Tranquil TimesSpring 2009 Newsletter
I have been experiencing the biggest thrill lately from the sprouting of an acorn into a seedling oak tree. Now, this is not just any oak seedling. Although we do have many majestic native oak species common to our region, the oak seedling I have become so enamored with comes from an evergreen scrub oak that is native to the Sonoran Desert in Arizona (Quercus turbinella). It has grey-green, holly like leaves and exquisite elongated acorns. I collected a couple of these acorns last August when visiting Arizona. I cold stratified them for six weeks in the refrigerator. Then, with much anticipation, I potted them up and placed the pots on a propagating heat mat. Of course, the Sonoran Live Oak is not hardy to Massachusetts, but it will be perfectly happy in a cool greenhouse over our long winters. It doesn’t take long for the visitor to Tranquil Lake Nursery to become aware of our passion for all types of plants. Whether hardy or tropical, woody or herbaceous, edible or ornamental, a diverse collection of specimen plants make up our display gardens and sales area. This passion for collecting plants and making gardens is certainly not new for me. By the age of five, I was sowing flower and vegetable seeds with my mother in Maine - on a tray table by a sunny winter window. Since then, I’ve made gardens from Maine to Virginia. These gardens are both richly architectural and attentively naturalistic. Working alone or with a crew, I’ve transplanted tall trees, moved massive rocks and levitated water. Certainly, the richness of gardening is much more than an analytical exercise, it is an amalgam of art and science. Starting this oak reinforced the importance of being in touch with my feelings and expressing them in the gardens and landscapes. It is an opportunity for experiencing the magic inherent to gardening. As reliable as daylilies are, I feel this same magical exuberance of spirit when a familiar and favorite cultivar’s bud opens and blooms. Indeed, it was with this same expressive wonder that Sir George Sitwell recorded in On the Making of Gardens; “it is possible to introduce a touch of imaginative beauty into almost any garden by finding the most perfect form for one of its features, or by giving expression to the soul of some particular flower or tree.” Come, explore the nursery fields and display gardens. Indulge your horticultural fervor, we’re quite sure it’s contagious. Warren Leach During the last week of March, Debi and I set off on a whirlwind garden tour, driving to Charleston, SC and back in just nine days. Our journey was driven by the pursuit of spring, as well as the desire to visit a family member who had recently relocated to the south. We called upon favorite nurseries and botanic gardens in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Virginia, Washington D.C., North Carolina and South Carolina along the way. The swelling and reddening buds of red maple (Acer rubrum) ushered us onwards to the south. Soon we were encountering yellow daffodils, forsythia, spikehazel (Corylopsis) and fragrant Edgeworthia at Brent and Becky Heath’s Gloucester Virginia nursery. The color mounted, with verdant green grass and magenta redbuds (Cercis canadensis). Finally, in South Carolina, we found dogwoods (Cornus florida) in full bloom, their white bracts curiously cloaked in Spanish moss (Tillandsia). Crapemyrtles, camellias, magnolias and azaleas teemed, as if to tease us with plants too tender for our northern gardens. Though the flowers were a welcome reprieve from a long New England winter and seemingly latent spring, it was the garden experiences in the designed landscapes that I savored the most. While the design principles are universal, I find discovering and translating their applications in a diversity of gardens to be most entertaining. And there are always new ideas to bring back and try out at home. Here are just a few of the experiences that we encountered exploring gardens on our southern excursion. Middleton Place, near Charleston, is considered to be the first great American landscaped garden. It offers much more than just a historic, eighteenth-century, landscape architectural footnote. The grounds are laid out with Euclid exactitude, planted with camellias and azaleas that create a vivid spring show. The house, now mostly in ruins, is situated on high ground overlooking an elbow bend in the Ashley River. The house and garden is centered on a main axis; it’s line reaches out into the Ashley River. Undulating, grassy slopes descend to the river with triangular pools, ‘butterfly ponds’, on either side of the central axis line. This is Middleton’s genius. It exemplifies Fletcher’s Steele’s design critique recommendation of making the best use of the land as one found it and going to where the axis is. Since we stayed on the property, we were fortunate to be able to rise early to experience this ‘Genius Loci’ at daybreak. The sun’s red ball rose from the river mist on the garden’s axis. What a focal point! Brookgreen Gardens, in Myrtle Beach, SC, offered enchanting experiences found among intimate enclosures. The gardens are laid out as rooms and galleries containing marvelous sculpture. Geometric patterns of pools, masonry walls and lines of palms and live oaks (Quercus virginiana) form much of the orderliness of the garden architecture on a very flat site. The most magical space, for me, was within a grove of live oaks whose massive trunks and broad spreading limbs, festooned with Spanish moss, created an organic dome around a large, waist-high circular pool, a giant cistern with water overflowing into a circumscribing rill. The reflections transfix your eyes. It is evocative of a pool enclosed by gabled yew hedges at Hidcote in England, which embodies a similar enchanting trick of scale and space. It offers a wonderful harmony of contrasts. At Winterthur, in Delaware, we enjoyed another mesmerizing concert of contrasts. On a steep hillside, elephantine trunks of beech trees seem to hold apart the blue sky and the ground, equally deep-blue. Immeasurable masses of Scilla and Chionodoxa forms a surrealistic landscape that blurs the boundaries of space and laws of gravity. The ‘Lower Display Garden’ was laid out in 1987 overlooking a glacial kettle-hole pond. It has axial lines that are perpendicular to the end of the house and centered to the office door. Another line converges on an existing red cedar (Juniperus virginiana). The central axis from the office door incorporates a panel of grass flanked by triangular beds. The garden beds are not perfectly symmetrical. The other axial line which terminates on the red cedar, turns into a broad gravel path. To the right of the central axis on the banks on the pond are massive swamp white oaks (Quercus palustris). We transplanted a large fastigiate yew (Taxus x media ‘Robusta’) to the left triangular bed. This counterbalanced the oak in an asymmetrical harmony. Over the years the mixed borders of perennials, tropical annuals and woody plants have varied. The fastigiate yew, now over twenty feet tall, and accompanying dwarf blue spruce (Picea pungens ‘Montgomery’) also grew, creating an opportunity to make a new garden nestled behind them within the left triangular bed. In 2005, we started by building a semi-circular stone sitting wall within a square behind the yew. Glass and stone mosaic dragonflies add a bit of whimsy within a ring of bluestone concentric to the stone wall.
Inspired by Jo Ann Gardener’s book, Elegant Silvers: Striking Plants for Every Garden we planted this pocket garden in a color scheme in silver, blue and grey. Weeping willowleaf pears (Pyrus salicifolia ‘Pendula’) with silvery-grey, willow-like leaves, silver willow (Salix alba sericea), rosemary willow (Salix elaeagnos) and Sophora davidii are pleached and pruned to form an airy screen and give seclusion the circular seat. Our ever growing collection of silver-foliage plants, both hardy and tender go on to stage a luminous display. The ‘Silver Garden’ is partially hidden from the main axis of the original garden layout but becomes a focal point as you walk around the corner. Contrasting red and silver foliage also adds a heighten sense of depth and distance, a good trick for small garden spaces. Our newest project, a rain garden, was inspired by a trip to Arizona last summer. So, whether you are looking for tricks of perspective and balance, ideas in color design, or just practical horticultural advise and quality plants, come and explore our gardens. We hope they will inspire you and save you a few thousand miles of traveling Warren Leach
The Perennial Plant of the Year for 2009 is Hakonechloa macra ‘Aureola’ An elegant dwarf grass, Hakonechloa macra is native to the forests of Japan. This form’s chartreuse and green striped arching leaves add shimmer and light to the shady border. It is an ideal companion to blue-leaf hostas or the round polished leaves of Euopean ginger.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
