Each Little World

Perfect weather

Snow, freezing rain, plain old rain, and very chilly temperatures are perfect weather for a least one thing in the garden. The moss is absolutely glowing this morning.

Beginning of the month view

It rained most of Saturday with gray skies, winds and a temperature in the high 30s. It felt like the beginning of December even if the weather was not particularly wintry. Today was more of the same, though the rain was rather sporadic until it turned to light snow in the late afternoon. I decided to post these photos I took this morning as I have a feeling the garden may look quite different tomorrow. 

The rain and the light had all the greens glowing, especially the lichens, mosses and mostly faded water iris leaves at the back edge of the pond. The pond is still ice covered; the rainwater is just pooling on the top of it. Those stakes by the small shrubs are to mark them in case they get buried in snow. I don't want to accidentally step on my precious shrubs and ruin them. 

See how green those stone steps leading up to the Tea House are? That means the rain has brought up all the lichens on them, making them dangerously slippery. 

I always take an alternative route when any of the stone stairs or stepping stones get really greenish.

I'm leaving the dwarf Ginkgo uncaged (lower left), though I did cage the new baby tree — Carpinus betulus 'colunaris nana' — on the slope to the right of the steps. The tall, narrow tree holding its leaves is a Korean maple with Hakonechloa grass in the background. 

Shade and a lot of wet weather have changed our Mica rock's look from glitter to velvet. 

I probably got 3/4 of the cleanup done that I hoped to accomplish before it snowed. So I am trying not to obsess about all the unfinished jobs I can still see out the window. I'm guessing they will all be under a blanket of white tomorrow morning. Out of sight and out of mind again.  

Lichens on rocks and roofs

Catching up with my garden

I hate to leave my garden in June even for a lovely family reunion. All I could think about as we drove away was all the blooms I might miss, to say nothing of the storms and wacky weather that might happen while I was gone. I brought my potted plants onto the deck and filled up a bunch of watering cans so my neighbor could easily douse the plants if we didn't get any rain while I was away. 

We were gone 8 days and got a little over 2 inches of rain, so clearly we are still in this extremely wet weather pattern. The leaves on my beautiful new dwarf columnar Carpinus are starting to turn yellow and I think it's from being in a pot sitting in a saucer that keeps getting full of rain water. I'm going to plant this tiny treasure in the ground now rather than later in the season, which I hope will help it maintain its youthful vigor.

The kids had a great time playing in the garden while I was away. This is the downside of moss gardening: someone is always looking for grubs and other bugs under my velvet carpet.

Somebody jumped off the highest fence onto the Kirengeshoma after they'd dive-bombed the Synellisis (shredded umbrella leaf), leaving both of them bowed to the ground. Then they kicked up the pine needles from one end of the path to the other — after they'd dislodged one of the old logs marking the edge of the path. They do go crazy when I'm not around to yell at them.

I'm going to dig out and discard all my Stella d'Oro daylilies and redo this street-side bed. I was concerned that the daylilies I want to retain might bloom and be done before I got back. I need not have worried as they are all just starting to flower. 

I've been putting big id tags close by the flowers I want to move into other locations, so I will know who is who if there are no flowers to guide me. I'm hoping to attack this redesign project next week, unless we hit temps in the 90s again. There are a lot of problem plants that have found a home here like that baby black walnut tree (above) that all need to be dug out as well. 

Most of my Asiatic lilies are just beginning to open, including this variety called 'Apricot Fudge'. Its flowers are described as more rose-like than lily-like and I think that is true. I loved the images of this in the catalogs and online. But I do not like it in person at all. I guess I'm not too old to be taught a lesson about the difference between pictures of flowers and the plants themselves. 

 

 

The downside of the rain

Hot weather, a little sun and a lot of rain combine to produce one thing in the garden above all else: weeds. I feel like they are growing as fast — no, faster — than I can manage to pull them out. I've just finished — for the moment — the mossy open space in the midst of the fence-line border of big yew and box balls. I am thinking this may be the perfect spot to put my new Larch tree. 

The ferns and moss all arrived in this spot on their own and I've let them do as they please. This is a spot that is almost always damp and easy to weed. That means, of course, that weeds also grow here just as easily. Over the years I've tried to eradicate all the invasive plants in the garden. Alas, almost all of them seeded over the fence to the garden on the other. A steady stream of new home owners means the plants on their side of the fence are more often than not out of control. So they all reseed and come back to this space to haunt me along with the plain old weeds. 

The further along the fence you go, the denser the weeds and the tighter the area to work in. We will be taking out this ancient lilac whose dying trunks fill this area. So maybe I will be able to permanently cross off the chore of removing lilac suckers, even if general weeding continues. Since all the evergreen "balls" need annual pruning on all sides, I can't really fill these weedy spaces with a ground cover since it is necessary to walk in here to prune and do fence maintenance. Thus I don't see weeding this area as a job that will ever disappear until the evergreens are so big they fill the space and keep everything else out. Or until I figure out a ground cover that will grow here and can be walked on with impunity.

In the meantime, an overabundance of rain and cloudy skies in June are keeping the weeds happy and colonizing a new space as soon as I clear one. 

Winter greens

Did you see this post from Loree Bohl of Danger Garden on FB?

Another conversation that I just have to share: I bought a green scarf today, the clerk ringing me up says: "oh that's a beautiful green, I just love green, it's my favorite color, it's why I moved to Portland, because it's so green. I first visited here last January, during that snow and ice you had, but there was still green. And you know what? None of that green died. The cold didn't kill it. None of that green died!"... I should have just smiled and nodded but instead I had to stomp on her green happiness by saying..."oh ya? I wish that were true, plenty of green died in my garden last winter"...but she wasn't having it, continuing... "but there was still green, and not just the evergreens, that's all that's green where I come from"..."where do you come from?..."Wisconsin... the evergreens are all that's green there during the winter."

. . .

As a Wisconsinite, I was very annoyed at this woman. She moved away from a state that is bordered by two Great Lakes and the Mississippi River. A state that marks the western edge of the Eastern hardwood forest and the eastern edge of the tall grass prairie. What's not to like?

And since I grew up in Buffalo, NY on the south side of Lake Erie where annual snowfall is around 94 inches, I don't even consider that it snows in Wisconsin since our typical annual snowfall in Madison is only half that amount.

It is obvious the woman Loree met is not a gardener. Nor is she very observant. Nor does she seem to appreciate any color other than green in the landscape. Maybe she's from "up north" in Wisconsin where evergreens DO dominate the landscape. But that evergreen gorgeousness is what folks who live in southern Wisconsin travel up to swoon over.

Yes, the green in my garden in January mostly comes from "evergreens." Though they are actually all different colors and shades from yellow-greens to blues and purply browns. But the lack of snow cover this winter has meant other greenery has also been visible this year. 

There's also a lot of browns and tans this year from leaves that have remained on the trees as a result of our strange autumn weather, like the pale foliage on this Japanese dissected Maple (above) — which looks just as good with snow (below).

The Japanese Maple at the back edge of the pond (below) also kept its leaves. Even though it suddenly snowed this week, the garden is not what I would call buried in snow, especially compared to other winters.

Tuesday I focused on some of the evergreens in my garden for Foliage Follow-up. Here are a few more favorites whose portraits I snapped just before it snowed. 

Thuja occidentalis 'Warenna Lutscens' (Arborvita)

Fargesia rufa 'Green Panda' (clumping bamboo)

Buxus and Chamaecyparis 'Green Arrow' (boxwood and false Cypress)

Rhododendron yakushimanum 'Yaku Angel' (front), Buxus sempervirens 'Latifolia Maculata' and Taxus media (Tauton yew)

Pinus strobus 'Blue Shag', Amsonia ciliata and Taxus media

When snow melts, lawn grass looks blah and bad. But if you've replaced your grass with sedges like Carex plantaginea, it is green even as the snow disappears.

Sedges like Carex morrowi variegata may be flattened and beaten up by snow and winter weather, but they still offer a lot of color and texture whenever they are not covered by the white stuff. 

Then, there's the green glowing gorgeousness of moss.

This moss has been colonizing a mica encrusted rock. What we're gaining in green, we're losing in glitter.

And lichens. In cold and wet weather many of the older rocks in our garden are almost solidly green. That's another yew in the background.

And ferns! Dryopteris erythrosora 'Brilliance' (Autumn fern)

Moss, lichens, last season's Hellebore leaves and Adiantum venustum (Himalayan maidenhair fern)

Adiantum venustum (Himalayan maidenhair fern) is so much stronger than it looks. The one above is protected by trees but this one (below) is growing out in the open.

Despite little snow cover and days and days of extreme cold, this Arum italicum 'Ghost' is doing fine. In the U.K. this plant is one of the stars of the winter garden — which is why I bought one. 

I just planted this Hepatica noblis 'Cremar' in October. It makes quite an impression in the winter garden for such a new resident.

We had our first serious snowfall of the season right after I took all these photos. We probably got five inches over the course of two days. As you might imagine, it covered up some of these plants and changed the degree of greenness visible on others. But I still think there is a lot to see in terms of color, texture, and form in the garden. To my eye, snow and evergreen plants make many beautiful combinations in winter.

Foliage Follow-up: Lichens and moss

Nothing makes lichens and moss glow like wet weather. Not much foliage on view in these shots, but there is still time for lots of posts about evergreens!

Moss and millstones

A gentleman with a terrific-looking Wisconsin moss garden recently spoke about moss at the monthly meeting of the Wisconsin Hardy Plant Society. He's a collector of moss, bringing it home from wherever he finds it. I'm a collector of moss as well. When moss finds my garden I leave it where it lands and nurture it. The moss that wants my conditions finds me; I never go searching for it.

I've got a nice collection of mossy areas in my garden now: on the ground, on stepping stone paths and rocks in the pond, on the roof of our house. The roof of the fence Mark designed and built had a nice blanket of moss until the turkeys landed there and removed the moss and a layer of cedar shingles during liftoff.

I don't water my moss or really do anything to it. It's lushness — or lack thereof — is a visual clue to the amount of light and water an area gets. This millstone (or grindstone, more likely) is richly covered in moss and is surrounded by Adiantum venustum and Epimedium. This moss is so happy it's now colonizing the adjacent ground. 

This grindstone gets much more sun though it is still in a fairly moist planting area as you can see from the Hart's Tongue Fern (Asplenium scolopendrium and Japanese Holly Fern (Cyrtomium fortunei). I think the extra heat and light from the sun is slowing down the growth of the moss on this stone. The type of stone is probably playing a part as well.

We used to have this grindstone mounted like a piece of sculpture in the house. This summer we decided to put it in the garden to add more secure footing at this spot where Japanese forest grass is starting to obscure one of the stepping stones. This grass has been cut back a lot but is really happy and keeps taking over half the path. No sign of moss yet and this is one stone that I hope stays moss-free for the sake of firm footing and safety when crossing the stream.

The Moss Garden at this particular moment

2017

Once we made the decision to move the bench to the moss garden with a wide path approaching it, that arrangement clearly divided the space into a couple of large beds that swept around the seat. I decided that I would just fill in the space with plants I already had and that would be that. So I dug up Japanese painted ferns, candelabra primroses and Hostas and began to fill in the space. The white buckets indicate the locations for future Yew balls. We already had one planted under the Carolina Sweetshrub by the fence, so adding four more would make a nice uneven number.

I also added a young Korean maple and two boxwood seedlings, all of which had been growing in pots around the garden. The boxwoods would also eventually be trimmed into balls. Everything's caged to keep the rabbits away now and during the coming winter. 

But hardly had the plants in the first picture begun to settle in when I decided it was too much color and pattern. That probably sounds crazy but the old moss garden was a calm green moment amidst everything else that was happening in the garden nearby. I wanted that green quiet feeling again. So on my recent trip to the Flower Factory I bought 8 solid green Hakonechloa macra plants to use instead of painted ferns and Hostas. This spot is fairly dry and the Hakonechloa will do better here than the painted ferns anyway. 

Mark and I then revisited our early idea of a long "wave' of Yews — rather than a mere four — that would be pruned into balls until they start melding into each other a number of years down the road. That would lower maintenance since they only need clipping once a year. After calling a few local nurseries we discovered Winterland Nursery still had what we wanted despite it being almost Labor Day. 

Luckily we had a planting plan otherwise it would have been easy to be seduced by Winterland's fields of trees and shrubs. 

We bought ten Taxus x media 'Tauntonii' which we've used elsewhere in the garden. Hopefully these will do as well as the others we've planted over the years. Winterland Nursery was bought out by McKay Nursery and they now offer a one year guarantee which is a valuable added protection to pricey plants like these. 

Mark unloaded the heavy pots and brought them to where we wanted to plant them via multiple wheelbarrow trips. We spent a fair amount of time moving them around to determine the best placement. Then it came time to plant them. Out came all the necessary tools. Mark started to dig the first hole to see how bad the roots from nearby trees might be and to see what the soil was like. He gave me some tips and said to call him if I need help.

I didn't really need help. I just had to do it my way with my tools. I knew it would take me twice as long as it would if Mark did it, but I wanted to do it right and also not hurt myself. That meant I did not use Mark's big shovel in the foreground or the heavy duty orange-painted spud. They were so heavy to lift I didn't have enough strength left for leverage!

I used the cardboard template to cut the diameter of the planting hole and the other tools as needed. Luckily I only had to use the saw on a few big roots; my Felcos worked for the rest. I planted two yews last Wednesday, three on Friday, three on Sunday and got the final two in the ground on Labor Day. I've got a pile of empty pots, a bucket of roots and a pile of dirt to use elsewhere in the garden. I'm sore, but not incapacitated, and very proud of myself. 

 Alas, it doesn't look like much given all my hard work. You get a better sense of how this will look from the shaggy Yew ball at the rear which has been in the ground a few years and thus makes a bit more of a statement.

This is the swath of Yew and Box balls that we planted a number of years ago and is what we're aiming for in the former moss garden as well. The individual plants are just beginning to touch each other, so Mark can soon start pruning them into a meandering cloud. These shrubs are almost 4' across and about 3' high.

Along with the Hakonechloa, I'm planting maidenhair ferns and candelabra primroses.  All are pest and maintenance free, other than cutting them down in the spring before they start to regrow. The primroses will provide a burst of red and then everything will revert to green again. Podphyllum 'Spotty Dotty', a Rodgersia and a red-flowered Trillium are planted around the apple tree to add some contrast to the ferns and forest grass that will eventually surround them. 

I'm hoping I can steal enough Hakonechloa and Maidenhair ferns from elsewhere in the garden to get this area off to a good start during this cooler weather we're currently having. Then I have to get back to the Sacred Grove where I've been re-doing a chunk of that area as well.

Moss garden re-do

When we first moved to this house in 1994, I was not really allowed to garden much because we were doing pond construction first. Thus I could only work in areas after the rocks were set and the big equipment was done in that area. That's really how the moss garden was created. It was the only spot that was free for me to play in. When I realized the grass was growing so poorly in that location because there was moss, I started slowly pulling out the grass by hand. Over the years we made this garden more defined by creating and updating the path that circled the ancient apple trees that were planted when the house was built. 

2009

2014

After almost 20 years of the moss garden, I realized it was just too much of a maintenance hog. We decided we would create a "cloud hedge" of yew balls similar to the one we planted by the back fence. It would lower maintenance and relate this area to the larger garden with all its evergreen shrubs. As always, we tried to "visualize" the concept using cardboard circles as stand-ins for the yew balls.

2015

Before we had a chance to implement the above plan, we decided to replace our driveway and build a stone retaining wall and steps, all of which is described under "Driveway Project" in the categories list. That project meant moving a swath of plants 2 feet deep and about 60 feet long that were in the way of the big equipment if I wanted to save them. So we built temporary holding beds in the moss garden.

I became very smitten with Tom Stuart Smith's design for a Norfolk garden (images 7 & 8) that used Staghorn sumac trees, Hakonechloa macra and scattered Yew balls. I decided during the summer that that's what I would do once all the plants went back to the driveway border and new front garden. But instead I used the 15 Hakonechloa macra plants I'd bought to re-do the moss garden out in the new driveway garden where they have filled in fabulously (below).

2016

After using my Hakonechloa plants the previous fall, I went looking for other ideas and Roy Diblik came to the rescue. Mark decided he would build the covered Japanese waiting bench he'd always wanted to do and I would use Roy's "know maintenance" concept to help me come up with a plan. But from the moment I put plants in the ground the rabbits starting eating them down to the nub. And none of them made it through the winter in good enough shape to begin to make a statement. 

In the meantime, I talked Mark out of all the work it would take to make another Japanese-influenced building. Plus I was worried that a second structure would dilute the impact of the Tea House. All we really needed was the ability to sit and look across the pond to the Tea House and stream on the far shore. 

We decided to move the English garden bench that we've had since 1990 off of the deck and into the spot where we had planned to put the building. I suggested Mark use bamboo poles threaded through stakes to mark the path to the bench — a fencing technique we'd seen in 1998 at Wave Hill in the Bronx and photographed to remember. The bench now offers a perfect view of the pond and Tea House. I just have to come up with the perfect planting plan and put it in place and this area will be complete.

Tomorrow: Where I'm currently at with this mossy garden project.