Our Life in Gardens Read online

  ALSO BY JOE ECK AND

  WAYNE WINTERROWD

  A Year at North Hill: Four Seasons in a Vermont Garden

  Living Seasonally: The Kitchen Garden

  and the Table at North Hill

  ALSO BY JOE ECK

  Elements of Garden Design

  ALSO BY WAYNE WINTERROWD

  Annuals for Connoisseurs

  Annuals and Tender Plants for North American Gardens

  EDITED BY WAYNE WINTERROWD

  Roses: A Celebration

  OUR LIFE IN GARDENS

  OUR LIFE IN GARDENS

  Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd

  Illustrations by Bobbi Angell

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux New York

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

  Copyright © 2009 by Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd

  Illustrations copyright © 2009 by Bobbi Angell

  All rights reserved

  Distributed in Canada by Douglas & McIntyre Ltd.

  Printed in the United States of America

  First edition, 2009

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Eck, Joe.

  Our life in gardens / Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes index.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-374-16031-9 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  ISBN-10: 0-374-16031-7 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  1. Gardening—Anecdotes. I. Winterrowd, Wayne. II. Title.

  SB455.3 .E25 2009

  635—dc22

  2008045349

  Designed by Jonathan D. Lippincott

  www.fsgbooks.com

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  For Jonathan

  Contents

  Preface

  Setting Out

  Agapanthus

  Annuals

  Arborvitae

  Artichokes

  Bananas

  The Bay Tree

  Berberis

  Biennials

  Boxwood

  Camellias

  Colchicum

  Corydalis

  Cyclamen

  The Daffodil Meadow

  Forcing Branches

  The Garden Trowel

  Gentians

  Hardiness

  Hedges

  Hellebores

  Ilex

  Leucojum

  Lilacs

  Magnolias

  Native Groundcovers

  Nerines

  Pea Season

  The Pergola Walk

  Poppies

  Pots

  Primroses

  Prunus בHally Jolivette’

  Prunus mume

  Rampant Plants

  The Rock Garden and Planted Walls

  Roses

  Sempervivums

  Snowdrops

  Sorbus alnifolia

  Stewartias

  Summer-Blooming Bulbs

  Tender Rhododendrons

  Time

  Vegetable Gardens

  Violets

  Willows

  Wisteria

  Xanthorrhoea quadrangulata

  The Future

  Index

  Preface

  This is the third book we have written together, though separately we have written others, making a total of six. But to say “written separately” makes no sense, for when two lives have been bent for so many years on one central enterprise—in this case, gardening—there really is no such thing as separately. That is not to say that we do not divide up chores and tasks. Much like piano duetists, we both have our separate parts to play, though we are also concerned that the sound of our lives be one seamless and complete whole. We hope our garden is that, for we have known many gardening couples who divided up their garden to avoid the quarrels we never seem to have. We suppose that domestic harmony is bought in all sorts of ways, when it must be bought at all. Fortunately, that has not been an issue here.

  We know that making a garden together is extraordinary to many people. We further know that two people writing a book about a garden seems even more impossible. Or at least very bizarre. Indeed, there are people (even very experienced writers) who claim that they can hear our different voices within the text, and can tell which of us wrote an individual essay, or even a single sentence. That is remarkable to us, for we certainly cannot, and in the earlier books—when we glance into them to see if we are perhaps repeating ourselves and are saying something one time too many—the question is apt to come to one or the other of us, “Did you write that, or did I?”

  There is a deeper point here, however, than the silly surface question of figuring out who said what. Most people have difficulty with the idea that a couple can achieve anything in perfect harmony. So, for example, we are often told that Harold Nicolson was the architect of Sissinghurst, and Vita Sackville-West poked in all the pretty plants. We are hardly scholars of their relationship, but nothing in their correspondence or published writings supports that assertion. Indeed, many who knew them have assured us that the garden at Sissinghurst was never a bifurcated effort, even when it came into the capable hands of the two wonderful gardeners who followed Nicolson and Sackville-West, Pamela Schwerdt and Sybille Kreutzberger. Why can’t two people make a garden?

  Actually, that is the trumpeting assertion of Margery Fish’s book We Made a Garden, and Mirabel Osler’s wonderful A Gentle Plea for Chaos lovingly records such a joint effort—and its necessary dissolution when her husband, Michael, died. All Beth Chatto’s books acknowledge the contributions made by her husband, Andrew, and she frequently expresses deep gratitude for the ways he saw and thought. We knew Linc and Timmy Foster well, and we also knew that perhaps some of their finest times together were spent in the joint creation of Millstream, their magnificent garden in Falls Village, Connecticut. They are both dead now, and the garden is gone, but Timmy left a wonderful memoir of its creation, Cuttings from a Rock Garden (with both their names on the title page), and Linc wrote an authoritative work on rock garden plants, Rock Gardening, with “Drawings by Laura Louise Foster.”

  Michael Pollan has said that sooner or later a writer who has a garden will write about it. We’d go further, to say that sooner or later two people who make a garden will write about it. Or at least we have. The point is this: When a book is written about a garden two people have made together, that book is really not about—or not just about—the garden they made. It is also about a relationship, and so it comes to be an autobiography of that relationship. It is for that reason, principally, that we write, and for that reason that we also find it so odd when someone says, as is the case with surprising frequency, “Come on! Who does what?”

  This book is a mixed bag, a gypsy trunk of this and that. Within it, we hope the reader will find sound information about the cultivation of plants and their value in the landscape, and some perceptions about garden design, which is our profession. There are also essays about the various parts of our garden, and there are essays about particular plants—roses and lilacs, snowdrops and cyclamen. And vegetables. There are also essays on the development of the garden over time and the question that weighs on us most at this time, its probable demise.

  Still, for all its mixed nature, this book has a coherence, for as we have tried to explain, it is really about us. Rather than apologizing for that implicit egotism, we would have to say that we may well shamelessly write another. We do not seem to be done yet.

  OUR LIFE IN GARDENS

  SETTING OUT

  WE LIVED OUR FIRST YEAR TOGETHER on Beacon Street, in Boston. The apartment was impossibly grand, high and white and classically pillared, previously the ground-floor ballroom a
nd formal dining room of a great private house. Its floor-to-ceiling bay windows faced the Public Garden, and that was our garden in a way, as was the magnificent Magnolia × soulangeana that filled our tiny front yard. Sunlight flooded those windows, and in them we grew a collection of tender plants, some of which were permanent, and some of which were added as the seasons progressed. There was a ficus tree, a wide-spreading Kentia palm, and a staghorn fern mounted on a wooden slab. To them we added cattleya orchids, pots of forced crocus and paperwhite narcissus, sweet-smelling hyacinths and bushy azaleas, all bought from Mrs. Fishelson’s very costly flower shop on Charles Street just around the corner. We were prepared to make almost any sacrifice for beauty, though often enough we had only enough money left at the end of the month for pancakes. Still, there was always enough for flowers from Mrs. Fishelson.

  We lived at 89 Beacon Street for three months short of a year. The plant collections grew larger, and at one point included a ten-foot-tall weeping willow tree forced in the high windows of the bedroom. But in the end, it was not plants that sent us to the country. It was chickens.

  We can no longer remember how we came to visit a chicken show, but it must have been the venerable Boston Poultry Show, now in its 158th year. In any case, we came home with a trio of Mille Fleur bantams, a sturdy little red rooster all spangled over with white and black dots, and two meek little hens. The hens were of an age to lay, and so, shortly thereafter, on Beacon Street, we began to produce our own eggs, generally two every other day.

  Even then it was probably quite illegal to keep poultry in a Boston apartment. At first we wondered how our landlord would react, and so we quickly fashioned a pen for our chickens in keeping—we felt—with the grand circumstances to which they had been elevated. It was a large cage, roughly six feet long and four feet wide, made of dark-stained wood and expanded brass wire, with a deep tray in the bottom for sweet-smelling cedar shavings. Tucked behind the Kentia palm at the sunny end of the great ballroom, it also had Chinese export-ware feed and water bowls, and was of course kept immaculately clean. Our landlord seemed, if anything, amused. We gave him some fresh-laid eggs.

  But as all chicken fanciers know, chickens are addictive, and one can never stop at three. So many of our Saturday mornings were spent driving to the breeders of fancy chickens around Boston, our favorite of whom was Marjorie George, just over the Massachusetts line in Nashua, New Hampshire. Around Easter, she sold us a tiny cochin hen we named Emma. She was hardly the size of a cantaloupe, though her body was a cloud of soft, almost furry snow-white feathers. (We kept them that way, by weekly shampoos and fluffing out with the hair dryer.) She was the only chicken who had full run of the apartment, though she mostly favored the kitchen, where she had a nest box tucked privately in one corner. Soon she became broody, a skill for which cochins are famous, being generally considered the best of chicken mothers. Or foster mothers. For as Emma had no mate, her eggs were sterile. So we bought a dozen assorted fertile ones from Mrs. George, and twenty-one days later every one hatched.

  Shortly thereafter, we had a morning visit from the chairman of the English department at Tufts, who lived in a beautiful house around the corner on Chestnut Street. Just at the moment he was lifting his cup of tea, Emma decided to show her brood the world. Perhaps seventy feet of dark, waxed oak parquet floor lay between the kitchen door and the couch where he sat. Emma proceeded that length, leading a stately procession of tiny, chirping chicks. She observed our guest skeptically, found nothing special in him, turned, and proceeded with her train the long way back. Good breeding kept him, we presume, from saying a single word about the extraordinary sight that had passed before him. But we wondered what Emma’s perspective had been. Perhaps good breeding of her own caused her so politely to withdraw.

  Figuring by May that we had perhaps reached the tipping point in our acquisition of chickens, we moved to a wonderful old rented farmhouse outside Boston in Pepperell, Massachusetts. Built in 1759, it preserved many of its original features, including a huge brick oven. Better, it came with a small barn that was more than ample for the thirty-five birds we brought with us, and then for the two hundred or so we soon acquired. We even kept a pig, named Morose, which was given to us a week before we left Beacon Street and which we had to keep in the bathtub there. Land came with this wonderful house as well, with pastures and woods and a stream and lots of space to make a garden. So we made the transition from being indoor to outdoor gardeners, starting first with an oval space fifty feet by thirty feet that lay in the center of the circular gravel drive.

  Naïve, we were. On a trip to Lexington Gardens, where we had already begun to buy indoor plants, we filled the car with flats of annuals, a bit of this, a bit of that, in every imaginable color. We stripped the grass from the oval, tilled the soil, and filled it with our new plants. It was certainly the most colorful garden in town. Though thirty-six years have passed, we still remember what we grew. Salpiglosis was a particular thrill, with its felted petals, fantastically veined in contrasting colors over grounds of yellow and blue, chestnut brown and a purple almost black. There was also Phlox drummondii, which we still consider indispensable for the edges of beds, blooming softly all summer long in shades of cream and coral, mauve and pink and white. There were certainly snapdragons, in yellow and pink, mauve gomphrena, and red zinnias. We thought we were very sophisticated in knowing to plant drifts of one plant in one color. Now we feel the greater sophistication might have been to plant wildly, all mixed up like a flowering meadow, but that style, now so fashionable, lay far in our future.

  We next turned our labors to a place to sit and enjoy the summer light. Flat fieldstone was abundant, and so we laid a stone terrace about ten feet by fifteen feet along the back of the house, and then made a screen around it of saplings cut from the woods. Into those we wove whips of privet hedge bought cheap in bundles from Lexington Gardens, and we planted bitter melon (Momordica balsamina) to scramble over the screen. Its bumpy, three-inch-long yellow fruits that split to reveal vivid scarlet seed and its dark lobed leaves all provided lovely contrast to the small fresh green of the privet. We still think the effect was surprisingly sophisticated, for the first garden we ever made together.

  Success emboldened us. We bought a pair of handsome yews to flank either side of the front steps, and a dogwood to mark the corner of the ell. We dug laurels from the woods and planted them under the shaded living room windows. We also laid a fieldstone path from the driveway to the back door, on either side of which we made an herb garden, which even boasted a three-foot-high standard deadly nightshade tree. We fashioned a glorious espalier out of an old watermelon-red flowering quince we dug out of the front yard, and made another espalier out of pyracantha across the garage wall.

  How quickly we grew in skill and knowledge. Everyone was nice to us. Allen Haskell, whom we met when we visited his magnificent nursery and garden in New Bedford, leveled the field between his lifetime of garden knowledge and our beginning ignorance by saying, “In this, we are all amateurs!” Plants he gave us then are still in our garden, having moved about with us for thirty-six years.

  Our first autumn in Pepperell, we also planted bulbs, daffodils of course and crocus and tulips and hyacinths. The day in March when the hundred or so species of crocus we had planted near the doorstep bloomed was then, and remains, a curiously blessed moment in our life together. It was something we vowed would happen each year we were together, forever.

  In all, we spent a little more than two years in Pepperell, gardening madly and also adding to our collection of animals, which eventually included two dogs, many more chickens, turkeys, pheasants, quail, pigeons and doves, miniature rabbits in several colors, and even a box tortoise. It was our peaceable kingdom. What is curious about that time is that it seemed to have been much longer than it actually was, in the way that children feel when they are very young and an eternity lies between birthday and birthday. When knowledge and experience expand at a rapid rate, time seems to str
etch out. A year was as far into the future as we could possibly see, and yet we gardened as if we would be there forever, in an immediate pleasure in the moment that seemed to imply an inexhaustible future. Little of what we did there then remains, though the daffodils must, and that thought is very pleasant to us.

  AGAPANTHUS

  FROM A CHANCE ENCOUNTER, gardeners, like lovers, often form lifelong relationships of great intensity. You see a plant, your eyes widen, your pulse accelerates, and huskily you ask even complete strangers its name, importunately tugging at coat sleeves. More than once this has happened here, when visitors have seen an agapanthus for the first time. We smile on their quickening passion. For to someone newly in love, it is neither tactful nor appropriate to explain the difficulties that lie ahead.

  It comes as no surprise that the genus Agapanthus takes its name from two Greek words, the first meaning “love” (agape), and the second, “a flower” (anthos). The genus—which contains about ten species and innumerable hybrids—passes in gardens under the popular name lily of the Nile. From a romantic perspective it suits them perfectly, for their flowers resemble the many renderings of papyrus in Egyptian hieroglyphics. It would not be hard to imagine Cleopatra on her golden barge, sailing languidly through tall stems of flowers of that shape, with colors ranging from clearest azure to lapis lazuli. Alas, the many species of agapanthus have nothing to do with the Nile. Though the genus occupies a wide geographic range, its origins are in South Africa, and the astral career of Cleopatra never took her that far.

  Agapanthus africanus entered Europe as a cultivated plant in the late seventeenth century, but its huge popularity arose only after large glasshouses and conservatories became common in the nineteenth century. It then burst into popularity—for the effect of the flowers of agapanthus is always explosive—and large tubbed specimens shouldered against citrus, oleanders, and other tender glasshouse ornamentals used for summer display outdoors. Wealthy people continued to cultivate agapanthus—or to have them cultivated—well after World War II. Indeed, an elderly lady who visited here once explained to us in great detail how huge wooden boxes of them were stored over the winter in deep pits below the frost line on an uncle’s estate in Brookline, Massachusetts. (He died, and it made her very sad that the agapanthus did not live long beyond him.) And anywhere they were hardy in the ground—Zones 9 and 10 in North America—they were planted with extravagance, in deep swirling beds and in large tubs and planters. Eventually, in sections of California and Florida, they soon became “groundcover,” a term used to describe any weed-suppressing plant that can survive with little care and receives little admiration. In such places, agapanthus are as common as dirt, making it hard to explain to gardeners who live there why the rest of us covet them so much. But anywhere agapanthus may not easily be grown outdoors, “coveted” is a status they fully possess. Their great beauty when in flower makes it quite easy to see why; managing them over a long winter when they are not in flower does add a difficulty.