Though this is a large garden, many of our favorite things are planted near to hand.  Lilacs and roses cluster beneath one bedroom window, and our oldest Stewartia grows beneath the other.  Our one precious Ilex opaca crowds against the foundation of the living room below one window, sheltered both by the winter shade thrown by the house and the warmth of the basement wall.  The bright yellow culms of Phyllostachys aureosulcata ‘Spectabilis’ enjoy a similar protection and brush against each other, creating what the Japanese call the sound of silence.  The beautiful soft pink hybrid magnolia called ‘Leonard Messel’ overhangs the kitchen door.  And across the face of the house are three deciduous hollies, Ilex verticillata, which are as old as it is and have grown into muscular shapes like small trees.

Because our house is small, that leaves only one aspect, out the upstairs bathroom window, and it is dominated by one of our most treasured small trees, important enough to share a place in our affections even with the Stewartia or the magnolia.  The tree is Sorbus alnifolia, the Alder-leaved or Korean Mountain Ash, and we see it every hour of the day, every day of the year.  Best of all, we look into its crown, close to its leaves and flowers and fruit and somber winter bark, not as if the tree stood out in the garden but is almost part of the room we are in. Read More

Sometimes we find autumn  a melancholy season.  What we had  eagerly anticipated a mere six months before – the first snowdrops, hosts of daffodils, a garden drenched with the scent of roses, the first fresh peas – has passed so quickly.  And what  lies ahead are shorter days, cold winds, snow and ice, a world bereft of color.  So it is a happy fact that  among the last flowers our garden  a few seem almost to be the first flowers of spring.    Crocus speciosus and C. sativus delight us with their limpid blue flowers centered by golden anthers, a late feast of beauty for us and a real one for the autumn  bees.   Along the conifer border, colchicum  also begin magically to appear , studding bare ground with chalices of vibrant lilac-magenta, just the color that looks best with tawny autumn leaves. A single bulb catches the eye from a great distance, and a full drift, in rich warm pink, with perhaps a tawny maple leaf or two caught among them, is the last best thing in the garden to look at.

We find it puzzling that colchicum are unfamiliar to so many gardeners, for  the genus is rich in virtues.  First of all, most  thrive under a wide range of cultural conditions, from the severe winter cold of Zone 4 to the torrid summer heat of Zone 9.  Possessing natural repellents, they are  free of  diseases, insect pests and predators, including deer and rabbits.   Though single bulbs can be breathtakingly costly, up to $12.00 apiece,  colchicum are ecceptionally easy to divide.  We began with 25, and now perhaps there are 2,000 along the front of the conifer border, all from divisions in  early spring, just as the green snouts appear above ground, or in mid-summer when the leaves die down. It is easy and satisfiying work, and our initial investment has paid huge dividends. Read More

Beans

For some years when the great pea harvest was finished the garden entered a quiet season.  There was still plenty to eat of course, salads and carrots, and beets and beans, but the next great celebration waited on the ripening of tomatoes and even more, on the corn harvest.  That should not have been.  We grew what we thought were good American bean varieties, largely bush type, Burpee’s Tender Pick and Purple Queen, Vermont Bean and Seeds Provider, Vesey’s Maxipel, Pine Trees Bountiful.  And we grew pole beans as well, especially Kentucky Wonder, generally thought the best of all.  Yet to us they seemed all to possess a bland sameness never ascending to the status of something you really look forward to eating.  Well, we thought, beans just aren’t as good as peas.

Some years later, while in Rome, we stumbled upon a small shop that sold gardening things – pots and fertilizer and seeds.  The seeds were irresistible, packaged in great large packs with brilliant photographs on their covers.  Their names were all in Italian so we knew not what we were buying.  But buy we did, all manner of things – chicory and lettuce and artichokes and more than anything else, beans.  The combination of name and photograph made them irresistible.   Fagiolo Rampicanta, Meraviglia small di Venezia, for example, a great vigorous climbing bean with broad flat yellow pods of extraordinary flavor.  And Fagiolo rampicanta Supermarconi, also vigorously climbing and equally flavorful if more green than yellow. Read More

Early each spring, we wonder whether we would love snowdrops if they bloomed in  June, rather than at the end of a long, cold winter. Certainly they are beautiful enough to love at any time of the year. Silken pearls in bud and winged when open to the warmth of an early spring day, they dangle on delicate, tread-like pedicels, dancing in the slightest breeze.  They are the very definition of whiteness, the more for the icy, ethereal  green that marks them all.  But our passion for them (passion it is, for we love them more than any other flower) stems as much from our great need as from their great beauty. That need is for light, change, and  life  after the still  of winter.  Somehow, they seem possessed of magical properties, breaking a curse of darkness. For when they choose to appear , winter cannot come again.  Or if it does, it cannot stay. Read More

In the middle of January, almost always, there comes a brief period of mild days so predictable from year to year that it has a name like any other season, the January Thaw. Those days are a tease, really, for the cruelty of February still lies before us, and even March can go out like the lion it came in. But for a few days rain might fall, snows melt and even night temperatures may hover around 20 degrees, which any seasoned Vermonter would consider balmy. Our little stream roars, and we are lured out into parts of the garden we have not visited for two months because the drifts have been that deep. Our garden blood stirs, as surely as must the blood of our two tortoises, buried deep in the greenhouse earth to sleep out the winter. But they don’t stir. Their pinched, nostrilled snouts never appear above ground, and ripe strawberries and slugs remain in their dreams. We are different from them.

Here in Vermont, the January Thaw does not hurry winter along, for we must still be in thrall to it for two or even three more months. If we lived in the coastal regions of the next state below us, Massachusetts, we might actually poke in a few pansies during these mild days or even plant a row of peas. But that would be quite foolish here, and so we continue to subsist on an indoor diet of forced paperwhite narcissus, supermarket cyclamen (the dwarf ones that proved fragrant and are saved from year to year) and our carefully cosseted collection of camellias. Later in the month, the jasmine in the winter garden will bloom, scenting the house with its magic fragrance. Read More