Our Life in Gardens Read online

  Agapanthus are clump-forming plants that grow from thick daylily-like rhizomes, producing strap-shaped leaves as much as eighteen inches long. Beneath is a mass of thick, spaghetti-like roots that will cling tenaciously to the porous sides of clay pots, making a plant that needs repotting impossible to turn out neatly. Further, agapanthus bloom best when slightly potbound. But if a specimen becomes too potbound, it will not bloom either, and that is a sign that it must be divided and repotted. We used to think there was no other way to do this than to smash the clay pot. Now we know that if the plant is allowed to dry out thoroughly, usually it will slip out easily. Still, division is a brutal process, often best done with an ax, chopping the plant straight through its heart, and then into pieces, each containing two or three rhizomes and as much fleshy root as possible.

  Agapanthus are generally big plants, and so a pot big enough that one winces when lifting it is required. They are also very greedy feeders, though they demand perfect drainage, so compost for repotting should be humus-rich and gritty. For a year or two after repotting, new divisions will bloom poorly or not at all. Then they will proceed to become potbound all over again. For three or four years, however, you should reach the pinnacle of success with repotted agapanthus, with pots that produce at least one bloom scape for each fan of growth. In a large pot, that may be as many as fifty, blooming over a very long period from late June into early September. A splendid display like that makes being a sort of horticultural Lizzie Borden worthwhile.

  Still, the great problem is how to store your agapanthus over the winter. If you have a sunporch or greenhouse or a well-lit guest bedroom, where temperatures can be kept hovering around 40 degrees, then the only effort required is lifting the heavy pots into such a place. Lacking these luxuries, however, a cool basement—again, hovering around 40 degrees and never freezing, even for a night—can be rigged with lights and the plants stored there. Plants must also be kept fairly dry, not so much that they shrivel up, but dry enough to force them into the rest period needed for good bloom.

  If things are well managed, then your plants will look simply awful, with yellowed leaves and a sickly appearance. But as the days lengthen in March, water-soluble fertilizer such as Peters 20-20-20 should be applied weekly, at half the strength recommended on the package. As growth quickens, watering should also steadily increase, and the plants should be moved to the brightest indoor conditions one can manage. After all danger of frost is past, they may be moved into their permanent places outdoors. During active growth, it is almost impossible to overwater an agapanthus. Large pots should probably be watered daily.

  From time to time, northern gardeners hear rumors of “hardy” agapanthus, special strains that might survive the winter even in Zone 5, “with protection.” The famous Head-bourne hybrids, developed by the Honourable Lewis Palmer at Headbourne Worthy, near Winchester, throughout the 1950s and ‘60s, are frequently mentioned. Palmer crossed species madly, ending up with a diverse swarm, rather like a barnyard of mixed bantam chickens. Some are very beautiful, such as the very dark blue ‘Cherry Holley’, the mid-blue ‘African Moon’ (the umbels of which spray out into tinier umbels, making it look like a lit sparkler), and ‘Rosemary’, colored the pale lilac-gray the late Rosemary Verey often wore. Incongruously, within the Headbourne hybrids is also ‘Lilliput’, the tiniest agapanthus of all, with six-inch-long, narrow leaves and flower scapes that scarcely reach a foot, topped by umbels of dark blue.

  The Headbourne hybrids have achieved notoriety not for their considerable beauty, but because they are said to be the hardiest agapanthus of all. Hardiness is never a matter of mere winter lows, however, but is always something like a complex tossed salad. So it may happen—in a most privileged courtyard garden in Washington or even New York City, with perfect winter drainage, some evergreen boughs placed over the crowns in December, a good covering of snow, and perhaps an exposed basement wall that leaks heat and is just opposite the furnace—it may happen that some selection might live to see the spring and flower in summer.

  But we remain skeptical. And so, to consummate an affair with agapanthus, we fear you must resort to shoving and hauling, smashing and splintering, to a cold bedroom full of nasty, yellowing foliage, always anticipating the pure bliss that will come. Not so very different, after all, from any other love affair.

  ANNUALS

  A LADY WHO ONCE VISITED our garden showed a keen interest in Begonia sutherlandii. It is a lovely foot-tall plant with a graceful, mounded growth of gentle, watery green angel’s wings into which nestle small, complex, four-petaled flowers of the clearest tangerine. We grow it among hostas, for which it is the perfect foil.

  “What a marvelous plant! What is it?”

  “It is Begonia sutherlandii.”

  “Hardy?”

  “Well, it’s a tender tuberous perennial. But not much trouble. In autumn you dig up the tubers and store them in a frost-free place. Then you start them back up in spring.”

  “Then you mean it is an annual!”

  Over the years, we have come to recognize the scorn that can be poured into that word, and so we were ready for her next remark.

  “I don’t plant annuals! It is like pouring money into the ground.” Our impulse was to remark, “When is gardening anything else?” But we held our tongues, and she swept on to pursue her tour of the garden, which we knew had already turned sour, for it was July and in her path lay many annuals.

  Experienced gardeners know that the word “annual” should almost always be enclosed in quotation marks, as should the word “vegetable,” for they are equally imprecise. In fact, many of the choicest annuals (and vegetables) are really half hardy or tender perennials, corms, tubers, rhizomes, sub-shrubs, or shrubs. A functioning definition of “annual” therefore is “any plant established for a single season with the expectation that it will not return the following year.” Such a definition would hardly be acceptable to a botanist, however, or even to an experienced gardener. For with the proper facilities, many plants grown as annuals can be carried over for years of beauty—in greenhouses, in cold basements, or even on the famous sunny kitchen windowsill. The amiable B. sutherlandii asks the minimum, just a frost-free place to sleep out a long winter before waking in spring to offer incredible beauty of leaf and flower. It is hardly “pouring money into the ground.” Rather, it is pouring money into an ever-greater number of clay pots, which seem to increase annually as plants need division, thriftily providing us with choice (and costless) birthday presents for gardening friends.

  To the botanist, a true annual is a plant that goes from seed to leaf and stem and flower and then back to seed in one growing season. Within this group are some of the most charming plants that can be grown, such as zinnias, marigolds, sunflowers, nasturtiums, and poppies. Though they are often very beautiful in themselves, their charm resides to a large degree precisely in their naïveté, their simple sense of ease and well-being, just in themselves, just in what they are. It is true that their colors are often bold and unsubtle, usually in the part of the color wheel called “hot,” which includes the hardest yellows, crimsons, and reds—but they are beloved by children, and to any adult they offer the same kind of lift to the heart that occurs when walking through FAO Schwarz at Christmastime. We always plant a few, most often in the vegetable garden, where the brashness of zinnias or marigolds accords perfectly with the fine green of bean leaves or radishes and lettuce. Nasturtiums snuggle happily at the feet of the finely crafted veined gray leaves of artichokes, and supply tender young leaves and flowers for salads, thus even crossing the divide between annual and vegetable.

  Most gardeners we know maintain vegetable gardens, though perhaps not our lady visitor, who would almost certainly belong to the “Why bother? There’s a very good farm stand near me” school of thought. But those of us who insist on vegetable gardens often have trouble maintaining a proper proportion of vegetables and annuals for cutting. Or for that matter, vegetables and perennials, for in
autumn, at division time, there is always that row you just cleared of lettuces, and you can propagate extra dianthus there, of which you happen to have a handful, and which you vow to move out next spring, and don’t. But this is always to be remembered: a vegetable garden is for growing vegetables. Whatever else happens there must be considered happy accident, and not main purpose.

  The annuals we grow mostly in the vegetable garden—what might once have been called “chicken yard annuals” and now grace the fronts of many filling stations—are hardly the whole panoply of tender plants that can embellish the summer garden. Within the class of plants roughly defined as “annuals” exist many that are as elegant as the finest perennials, and further, will assist in maintaining the beauty of the perennial border throughout its three most difficult times: early in its life when little color is showing; in August, when something that all gardeners know to call the “August Slump” occurs; and then at the very end of the season, just before frosts come to cut everything down. These assisting annuals are very numerous, and each year brings others forward, either as hybrids or selections of familiar plants, or as completely new introductions discovered in faraway places. Many are already indispensable, and more are likely to become so as their special virtues establish themselves.

  We start our annuals season with the gentle ones that bloom in late June, just as the large border geraniums are finishing. They are generally benders and weavers, little plants that can rise above emerging perennials, providing a tier of delicate flower when their sturdier neighbors are yet to bloom. Among those, a great favorite is Nigella damascena, which owns many popular names, according to the rule that the longer a plant is grown in gardens, the more popular names it will accumulate. Nigella was a common feature of Elizabethan gardens, and is known by at least five popular names, among them love-in-a-mist and devil-in-the-bush, the two conjoining to indicate where you end up when you start out. But it is also known as Chevre de Venus in French, from its fine, ferny leaves, and Catherine’s wheels, as its flowers seem to resemble the wheel of fire on which Saint Catherine of Alexandria endured her martyrdom for refusing the advances of Emperor Maximinius. The fifth is Bluebeard, from the famous bête d’extermination in Charles Perrault’s tale (published in 1697) who murdered seven wives and a few small boys in quick succession. These names hardly promise a charming plant, but in fact, nigella is wonderful, with a ragged ruff of pale blue petals surrounding a boss of green, filamented stamens that repeat its ferny leaves. The form called ‘Miss Jekyll’s Blue’ is particularly fine, with a rich sky-blue flower that makes everything around it beautiful.

  Another of these gentle plants is Phlox drummondii, in fact an American native and perhaps one of the most amiable plants that can be grown at the front of a border. It forms little loose bushes to about a foot tall, clothed in fresh, pale green leaves, each stem surmounted by a cob of recognizable phlox-like flowers in beautiful colors. The finest is the variety called ‘Phlox of Sheep’, which exist in various shades of biscuit brown, pale cream, and sometimes cameo pink.

  Early to bloom, also, if you buy pre-started plants, is Tweedia caerulea, another American native that always creates excitement at the front of a border. It is quite different in effect from Drummond phlox, with stiff, two-foot-tall stems clad in bladelike, bluish-green, hairy leaves at the top of which forms a loose umbel of blue five-petaled stars. But to call them blue is an injustice, for buds begin pink and then fade to that shade of turquoise so much loved in the 1950s, for cars and ties and prom jackets, though the flowers eventually change to a deep, purplish blue dotted over with red freckles. Each blossom merits the closest study.

  The list of annuals that act almost as glue in the late-season garden, holding its frayed parts together, is long. But at the very top is Verbena bonariensis, a plant without which we simply could not imagine the autumn perennial border. Though the plant was discovered in Buenos Aires in 1826 and given its species name after that city, the name is still a sort of pun, for it would be impossible to imagine any plant more airy. That is one of its great values in the perennial garden, for it is so slender of form that young plants may be inserted between perennials anyplace that a few inches of bare ground exists. From a few dark green, narrow basal leaves ascends a much-branched four-sided stem about four feet tall, surmounted by a flat, two-inch-wide corymb packed with flowers hardly three times the size of a pinhead, and of the purest lavender shaded to dark purple. They float above other perennials, and for this reason,V. bonariensis should always be used pointillistically, dotted here and there throughout other plantings to create a kind of purple haze in autumn. It will never get in another plant’s way, and though it is a wonderful cut flower, as many corymbs of flower as possible should be left in the garden, for they are seldom un-visited by monarch butterflies, providing essential nourishment for those remarkable creatures before they make their long trip from Vermont to Mexico.

  It seems that all species of nicotiana are valuable in the garden, including even N. tabacum, the smoking tobacco that has been humanity’s bane, and the much older N. rustica, cultivated as a sacred herb by Native Americans from prehistoric times to the present. Nicotiana tabacum was much prized by Gertrude Jekyll, for its huge rosettes of rich green leaf and its ascending cobs of flowers to five feet in autumn—white or rose red or pink, according to variety. Nicotiana rustica is a much lower, cobby plant, to about three feet, with fleshy, celadon-green leaves and flowers that are arranged in a blunt, club-shaped panicle and tinted pinkish green. Both plants might be grown in the autumn garden for what one might call historical interest, or for other purposes. But neither would be as beautiful as several other species of nicotiana, among which our two current favorites are N. langsdorffii and N. mutabilis.

  Nicotiana langsdorffii is a native of Brazil and Chile that has been cultivated in gardens for many years, but it has only recently become what one might call frequently grown. For one thing, its inch-long tubes of flowers are green, and green is a color most gardeners prefer to see in grass. But the flowers are of such a fresh and lively green that one should really call it chartreuse, and if you turn up a bell and look inside, there are five cobalt-blue stamens. From handsome rosettes of six- to eight-inch-long leaves, branched, wiry stems emerge, beginning their flowering in late July and continuing until frost. Hummingbirds adore the flowers, and a planting is never free for long from the whirr of wings and the flash of a ruby-red throat. Transplants bloom earliest, though self-seeded plants, which will occur around the garden every year after the plant has once been grown, provide a fine late show, lasting well into first frosts.

  Nicotiana mutabilis was unknown until about twelve years ago, when it was discovered in open forest clearings in southern Brazil. It is a wonderful plant, with hefty rosettes of dark green, arrow-shaped leaves about two feet wide, from which emerge much-branched flowering stems as tall as five feet that produce hundreds of tiny, half-inch-long tubes that end in tiny, five-petaled stars. There are two miracles to this plant. The first is that flower stems appear quite late, not until the middle of August, when even a charitable estimate of the garden would have to call it tired. The second is that flowers start out white, fade to light pink, and then to deep rose, creating an iridescent shimmer over each plant. (Hence the species name, mutabilis, which generally means “changing in color.”) But the plant is mutable in other ways, for no two individuals seem to behave in exactly the same way. Transplanted in June, some will bloom in early July, and some will gather force and bloom taller and freer in August, and some will wait until September, and then be giants. It is not a bad thing for plants to express individualism. Not everyone can be a marigold.

  We would further say that it is annual and tender plants that do the most to keep our interest in the garden alive, season after season. They are not mere garnish, the pickled red crab apples beside the turkey that nobody eats. The idea that a garden would consist only of perennials that return faithfully from year to year to year is actually fr
ightening to us. Annuals and tender plants are the growing tip, a chance to experiment and learn, but more important, to play. The very fact that they are not permanent additions to the garden is part of their vitality to us.

  All this we would have explained to our visitor, had she had ears to hear it and had chosen to linger long enough over our B. sutherlandii.

  ARBORVITAE

  Recently, we found ourselves committing a crime in broad daylight. We pilfered five cuttings from an arborvitae growing at a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike. The plant was an old acquaintance. It wasn’t any arborvitae we knew, not the lance-shaped ‘Holmstrup’ or lustrous ‘Green Emerald’ and certainly not the elegant old ‘Pyramidalis’ or winter-black ‘Nigra’ or fat, serviceable ‘Techny’. All are excellent in their way, for there is no such thing as an ugly arborvitae unless it is sick or mistreated. But the specimen that attracted our attention was extraordinary—about five feet high, a dense dark green and breathtakingly healthy, and as conical as an upturned paper