A Pocket of Joy

Life is a series of challenges interspersed with pockets of joy, one of which I was blessed to experience on a recent March weekend. Thanks to the intervention of our mutual friends Barbara and Les Seigman, very accomplished gardeners in their own right, Ron and I, along with our neighbor and friend, Jane, found ourselves invited to spend the day with them and Pamela Harper. Mrs. Harper has been a major force in garden writing for many years, and is the designer, creator, and curator of one of the finest gardens it’s ever been my pleasure to visit. I have always loved Mrs. Harper’s writing, and our time together in her garden (and mine) that day convinced me more than ever that great garden writing requires a rare combination of intelligence, good humor, and, most of all, the knowledge and skill acquired only through many years of hands-on, trial-and-error, take-no-prisoners gardening. This is a woman who writes about gardening from first hand experience rather than relying solely on research (although I’m sure she’s done a prodigious amount of that as well); this is nowhere more evident than in the impeccably maintained and organized garden which has shaped her life and work for nearly 40 years. Mrs. Harper’s most recent book, Time Tested Plants: Thirty Years in a Four Season Garden, verbally and visually (she’s also an accomplished photographer) chronicles her efforts to transform two sandy acres in Seaford into what is surely one of the finest gardens in southeastern Virginia.

Thankfully, this progressive garden tour began in our own crowded, overgrown mess of a garden, woefully neglected for several years now due to the demands of work and family obligations. Our guests, being kind, polite people, struggled valiantly to find nice things to say, and no injuries were sustained as we picked our way cautiously along the uneven pathways which snake among the jumble of pots, hoses, and makeshift structures which litter our property. I should not have invited them to the house at all, except that I felt it was the polite thing to do; if I were not interested in having these people as friends deserving of full disclosure, we’d have met at a restaurant for lunch and had done with it. At any rate, they’ve seen “the jungle”, warts and all. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I do know all the rules of garden design, grooming, and maintenance, but knowing and doing are two different things. Good design, timely pruning, and weed-free borders will just have to wait until family situations change, or until I can retire.

After lunch (which I, since I like these folks, did not prepare), we drove to Seaford and began touring the amazing Harper garden. Seeing the garden itself would have been magical enough, but having a personal tour, complete with anecdotes and observations gleaned over years of loving labor, made this easily my favorite two hours of the year so far. I took my camera, but gave up trying to capture the effect of this paradise photographically. The sight of an ocean of Ipheon spreading under Magnolia stellata (which is pictured in Harper's book much better than I could ever photograph it), of Cyclamen hederifolium better than a foot in diameter each (issuing from corms which must easily be the size of dinner plates), and of the spectacular yellow Magnolia ‘Butterflies’, backlit and glowing in the diffuse light of a drizzly afternoon, are memories to carry somewhere other than on a computer hard drive. As we explored each of dozens of intricately designed and maintained island beds, Pam (as she’s known to her friends) kept up a running commentary and helped us to envision how the plantings would develop over the coming months.

It’s rare to meet someone so gifted in the use of plants and words; I realized later, on re-reading her last book, that many of the opinions and observations I’ve been making to anyone who’ll listen were Pam’s rather than mine. When I admitted this, by way of a clumsy compliment, her gracious response was that even Helen Keller had been accused of plagiarism for restating ideas internalized from the writings of others; I can’t, however, claim Miss Keller’s excuse for this behavior – only forgetfulness and a measure of attention deficit deficiency.
My reactions to the great gift of this tour have been mixed. Some hopelessness, I have to admit, that I will ever manage to get my garden under control enough to even deserve the name after seeing Pam’s; encouragement that I was able to keep up to some degree with her vast knowledge of horticulture and to identify a large percentage of the botanical treasures on display; the delight of receiving some choice plants I’ll treasure for many years to come; and, mostly, gratitude to these wonderful people for taking the time to spend the day with us and share the joy of their experiences as friends and gardeners. I was reminded of one of the great joys of my childhood and adolescence – long Sunday afternoons spent rambling through the woods of Southampton County with my grandmother as she identified and taught me to appreciate the indigenous flora and fauna. I can’t imagine a better way to spend one’s time.

Hellebore Heaven

Hellebore Heaven

The best thing about February, other than my father’s having been born on Valentine’s Day, is that the hundreds of Helleborus species and hybrids in my collection come into bloom. If I had to name a favorite plant and flower, it would be one of these. I started growing and hybridizing them about 15 years ago, before many of the spectacular new varieties were available in the United States, scrounging plants and exchanging seeds from all over the world. I still have some of my original plants, and I probably should get rid of them, because they pale in comparison to some of my more recent acquisitions and many of my newer seedlings, and are probably hampering my efforts to improve certain strains by crossbreeding with them. Culling is the toughest part of plant breeding – I have an incredibly difficult time with consigning any healthy plant to the compost – but it’s also necessary when interbreeding can occur as readily as it does among the Hellebores. I promise myself that I’ll label some of the “dogs” (which are still beautiful, each in its own way) and donate them to plant sales this spring. Because it takes about 3 years to grow the plants from seed to bloom, I have tons of seedlings in cold frames this winter, in pots from 3 inches to 4 gallons, all waiting to be evaluated. Every year I tell myself not to save and plant seeds – there isn’t room – but every year I grow another couple of hundred. The new ones (planted last June) are just now breaking ground as the weather begins to open up. There’s so much information on varieties and growing techniques available online (and in the great recent book on the subject by Judith Knott Tyler and C. Colston Burrell) that I won’t try to reproduce any of that here. I have, however, learned a couple of interesting facts about growing hellebores in southeastern Virginia.

Hellebores will flower in the shade, but I find they grow and bloom much better with at least half a day of sun (preferably in the morning). The caulescent Hellebores (argutifolius, foetidus, lividus, and their hybrids) prefer as much sun as they can get. The healthiest of my H. x hybridus (descended from the clump-forming species) grow at the feet of rose bushes where they are exposed to full sun for about 9 months of the year, but shaded during the hottest part of the summer by the roses themselves and the Salvia guaranitica which runs rampant throughout the bed as well. H. niger, the “Christmas Rose”, usually doesn’t bloom here for Christmas, but for the last two years it’s arrived around New Year’s Day. These seem to do better here in large containers than in the ground (I heavily amend the soil to counteract the natural acidity of our heavy clay), and my favorite plant (supposedly) descends from a famous strain called “Potter’s Wheel”. Its blooms can reach five inches in diameter, and very often a second crop is produced in May or June. The only disappointment for me regarding this species is the difficulty I have in germinating and growing on the seed; my few plants produce large amounts, but it germinates poorly, and the resulting seedlings are usually so weak that they don’t survive our hot, humid summers. (Note added April 20, 2008: This year, for the first time, I have hundreds of healthy H. niger seedlings ready to transplant - a good lesson in persistence!)

Because of serious drainage issues (there isn’t much here), I’m growing many of my best plants in pots. Hellebores have done well for me in half barrels and large clay pots; I have been using fiberglass planters for larger plants as well, but I’ve found that these require lots of perforation to allow for enough drainage, and that the soil used in them needs to be highly amended. This year I’m experimenting with planting in “grow bags”, flexible containers sewn from heavy duty landscape fabric which hold anywhere from five to ten gallons of soil. They aren’t all that attractive, but my plan is to group them together and disguise the fabric with pine straw; their flexibility should allow them to be butted up together to simulate a raised bed. I discovered these when visiting a nursery in DC which was using them to hold containerized tree peonies (another member, along with Helleborus and Clematis, of the Ranunculus tribe.) The bags drain really well, even when filled with pure potting soil, but so far I’ve found only one source which will sell to retail customers, and their service hasn’t been great. I’m growing about 50 plants in bags this year, and I’m hoping this simplifies the container growing process. Even with thoughtful placement, careful watering, and the liberal use of perlite and granite grit as soil additives, two or three plants will develop crown rot every August when the air gets hot, humid, and still. It’s easy to spot, even from a distance – the usually glossy leaves take on a decidedly matte finish as the roots and stems decay, becoming unable to send any water or nourishment to the plant’s extremities. Usually death occurs within a matter of days, but sometimes I manage to salvage part of a plant by employing triage methods – washing all the soil from the roots, cutting away all of the rotten roots and rhizome, soaking the remainder in a fungicide, and repotting in fresh potting mix. I got lucky in this way with one of my few double varieties (these are much rarer and hard to get than the singles) last summer, and it has a few blooms now.

The success of tissue culture is a recent development in the world of hellebore breeding, and has already resulted in thousands of identical plants flooding the market through mass retail outlets. Part of the appeal of Hellebores for me has always been their elusiveness; you had to buy them in bloom to know exactly what you were getting, and still we have to travel great distances to visit growers of quality plants. Next Saturday I’m hoping to visit what I think of as “Hellebore Heaven” – Pine Knot Farms (run by Judith Knott Tyler, who co-wrote the aforementioned “bible” of Hellebores) in Clarksville, VA. They hold their “Hellebore Festival” for only two weekends late each winter, and it is a spectacular place to visit; acres and acres of woodlands filled with blooming plants in the dead of winter, not to mention hundreds of their hybrids for sale in full bloom in the nursery area.
Even Pine Knot has begun offering plants produced by tissue culture, including this gorgeous semi-double H. niger variety called “Double Fantasy”. I’m glad such rare plants are becoming widely available, and this may, in the end, help to cure my obsession with this genus. Once plants identical to those in my garden begin showing up at Walmart and Trader Joe’s, I suspect they’ll cease to hold the same cachet for me as in the past. I got over growing Phalaenopsis and Cattleya orchids for that reason (aided and abetted by a nasty scale infestation which claimed most of my collection). For now, however, I’m glad I have these spectacular plants to lure me into the garden on the very rare occasion when I’m home in February during daylight hours.