Cold Climate Gardening

In 1878, Sherman Stowell sold to Elizabeth Brockett 30 acres of land which he had earlier purchased from George Jennings. I now live and garden with my family on some of that land, which Jennings or Stowell, or perhaps Ms. Brockett, had cleared of trees to make pasture. The forest is growing back, but it’s not the same forest. For one thing, several invasive plants are now growing here, everything from Rosa multiflora to Lonicera tartarica. And where are the trilliums?

Call me a romantic or call me ecologically correct, but I’d like to restore the native flora to my parcel of land, land that was sown to timothy and grazed by cows. How does one go about such a restoration? For starters, you have to know what plants were originally growing there. I’ve taken an informal survey of our property and catalogued all the natives I’ve found. I mention trilliums because they bloom along the roadside further down our country lane. What will it take to grow them here?

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Hmm, what’s your name? If you were thinking Kermit you wouldn’t be far wrong.

Winter seems to still be with me. The nights are consistently in the low 20s and snow remnants remain on the ground. Mostly on the north sides of hills and buildings, and hiding behind large trees and objects, the white has not completely gone away. Large swaths of lawn and fields are now visible and the remaining strands and patches of snow can look like washing laid out for drying or ice fields in miniature or ocean foam left behind by the surf. I didn’t think I would feel nostalgic for it but I do and will miss it after it’s gone in a week or two.

But the landscape is coming awake and one of the first groups of animals to become active after a winter’s hibernation are the amphibians. I’ve seen tiger salamanders coming out of the woods by a roadside, heading towards shallow waters and ponds, eager to reacquaint themselves with the world and get on with their lives. I like them, as with all of the native wildlife, but my favorites are Rana clamitans (rana=”frog” clamitans=”loud calling”), commonly known as Green Frogs.

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Brave the snow, get out of the house, and learn something new! Here are some gardener-worthy events coming up in my neck of the woods.
“CNY Blooms” –Spring 2007 will sprout up before you know it, and with it the blossoming of Syracuse’s flower and garden show, now known as “CNY Blooms”. Mark your planting calendar and get ready to enjoy this beautiful show, devoted exclusively to the world of flowers and gardening. It all starts blooming March 1st through the 4th, 2007, in the Convention Center at Oncenter, Syracuse. Hundreds of area landscapers and horticulturalists will be offering you the best of the season’s blooms. Interested in learning more about perennial flower gardens? Want to know more about creative outdoor structures or innovative patio designs? There will be seminars and presentations to help with your landscape plans. Adults-$9, Children 12 and under free. Discount coupons available at a Price Chopper store near you

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Sunday, October 8th, was a gorgeous autumn day, sunny and warm. I decided to go up the hill for a walk in the woods, camera in hand, and you get to share the results. (Be forewarned: this is an even longer than usual post.) But first, a little bit about where we’re going. Our family lives on 14 acres. It is a narrow slice of hillside, with our house near the road at the bottom of the hill and our land going uphill for about half a mile. Once upon a time, it was all forest. We figure our house was built sometime in the 1880s, so that’s probably about the time the trees were cleared for pasture, though it’s always been marginal land for grazing: not especially fertile acid clay, with a high water table that leaves many areas soggy during years of average rainfall. The forest has been growing back as the occupant before us (and maybe the one before him) gradually stopped mowing the areas furthest away from the house, though we still have a field of about 4 to 5 acres.

The field gets mowed yearly with a brush mower, which is also used to keep paths through the woods cleared enough so a suburban girl like me can pick her way without carrying a machete or getting lost. The path starts out in what I call the Secret Garden, which is an area closer to the house that reverted to trees early because it’s clearly too wet to mow. I have dreams of turning it into a native plant garden, but for now, that’s mostly all it is, an idea that, maybe someday . . . After meandering through the Secret Garden, the path starts going up, and threads through the hedgerow alongside the field before joining the woods proper.

Don’t these berries look ornamental? And the birds love them. Such is the recipe for disaster, for these are rose hips of the invasive Rosa multiflora. This shrub is growing on the bank of the seasonal brook that borders the northern side of our property, right before it narrows and becomes easy to cross at the top of a hill. As you cross the brook at this point, you can look back down the slope and watch the water spill over the rocks. I used to dream of sitting on a bridge and enjoying the view, which I would enhance with ferns and native flowers planted into the steep bank. But it took a mere decade for this little glen to fill up with the thorn-infested brambles, which I’ll have to remove before I can ever realize my dream, and I’ll have to be eternally vigilant ever after. Don of An Iowa Garden has been working on eradicating this shrub, and it sounds exhausting.

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If you want to learn more about the plants native to your area, a good place to start would be The New England Wild Flower Society Guide to Growing and Propagating Wildflowers of the United States and Canada by William Cullina. He has done a good job creating a general reference work that can help both novice and advanced gardeners, whether they are attempting habitat restoration or just looking for plants that will do well in a problem area (too wet, too dry and the like).

Not only does he avoid preaching, but he also recognizes that not all of his readers will care to limit themselves to plants native to their region:

While I encourage you to grow and appreciate the plants of your area, I know that we all as gardeners like to seek out the challenge of something new and different, so whenever possible I have included information to aid you in growing a particular plant outside its native range.

In fact, all the information he provides seems aimed to enable you, the gardener, to successfully grow native wildflowers, no matter what your underlying philosophy. His section on Ecological Gardening could be renamed Sensible Gardening, as it discusses the various conditions necessary for plant life and how to best match plants to the conditions at your site. If you’re completely new to the whole idea of habitat gardening, a map will help you locate your floristic province, which is discussed in the pages following the map.

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Question: What do you do with fifteen acres? Answer: That’s a good question! My family and I have been working on the answer for over fifteen years. This probably won’t surprise you, but we seldom come up with the same answer. I wanted the area immediately around the house to be devoted to ornamental landscaping. We also had to decide about the location of poultry and livestock, the vegetable garden, and various play areas for the children. What, if anything, were we going to do with the field, and how were we going to maintain it? Did we want a pond? Where should it go? And what about the woods?

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