Mark went out late Saturday afternoon with his camera after he glanced up the steps into The Moon Garden and was intrigued by what he saw.
The opposite side of the path in the above photo.
Paeonia japonica
Malus 'Tina' at the peak of perfection.
The Yin Yang bed and the path to the West Gate on the right.
Looking back to the east side of this upper garden.
The orchard owner at the Wednesday Hilldale Market, here on the west side, has a beautiful and ever-changing selection of apples each week. I picked a mixed bag of crisp varieties out of his assorted baskets, not realizing what a stunning group I'd chosen until I opened my bag at home.
I snagged this impressive pumpkin (squash?) at the first stand I always visit at this outdoor market. Once I saw this beauty, I had to stop shopping and carry it back to my car. It was too heavy for me to haul around while I finished my shopping. I love the fact that the dark green color is a perfect match for our house color.
Freezing rain on Friday evening with a bit of snow on Saturday has done little to provide protection for the garden from the single digit temperatures forecast this week. Nor did it glam the garden up the way a heavier snowfall would do. That means my focus for the foreseeable future will be the gardens I visited last summer.
It is rare to see a bottle tree up north, but this one looks completely natural as it repeats the intense color on the trellis in the image directly above.
Betsy True and Danny Aerts garden on one acre with mushrooms, fruit and flowers, a pond and a prairie, bees and chickens, a pizza oven and more. This is a shot of their fenced veggie garden which also contains pears, quince and espaliered apples.
It's inspirational — and educational — no matter where you look. That's Betsy between me and another WHPS member.
The apple crisp is in the oven. The house smells delicious and the weather is sunny and dry. Looks like it will be a perfect day on all fronts.
Martha Stewart's Apple Crostata is one of my go-to desserts for fall and winer. In a moment of sugary madness I made the crostada and these roasted pears for recent winter party. The crostata is nice because the dough makes enough for two, so I just keep it in the freezer and thus can quickly pull this particular dessert together as long as there are apples in the house. You can find the recipe here.
There is only one thing to remember when you are making this dessert, bake it on a pan with sides to catch any drips. And put a cylinder of rolled up tin foil around the edge to hold it in place till it hardens during baking. The first minutes in a warm oven make the sides want to collapse so you need to figure out a way to keep that from happening. It's too pretty and too delicious a dessert to let that little problem stop you from making it.
You'd be hard pressed to find a book as different from "Oudolf Hummelo" as "The Gardens of Arne Maynard." Given that I deeply appreciate the work of both men, I should have a much more chaotic garden than I do. I confine my Oudolf worship to trips to Lurie Garden in Chicago and my Arne adoration to drowning in the pages of his book while sipping tea and sitting by the fire. I bought both of these books the minute they were published, unable to wait to see if they appeared under my Christmas tree. But they would make perfect presents for the gardeners on your list.
Unlike "Oudolf Hummelo," this is a big book: 10" x 12" and an inch and a quarter thick. It's got glossy photos, double-page spreads and even tri-fold images. The photography is the work of Maynard's life partner, William Collinson, and captures the history of his work, especially at their two personal gardens. The book also has the most beautiful endpapers I've seen in years: elegant black and white drawings of Fritillaries by Jane Hyslop. The book covers twelve gardens in great depth with both text and images. Only two are outside the UK: one in East Hampton, Long Island in the U.S. and the other in Italy. I found them well-thought-out-and-designed but less interesting than Maynard's gardens in the UK.
With a big, coffee table style book like this one on Maynard's gardens, I often just revel in the images, read the cutlines and dip briefly into the text here and there. The minute I started reading this, I couldn't stop. Not only are there fascinating lessons about how Arne looks at existing landscapes and then discerns what to save and where to start afresh, it is a beautifully written book. Intelligent, evocative and highly personal — at least in terms of the subject at hand. The long pieces on specific gardens are divided with shorter sections that look at the things that Maynard considers "essential" to his gardens: Roses, Topiary, Kitchen Gardens (below) to name a few. These short pieces are about 6 pages long and heavy on examples.
I was very taken with most of Maynard's gardens for clients and his discussions with them about appropriate solutions. He also mentioned differences in working in the UK and the U.S., in particular, our lack of the kind of quality specialist nurseries that pepper England. Because many of the gardens he designs are for people with lots of land and money, he is able to hire skilled craftspeople to make furniture, gates, build walls and such. These aren't things that most of us can afford but we can learn from Maynard's approach about how to incorporate such items into the landscape and link them with our own house and history. I think of the Arborvitae tree trunks we saved when we took out a tree to put in the pond in 1997 and how many places we've used them in the garden. And of the few skilled artists we were able to hire, like Matt Wineke who did our recent driveway project.
But most of all I enjoyed reading about the gardens that Maynard created for his own houses. I remember when I saw this tree (above) at his first garden at Guanock House and marveled that someone had the sense to leave it right there in the middle of the path. I should have realized that this was the work of a very thoughtful gardener.
Listen to Maynard describe his current house and garden, Allt-y-bela in Wales (below): "The moment I saw the garden, I said the house was like an exotic pearl sitting on a cushion of green velvet, and now we're embroidering the cushion with native and species plants. The topiary is the Elizabethan stump work on the cushion, and my rarities are the occasional golden threads that give it another dimension. It is all very delicately crafted, all hand-stitched."
I fell in love with gardening while researching a piece of Elizabethan stump work, so his words caught at my heart. The last words — "delicately crafted, all hand-stitched — certainly speak to all of us whose gardens are the work of our own hands (and backs and knees).
Despite the size and complexity of many of the gardens shown in this book, my copy of "The Gardens of Arne Maynard" is chock full of scraps of paper marking pages with bulbs I want to order and combinations of flowering plants I want to try. Everywhere I looked and read I found something of value, like these incredible crab apple trees (below). No, I won't do an elegantly topiaried pair like this, but I am seriously thinking about growing this variety ('Red Sentinel') where we just lost an ancient Macintosh apple tree in our garden.
Editor's note: I purchased this book on my own and did not receive any remuneration for this post.
Our garden has a pair of full size Macintosh apple trees that were planted when our house was built in 1954. Unfortunately they were never pruned in the early days to control their shape. So they've grown splayed open with the crotch of the trees collecting water and weakening them. The photo below is from 2010.
The tree in the foreground in the picture above was down to its last limb when we finally cut it down this week. The picture below shows the stump more or less even with the ground and the last chunk of the trunk. The dark spots are rotted sections with openings of various sizes.
The apple trees presided over my original moss garden. When we were initially creating the garden I could not do any planting for the first few years as we created the hardscaping and paths. So I pulled out the grass under these trees exposing the moss growing there. It was a relaxing project and for a long time I enjoyed weeding this area. But now there are too many other chores and this has become a labor intensive area with not enough visual reward for the energy required to maintain it.
After taking down the one apple tree Mark pruned the other to take some weight off the limbs and allow more light through. This area is about to become a temporary holding bed while we do our last big front garden project: replacing the driveway and turning the slope up to the garden into an informal rock garden complete with stone steps. Before the work begins mid-month, I need to remove two feet of plants the length of the driveway border. Thus this area under the apple tree will handle those plants until the project is finished and they can return home.
Then we will redesign the apple tree garden. No clear plan at the moment — other than incorporating the 15 solid green Hakonechloa plants I bought a few weeks ago. They are currently living in pots on the deck.
One of my favorite bloggers, Deborah Silver at Dirt Simple took a look back at her garden over the course of the last year, as did Margaret Roach at A Way to Garden. It made me curious to look back at my own garden for 2013.
JANUARY
One of our massive 58-year-old Austrian pines came down in a storm at the end of December. It took out a couple of smaller trees as it fell but amazingly did not damage the fence. Mark and an arborist friend carefully cut it down in January.
FEBRUARY
I barely blogged or looked out the window I was so depressed over the loss of my big pine tree since it meant my shade garden was now pretty much in full sun. I cocooned indoors with good food, books and lots of candles.
MARCH
It seemed like it took forever, but it turned out the snowdrops appeared right on schedule when I compared their arrival date with prior years. However neither winter nor the snow were over.
APRIL
Fred and Ethel flew in with barely enough open water on our pond for a smooth landing. Looked painful to me but didn't seem to bother them. Look how much snow is still on the ground on April 7th!
MAY
The garden finally burst into full bloom with a spectacular month of flowers. Everything from our ancient apple trees to these primroses and Trilliums was lush, given the drought of the prior year.
JUNE
Record rains kept the garden green and going strong. It also sent water into our basement and Mark spent much of the summer re-landscaping one side of the house to try to send the snow-melt and rainwater away from the house.
JULY
After 13 years our Stewartia finally flowered on its lower branches. For years we mostly enjoyed the flowers as they fell to the ground from the top branches. A real thrill!
AUGUST
Despite the wet spring, by late summer it was dry enough that I had to drag out the hoses to water my new shrub and tree purchases as well as all the plants that got new homes after the pine tree came out.
SEPTEMBER
Plenty of flowers were happy with the sun and dryness like this geranium. It's growing in a pot on the deck with a fern and a clump of Tiarella or Heucherella, both of which I just dug out of the garden. I brought the pot into the house at the end of October; the fern has mostly faded but the other two plants are looking great, as is the pot of rosemary just visible on the far right.
OCTOBER
Mark spent late summer and fall working on the Tea House. He finished all the doors, windows and a couple of protective shutters. Next summer he plans to do the finish carpentry on the interior. We sat inside with the doors open having a cup of afternoon coffee quite a few days during the fall.
NOVEMBER
We had a fence built on the east side of the garden, mulched many bags of leaves and also gathered 4 or 5 bags of white pine needles from our neighbors' trees. They will be used to refresh all my pine needle paths in the spring. From my first, rather sad little garden up to the present day, I have no qualms about cutting flowers to enjoy indoors. Making my own bouquets is the main reason I grow flowers. The last thing I did in November was to cut a couple of bouquets of leaves and seed-heads for the Thanksgiving table and for arrangements to put in the bathrooms. One small vaseful of dried seedheads remains, refreshed with evergreen prunings.
DECEMBER
Twenty-eight new or favorite trees and shrubs — mostly dwarf varieties — were caged for the winter. We seem to have Peter Rabbit and his family living under our deck. But tracks outside the windows show that someone who travels on four feet has been trying to find the bunnies. Not sure if it's a fox or coyote. So far we can't tell if he's had any success. I am one who likes her plants more than Peter R.
How did your gardening year go?