Christmas Fern on Stompf Tavern Road

Christmas Fern (Polystichum acrostichoides) is an especially prolific native plant in our woods. Last weekend, driving down Stompf Tavern Road, an unpaved 18th century path, now road, that drops swiftly down to the Delaware from our perch on a ridge above the river, I found Christmas Fern growing in large colonies. It seems to have a fondness for steep banks, where it is well drained, though growing in heavy clay.



This is a view of the habitat carved by an intermittent, very steep, stream.

Garden Diary: October 24, a Day of Misting Rain

The diminished color of this season is fading fast. All the trees will soon be bare.


The sitting area overlooking the garden, leaf-strewn now. Kiringeshoma palmata, on right, is still green.


Moving out into the garden, which is starting to fall apart ...



Rain drops on lens ... wider views of a sea of vegetative wildness ...




I've always liked the leaden brown of dying Joe Pye Weed (left).

Aster tartaricus 'Jin Dai' (foreground above) is dwarfed by the wet clay environment, but it survives and even increases, adding late color, which isn't really visible in this photo.

A 'legacy' virburnum I cut down during the mass tree clearing almost five years ago, recovering now, and to be a small tree in years to come. Panicum 'Shenandoah', a favorite grass, beside it.


More Shenandoah, a Panicum 'Cloud Nine' behind.

More Shenandoah, blowzy Calamagrostis 'Karl Foerester' behind.

Eryngium yuccafolium - I planted several in a holding bed so they could grow to size before I place them out in their permanent locations. Now they've gotten so large, I'm afraid moving them will kill them.

View back toward the house.


Japanese fan tail willow (Salix sachalinensis 'Sekka') is holding its green very late, perhaps because it comes from extreme northern Japan.

Death and Happy Talk

A dreary few days of rain is doing its bit to spoil what's left of melancholy autumn. The sun will certainly come out again and play across the dying garden, reviving opportunity for more uplifting views of autumn brew shot through with glittering shafts of light. But all that's left in my cold, wet clearing in the woods will be the textures and foliage colors of a flowerless season - quite unlike the late show of Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day.

Frankly, I tire of pretty pictures and happy talk so prevalent among American garden blogs; I think this has more to do with American culture and its denial of the facts of life (of sex, death, suffering, rot and dissolution, take your pick) than with gardens or gardening, which can be and often are routes to deeper understanding of our place in this universe. Instead, we find art talk in design magazines, craftsmanship as commodity (very expensive, that garden bench, at $7000 per), white gardens, blue gardens, rose gardens, "English" gardens, and, lowest of the low, the pristine desert lawn and Disneyland.

The focus of American culture on the frothy and the superficial, even the seeking after "sustainability," which has long ago been co-opted as yet another commodity, as has "organic," doesn't cure cancer, stop wars, end child slavery or work to prevent any of the many other horrors we wish to hide from our eyes. In spite of our diversions, we all ultimately find a path to realization of our own physical end. It's considered bad taste to write about sadness or the darker side of life, though that seems appropriate to our time.

Around the corner from us, a man has put out a sign announcing he's a landscaper. The bank at the front of his house is covered in black mulch. He planted a few perennials, sun lovers, in deep shade (they died), and at the side are several large, complicated, expensive machines for moving earth and carrying heavy loads. What does this landscaper cultivate? Certainly not life.

A first step to taking gardens seriously is to allow in the full range of human emotions. Until we begin to do that, gardens will continue to be relegated to the "hobby" category by the cataloguers of our lives. Gardening will remain a harmless diversion ... so long as the plants don't get too high.

Great Blue Heron

Several times each year I see Great Blue Herons as I drive over Lockatong Creek on my way hither and yon ... but always from a good distance. Yesterday, working at home and pausing to look out the window, I watched a large, delicate creature, more gray than blue, with an astonishing wing span gliding across the garden, alighting at the pond edge just below the house. A frog plopped into the water and the heron jumped in to search.

I'm not sure what I felt. First surprise and excitement; I've never seen one of these wild creatures close up. Gratitude, curiosity, a little disappointment when it spied me and took off, rising in a long arc over the garden and into the trees. Admiration, wonder.

A couple of years ago one surprised me while I was doing some gardening chores. I heard a flutter and flapping above, and just caught sight of a dark, giant creature leaving the top of a Blue Atlas Cedar next to the house. And I remember thinking, had I lived in ancient times, I might have understood this as a visit by one of the gods, something wondrous, more heard than seen.

But we live in an age of reason, and I dismissed that wonder and surprise, knowing it was just a heron leaving a perch in a tree.

The pictures are of wild turkeys visiting my living room window (excuse the reflections on the glass). I didn't get a photo of the heron.

Dan Pearson's Spirit: Garden Inspiration

I've been waiting for Dan Pearson's new book since I first heard about it several months ago. What a surprise!

Dan, just about every one's favorite garden designer for the moment, has written a highly collaborative new book that has almost nothing to say about garden design. At least not directly. It is a beautifully produced book ... not a flashy coffee table tome, but a piece of fine, understated craftsmanship. The medium is the message, so to speak.

The book is about the source of inspiration for gardens ... a very romantic notion ... in sense of place. It's a book of stories, tellings of visits to particular people in particular places, bits of autobiography with emotional background - a book about feeling, sensitivity to place, memories, things learned.

I had anticipated not a "how to" of garden design, but a book about Dan's gardens (and I'd still love to see that book). But this one is so much finer for its difference from the expected. Spirit is quite Japanese in its method. It points a direction, like a finger lifted in silence, then leaves it to the reader to make the connections.

It's also an enjoyable read, one for contemplative moments, quiet times, but, surprisingly, it moves the reader along quickly, from story to story (who doesn't like a book of short, image strewn stories?).

If I may quote, since Dan gets the point across so well:

"Those gardens that use nature for their romantic gain, but strike that delicate balance between it being invited in and not quite having the upper hand are always in the balance. The most romantic moments at Painshill are those on the edge of being lost, the entwined stones in Nunhead Cemetery are the places with the most resonance. It is in this balance that I find the most evocative moments, the points where the magic occurs. I suspect that the ephemeral nature of these interludes is the greater part of their appeal, and for me, trying to capture them is part of the art of garden making."

If you want to know more about the stories of Painshill and Nunhead Cemetery, go get the book. It's finally out.

I understand from one of his associates that Dan Pearson will be coming to the US to lecture in January. He'll be at the Arnold Arboretum in Boston on January 19, at the New York Botanic Garden the morning of January 21, at Potterton's bookstore, 979 Third Avenue in New York in the early evening of the 21st, and the Chicago Botanic Garden on January 23. Perhaps his web site will provide details before January.

Japanese Screen

The old ragged dogwoods around the house become like vibrant Japanese screens each fall, calling to mind the layered, abstracted images in some impressionist paintings.

Plants for wet clay: Prairie Dock

Planted as small plugs three years ago, the Prairie Dock (Silphium terebinthinaceum - now how do you pronounce that?) put up flowers this year. But that's an understatement. The buds are small round buttons like green peony buds, the flowers are pretty yellow disks, but the real feature, or I should say features, of this plant are the tall flowering panicles (eight to ten feet or more) and the huge leaves (think 18 inches long and 10 inches wide), which emerge in spring. These photos were taken in the first week of September. I almost prefer the seed heads to flowers.

The Brother Gardeners: Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession by Andrea Wulf

How do a modest Quaker farmer outside Philadelphia in pre-revolutionary America, a well-to-do cloth merchant in London, the inventor of the scientific binomial nomenclature that made possible universal identification of plants, and an enormously wealthy British nobleman with a passionate dream of exploration and discovery come together to affect the course of Western civilization? Quite simply, a passion for plants.

My interest in this book was sparked by the role of John Bartram, an intelligent and inquisitive farmer outside Philadelphia, and a friend of Benjamin Franklin, who happened to have an unusual affinity for plants and horticulture. Rising from his rather lowly beginnings, Bartram became a key figure in the importation of North American flora into Great Britain, traveling throughout the East to find new plants, eventually helping make possible the birth of the centuries-long passion for gardening among the British. His 18th century house and nursery are near here, on the outskirts of Philadelphia.

The Brother Gardeners is about a time when botany was the cutting edge of science. Advances in horticultural knowledge, invention of a universal system for classifying and naming plants, and the discovery and cultivation of new plants from the far corners of the world were among the highest scientific pursuits. Andrea Wulf weaves together these and other stories in a fascinating account that takes us from John Bartram's farm on the Schuylkyll River in Pennsylvania, to Peter Collinson collecting boxes of plants and seed from America on the London docks, to that most arrogant of scientists, Linnaeus, ruthlessly pursuing his new system for classifying and naming all plants, to Joseph Banks in England, a man with enormous wealth and courage enough to finance and risk his life on one of the first voyages of exploration to the South Pacific, guided by Captain Cook aboard the Endeavor, in pursuit of new plant discoveries, and in that pursuit discovering, by accident, the east coast of Australia.

Fascinating reading for gardeners with a historical inclination, this book brings to life one of those times in which apparently unrelated interests merge to move a culture into new directions. In the eighteenth century, when Britain was building an empire that would dominate the world, large numbers of the well-to-do were becoming entranced by new horticultural discoveries. They became a new moneyed market for the new plants, vying for access to the plants for their gardens, driving development of new technologies such as heated greenhouses for growing tropical species, and collecting vast herbaria. As plants became more important to the economy of Britain, interest in them spread and access became easier and cheaper, igniting a passion for gardening among the broader population.

Ms. Wulf's is a gossipy book - if a book on 18th century botanical goings on can be so characterized - and a well researched book full of treasures of information, quotes from letters we might otherwise never have opportunity to read, a book full of stories of the follies and amazing achievements of a group of intelligent, at times prideful and silly, and accomplished gentlemen and farmers to whom all gardeners today owe a debt.

Gardens Gone Wild Picture This Photo Contest

Here's my entry in the Gardens Gone Wild Picture This Photo Contest. One of my favorite grasses is Panicum 'Cloud Nine', so flexible in a breeze ... hardly has any substance it's so light and airy, even ethereal, but it holds up amazingly well late into fall. This was taken mid-October last year. Here it's fronted by a golden bank of bracken.

Plants for wet clay: Rudbeckia nitida 'Herbstsonne'

This rudbeckia is one of the most successful perennials in my unimproved wet clay. In my last garden in Rosemont, I banned yellow. Here, on Federal Twist Road, with a dark background of forest trees, the yellow brings much needed color and light. This plant thrives in partial shade, without any need for staking, while rising to heights of eight to ten feet. It has a great mop of flowers, and good looking, disease free foliage, year after year. And look at the marvelous seed cones (click photo for a closeup).

Garden Diary: Changing light of fall

As fall approaches, and the sun moves lower in the sky, large parts of the garden are cast into changing shadow, hour to hour. Trees, capturing the wind, let through intermittent shafts of light, on the best days creating constantly moving patterns in greens, golds, pinks, tawny browns.

Garden Diary: The Planter and the Pond

The raised stone planting area on the left was intended to work as a visual extension of the linear pond. I can't yet say whether that concept is working. Two weeks back we cleaned out most of the growth, exposing the pond's edge for the first time since spring. I think a rough rock edging will improve things and help establish a better visual link between the two areas.

The raised planting bed will be mainly box (balls of Buxus sempervirens 'Green Mountain' with smaller Korean box) and Bergenia 'Bressingham Ruby', with a large Oakleaf Hydrangea at the pond end. When trimmed and grown for a couple of years, the box should make a single undulating mass, similar to the wavy box "clouds" I've seen in photos of Jacques Wirtz' home garden (may as well aim high). I know I should have used a single box cultivar, but these are what I found at my local nurseries.

The far end (below) is much closer to the look I want to achieve, with the Bergenia acting as a ruffly ground cover. The self seeded iris is questionable; I'm not sure whether to move it over or just take it out. Probably the latter.

In winter the box will remain green (I hope) and the Bergenia will turn a deep burgundy. It should make an interesting winter feature, even if the box browns a bit.

Yes, I need more Bergenia. Finding it is rather hit or miss in this area.

Garden Diary: Must add more Asters

More plants for wet clay. Clockwise from left: Miscanthus purpurescens, Magnolia grandiflora 'Little Gem', New England Aster (Aster novae-angliae), Joe Pye Weed (Eupatorium maculatum 'Gateway'), Mountain Mint (Pycnanthemum muticum), Siberian iris with their beautiful dried seed pods.

Okay, the Aster is no longer an Aster. I haven't got the new names down yet. This is the only one remaining from plugs I put out three years ago, and I need more for their color this time of year. I hope to get new ones in the spring and grow them on in pots until they're big enough to survive the rigors of my garden.

These plants all thrive in my wet clay, though this end of the garden is drier than the rest; a layer of broken rock below the surface (it's part of the septic system leaching field) improves the drainage .

Plants for wet clay

A photo from the long Labor Day weekend - three late season plants for wet clay: Joe Pye Weed (Eupatorum maculatum 'Purple Bush'), Sanguisorba canadensis, and Sanguisorba tenuifolia.

Garden Diary: Musings on memory, pleasure and structure

Going down into the garden at this time of year is like becoming small again, like a child. I've never been able to say why I admire large plants, why I delight in being surrounded by towering grasses and perennials, but I think this pleasure comes from childhood memories - memories of hiding in banks of blossoming vetch in the vacant lot next door, the privacy and solitude of a secret room inside a colony of wild plum bushes.

A Simple Love of Plants
The candelabra-like spent flower heads of Prairie Dock (Silphium terebinthinaceum) rising to ten and twelve feet in the photos above and below add a sense of magic, suspended as they are, like vegetable jewels, on amazingly strong stems above the surrounding plantings, dancing entwined with tall black-beaked, seed-heavy rods of Rudbeckia maxima. (Click on the photos to see detail.)

This is the same pleasure most gardeners find in plants, a simple passion for plants, a sensuous response to THE PLANT. Period. It has little to do with aesthetics of the garden as a whole.

Private Meanings
On another level, appreciation of a planting can be a door to a personal world of private meaning. The plants in the next photo, delicately accented by flowering panicles of Molinia 'Transparent', can be seen as metaphor; they bring to my mind the quantum foam conceived by physicists, where matter and energy dance at some subatomic level, matter popping into and out of existence, changing into energy and back to matter eternally, a bubbling brew where we confront the hard edge of existence, being and non-being.

Analogy as a Way of Seeing and Understanding
Musical analogy is another pleasing way to see a garden - think variations on a theme - the infinite variety of plant shapes, textures, leaf forms, movements, rhythmic changes over time - revealing similarities and differences in form, bearing, or other attributes. Below, mounds of Miscanthus 'Silberfeder', their ribbon-like foliage echoed in altered form by the tall wavy arms of the Japanese Fantail Willows (Salix sachalinensis 'Sekka') behind them, contrast with the big, low leaves of the Petasites at their base (the bass viol in this musical analogy?) ... in late summer the dusty silver of Mountain Mint (Pycnantheum muticum) flowing through it all like the sparkling high notes of a piccolo.

What is Structure in a Naturalistic Garden?
Below, a simple garden path defines the edge of the open space and of the garden, the boundary - a reminder of the garden's structure, largely invisible at this time of peak growth. Naturalistic as the garden is, even approaching wildness, particularly to more traditional gardeners, this is a structured space. The structure takes its impetus from the river delta-like drainage flow across the garden, from the linear pond at the entrance into the open garden, from the native stone walls emulating ancient stone rows built here in previous centuries, and from the circular clearing in the woods that defines the space of the cultivated garden - and from the plants themselves, placed to reflect similarities in form and structure, planted to create drifts, to create a visual sense of movement, even to tell a story.

While it's possible to enjoy the plants alone, if the whole isn't more than the sum of its parts, a garden is little more than a private collection of perennials, shrubs and trees. Without structure, it could just as well be the plant growing-on part of a nursery. Structure holds it all, helps give it meaning, and evokes an intellectual pleasure - each part fitting into a perceived whole. Piet Oudolf's gardens, for example, use blocks of single species to create structure, strategically placed shrubs and topiary to manipulate the sense of depth, hedges to hold the looseness of the naturalistic structure.

Open space, the void that makes possible the view through and across the garden, given emphasis by the red circle of logs at the vanishing point in the photo below, is intrinsic to its structure - open space bounded by the wall of surrounding wood, but with occasional glimpses into corridor views opened by tree felling, or simply views into the interstices between the trees (an effect much more pronounced in winter when the leaves have fallen). And above it all the dome of sky opens the garden to the universe, yet is circumscribed by the circle of trees that enclose the space, too closely I think. Closed openness, like a nest.

Pleasure in Detail
As I walk through the garden, likeness and difference, similarity and contrast return my eye to the material aspects of the garden: a sanguisorba given by a fellow gardener, Mirjam Farkas, so different in structure from the flowering Joe Pye Weed (Eupatorium purpurem) behind it, yet so similar in color, brings to mind another reason for gardening, many as they are - in this case the pleasure of differentiating between similar and dissimilar things, something we observe in small children playing with shaped objects ...

... or simply delighting in the detail of small things.

Or taking pleasure in durable, sturdy form as with this Queen of the Prairie (Filipendula rubra 'Venusta'), still giving a good show two months after its blossoming time in spite of a summer of heavy rain.

Distance, Space, Large Scale Structure
Thick as the garden is planted, the architecture of the space reveals itself only over distance. The vertical cedar trunks 300 feet across from the viewpoint below provide a reference point, making it possible to "see" the intervening space.

Moving to the left, the distant framework stays the same, while the foreground changes, showing different plant forms and plant combinations. Here panicums, irises, a lone cimicifuga (actea), Silphium perfoliatum, Arborvitae (Thuja occidentalis), Miscanthus giganteus on the right.

Moving left, looking across the pond (hardly visible), petasites, cattails (typha), Sweet Bay Magnolia (Magnolia virginiana), river birch in the mid-distance, floppy flowering Miscanthus 'Silberfeder' at the far side.

Transient Structure of Plants
And last, a closer view, taken with a small aperture to gain maximum depth of field, bringing multiple layers of the scene into focus. This foreground, the plants themselves, are transient structure, changing from hour to hour, day to day, season to season - the abstract and concrete in interplay, visible and invisible structure making the garden.


More Questions
In the end, this post raises more questions than it answers. Plenty of room for exploration of the concept of structure, especially in naturalistic gardening, remains. The role of memory as a starting point and source of pleasure is clearer. What gives pleasure is, of course, a highly subjective thing. I know from personal experience that many people are uncomfortable, if not frightened, in my garden, in most cases I think because they are intimidated by plants larger than themselves. But I'm not trying to start a movement.

High Line at Night - Again

Click on the picture to see Judy's photos of our early evening visit to the High Line.

High Line at Night

We visited the High Line last night - not the way I hoped to see it for the first time, but it was a revelation none-the-less. Crowds of strollers, visitors in twos and threes, groups, loungers. The lighting even made it possible to enjoy some of Piet Oudolf's low plantings. But the big surprise was the mass plantings of Prairie Dropseed (Sporobolus heterolepis), which invisibly perfumed the air with a unique fragrance for several hundred feet - like a silent message in the dark. Like an unexpected gift.

Chanticleer revisited

Over a long 4th of July weekend, Phil and I drove down to Chanticleer, just outside Philadelphia. On my first visit last September, I was in a frenzy of plant madness and couldn't properly see the garden. This time, I realized why Chanticleer bills itself "a pleasure garden." It's a fun place, with wild juxtapositions of color and texture, risky plantings you may not like, or you may love. At least they'll make you stop and think.

Below an artistic joke: a grove of ceramic bamboo, with red rooster's combs randomly spurting out.


The "Serpentine" - last year it was planted with bronze sorghum; this year I'm not sure what's coming up. Beans?

Sporobolus heterolepis, a favorite in many parts of the garden, always brings a smile to my face. It's a stunning grass, but humorous too, a cartoon mop head. A buried gnome?

This area warms my heart because the designers decided to make the most of a wet area infested with Equisetum arvense (Horsetail). Bowles Golden sedge for some color highlights. Even some weeds.

Several beautifully carved bridges add an artful tone. This one evokes a feeling of magic or a fairy tale world.

In an out-of-the-way place, someone has been playing with paving made of clay tiles and slate buried on edge.

A sunburst in stone ...

And another, cruder than the first, but perhaps just waiting for a little gravel and age to bring it to completion.

The water wheel accompanied by Thalictrum and ferns ...

An entire field of Sporobolis heterolepis. Last year it was an unbroken expanse; this year it has a path mown through, with Echinacea dotted here and there.

Another Echinacea at the top of the hill. I don't know which one, but it has hairy stems and leaves.

A humorous planting, with skinny Rudbeckia maxima in the background, and rotund verbascums toward the front. Of course, "front" is relative since you can approach this island planting from any direction.

A stone sofa with a stone TV remote just visible resting on the right arm (your left). To either side are stone easy chairs.

One of Chanticleer's many creative groundcover plantings, here decorating the entrance stair to the Tennis Court Garden.

Lots of gold in this garden. Cercis 'Hearts of Gold' like a fountain behind a veil of Calamagrostis a. 'Karl Foerester'.

Still in the Tennis Court Garden, a golden Catalpa behind Salvia sclarea (Clary sage).

Another bed in the Tennis Court Garden. I think I liked the plantings last year more, but I also enjoy knowing I'll always find Chanticleer trying something new.

One of several hand-crafted boxes holding plant lists.


The "formal" courtyard garden behind the main house - more exuberant gold ...



Experiment in color and texture near the swimming pool. Last year a deep purple form of cotton was a featured plant in this area.

At the top of a hill is the stone 'ruin', rebuilt where an estate house was torn down. Here, a stone trough with tender plantings.

A very successful naturalistic garden at the top of the hill. The orange of butterfly weed carries the eye around on a visual exploration.

A weeping hemlock has its own personality.

In fact, many of the exotics are almost like characters in some story I don't yet know. You could have a relationship with this yucca.

An unidentified lilly ... but an appropriate symbol for this pleasure garden.

More on the High Line

My friend Judy Mann has made a second visit to the High Line. Although I work probably a mile from it, I haven't found time to visit yet, but I'm enjoying Judy's photos. Take a look at a slide show and see how the Piet Oudolf-designed plantings are doing now that hot weather has finally arrived in NYC. To see the entire photo album, click on the picture above.

Great Indian Plantain (Cacalia muhlenbergii )

The silhouette of this plant attracted my attention from a moving car several weeks ago. The photos don't really capture the dramatic form that caught my eye speeding by at 50 mph. I stopped last Sunday to get a closer look.

Though I've never encountered Indian plantain before, I thought I'd seen similar plants in some of the nursery catalogues I use, so I went on a search, only to discover there are several different Indian plantains. This one has jagged, angular foliage held at a uniform angle (maybe 60 degrees) from the horizontal. Combined with the rigid stems of the plant, they make for a striking effect against a uniform background. I believe this is Cacalia mulengergii, Great Indian plantain, but correct me, please, if I'm wrong.

The umbelliferous flower heads are decorative, but the foliage and overall figure of the plant are what make this plant unique. Now I'm on a search to find it for my garden.


This close-up gives a better view of the foliage as well as the reddish stems.


This specimen is growing on private land, about 25 feet from the roadside, in the Rosemont Valley near our house in western New Jersey.