive selection of perennials, vines, grasses, shrubs and trees. They also offer a long season of beauty and interest from early spring through to frost and beyond.

Later gardens were designed around a special design element or cultural condition. There is a thyme bench surrounded by fragrant plants and a purple garden that offers a site for the purple columns from a flower show exhibit. A dry scree bed collects water and channels it to a raised bog. Two bog gardens were also added, so we would have a place to grow water loving plants.

Many of the gardens were designed around water features or sitting places. There is a pond-side curved bench made of Carex pensylvanica and another seating area hidden under the bows of a weeping hemlock. A circular bench around a dragon-fly mosaic floor is surrounded by a silver garden. A small fish pond with a bog edge offers a place to grow cranberries. A stone wall was amended with a drip fountain, providing a terrific location for frogs and dragonflies.

The wildlife is one of the most important features of Tranquil Lake Nursery. Although we are just eight miles from Providence, we offer a place where people can watch bluebirds perch in the fields, orioles swoop into the oak trees and cedar waxwings nest in the pines. There are always several varieties of frogs and dragonflies visible in the ponds and the butterflies, hummingbirds and many other pollinators abound.

We are always happy to share this special treasure and invite you to visit often. This autumn, bring your friends and enjoy the gardens, fields and more.

The architectural makeup of a grove of trees can evoke various emotional responses, from inspiring to romantic or even sacred. A grove of silhouetted trunks with outstretched limbs and branches intertwined, offers a delightful space beneath, dappled with cool shadows. Compositions of closely planted trees, call them thickets, copses, groves or bosques; are a universal archetype for gardens found in ancient China, Persia and Rome. This venerable and inspirational pattern of an oasis grove still speaks genuinely to us in the present. A distinct memory from exploring desert botanic gardens in Arizona in August is the sheltering shade and pleasantly unique aroma of a mesquite grove. Thank goodness for the shade!

Groves and close clusters of trees are also a familiar poetic image. The opening line of A Forest Hymn by William Cullen Bryant portrays ‘groves as God’s first temples’. Perhaps the most common vision in New England associated with the word grove, is the peeling white bark of birch trees. Images of birches are memorialized by Robert Frost; swinging birches, cavorting in a lyric dance. Fletcher Steele employed a grove of paper birch (Betula papyrifera) with artful mastery in the ‘Blue Stairs’ at Naumkeag in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

I have many indelible, childhood images of magical groves while growing up in Maine. Today, I apply them as a model to garden making. The woods by the upper hayfield was markedly different from the dominate spruce and fir forest. It was densely populated with the tall, smooth trunks of American beech (Fagus grandifolia). Their silver-grey bark was clearly visible from a distance. The forest floor was bare, but for the litter of beech leaves which turned beige and held onto their twigs through winter snow. At the end of the house was a place called ‘the cedars’ where we played in a grove of contorted arborvitae (Thuja occidentalis). We climbed and played among the cedar trunks with their fragrant shredding bark. Some trunks grew almost horizontally, making a long seat; others bent at a ninety degree angles forming ‘cedar knees’ which were used historically for boat keels.

Not far from home, on the rocky coast of the Schoodic peninsula, bosques of Jack Pine (Pinus banksiana) growing out of mossed granite ledges were, and still are a favorite picnic spot. The pines, dwarfed and contorted by severe weather and the rugged site, rival any pruned and manicured in a classic Japanese Garden.

The entry road to the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Garden in Seal Harbor penetrates a dark spruce woods, impeccably pruned and luxuriant in moss. The dark and dappled light flickering through the primeval forest is a wonderful contrast to the bright exuberance and colorful blooms of the summer borders within Chinese tiled walls. This powerful imagery is evidence of Beatrix Farrand’s genius.

A diversity of ideas for garden groves can be gleaned from nature or classic gardens. Many small trees and large shrubs are well suited to a configuration of close planting and artful pruning, exposing sculptural trunks and branches. Aside from abstract garden contrivance; groves, copses and bosques offer the comfort of shade, a buffer from wind and afford a biodiversity of habitat of food and shelter for birds, butterflies and insects necessary for a healthy environment.

Here are just some of the garden groves I have designed and planted. They represent a diversity of cultural settings and multiples of different trees and shrubs used to compose a complexity of layered canopies.

I had always wanted to make a pleached bosque, like those in English gardens. Opportunity struck in a garden project at Brigham Hill Farm in North Grafton, Massachusetts. I am most flattered that images of this circular bosque of crabapples are included in the Archives of American Gardens at the Smithsonian Institution.

The bosque defines a garden entry and establishes a design theme of bed lines edged in granite. Two concentric rings of stone scribe a circular lawn sixteen feet in diameter. The circular band is planted with six Malus x ‘Sugar Tyme’. The branches are trained to form a canopy, shading the round threshold of lawn that leads to a garden of colorful perennials and shrubs. The crabapple bosque is beautiful year-round. The red buds open with fragrant white flowers; they are followed by bright red fruits that persist throughout the winter.

On the same property, a grove of three amur maackia (Maackia amurensis) adds a respite of refreshing shade to a bluestone terrace against the house. Maackia is a tough and drought tolerant member of the legume family, tolerant of being planted in pits surrounded by pavement. The pinnately compound leaves unfurl in spring cloaked in a silvery fleece. The leaves mature to green and set off clusters of white, pea-like flowers in June. Maackia’s greenish bark merits winter distinction as well.

Hornbeam (Carpinus caroliniana) is a native tree, adapted to dry-rocky sites and woodland understories. A copse of hornbeam is easily at home on a stone terrace providing shade and adding enchanting winter structure. Musclewood, another common name is very descriptive of the sinewy, muscular profile of the grey trunks.

Moosewood, or striped maple (Acer pensylvanicum) is another tree adapted to the woodland understory as well as sunnier sites. Striped maple is a small tree growing up to thirty feet in height, sometimes growing in multi-stem clumps. The greenish bark is distinct with vertical white stripes. Also unmistakable are the very large lobed leaves that turn a translucent yellow in the fall. These enormous leaves gives rise to a colloquial common name of woodsman’s toilet paper. I have planted a long linear grove of Acer pensylvanicum integrating interior views of the garden planted with evergreen Christmas fern (Polystichum arcrostichoides), Bergenia, Fothergilla gardenii ‘Harold Epstein’, Royal Azalea (Rhododendron schlippenbachii) and hundreds of daffodils.

Many cultivars of Japanese maples (Acer palmatum) prefer partial shade under the canopy of a larger shade tree. We have several Japanese maples as well as a striped maple planted next to our bluestone terrace under the high spreading canopy of Yellowwood (Cladrastis kentukea). The cultivar ‘Butterfly’ with pink and white variegation especially benefits from some shade. A bosque of ‘Butterfly’ Japanese maples provides a gauzy screen to a bedroom terrace in Dartmouth.

Where as groves of birch may be common, planting them on their sides in an innovation we executed with dwarf River Birch (Betula nigra ‘Little King’). The grove is densely planted on a 45 degree steep incline to a sunken garden. We also planted a grove of Jack Pine (Pinus banksiana) purposely listing on a slant, mimicking the wind.

At Becker College in Worcester we planted crescent shaped copse of Shad Trees (Amelanchier) and colonies of September blooming Heptacodium miconioides providing colorful flowers and fruit to the academic year.

There are countless, other grove planting possibilities; consider fastigiate conifers Picea glauca ‘Pendula’ or Chamaecyparis nootkatensis ‘Green Arrow’ or pollarded sycamores to flesh out your garden grove fantasy. Henry David Thoreau told of tramping eight-or-ten miles through the deep woods to keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or a yellow birch or an old acquaintance among the pines. Conduct your dendrology dialogue with a grove of your own.

Warren Leach

Trees and Shrubs for Planting in Groves

Tranquil Lake Nursery 45 River Street Rehoboth, Massachusetts 02769-1395 Phone: 508-252-4002     Fax:  508-252-4740 www-tranquil-lake.com    or send an e-mail to Tranquil Lake Nursery