Winterberry (Ilex verticillata) is a native holly that drops its leaves in the fall. That’s what enables them to survive in colder climates. If your winter landscape seems dark and dreary, you will want to plant some of these shrubs where you can see their profusion of colorful berries from the heated side of your home’s windows. One way I knew that my next-door neighbor was a gardener before I ever met him, was that he had a hedge of winterberry screening his house from the road.

I admire this hedge of winterberries every time I drive by it. These are 'Winter Red'.

Planting winterberries is a good way to feed the birds in winter without filling the feeder. Many kinds of songbirds eat the berries, though my neighbor’s hedge doesn’t appear to be touched. Some say that the berries have to be frozen several times before the birds like them. If that is true, then it is not surprising that the berries haven’t been eaten, as we have had a surprisingly mild winter so far.

These berries are an important food source for many kinds of birds

Mike used to have cages around his winterberries to permit them to attain some size.

Posted for Wildflower Wednesday, created by Gail of Clay and Limestone, to share wildflowers/native plants no matter where you garden in the blogasphere. “It doesn’t matter if we sometimes show the same plants. How they grow and thrive in your garden is what matters most. It’s always the fourth Wednesday of the month!”

Imagine having a garden composed of only female plants. It could be considered a goddess garden. Think how subtle that would be. I wonder how long it would take for visitors to discover the organizing principle. It might be the solution for persons with pollen allergies or provide cuts for their house.

I could have included Ash, Willows, Poplars, and many others but making a list or creating a catalog isn’t the point. By asking a simple question “Why?” and pursuing it, an unnoticed world opened up. It was always around me, waiting to be revealed. One last story.

The picture of cycads from earlier doesn’t match the words in the paragraph. The plants are well-grown but they certainly don’t “dominate” the bed, let alone the room. On one of my visits I discovered that the wonderful old plants I wrote about were gone. I was heart-sickened and very depressed about it. Yes, they had outgrown their area, becoming too tall and touching the ceiling. But still, to treat them as trash and throwing them out felt wrong. My visit was ruined; the joy I always felt was gone.

The facility has undergone several expansions over the years. I always think of these as the “new” areas because their more modern architecture doesn’t mesh seamlessly with Morgan’s original design. I routinely visit several areas throughout the building and a surprise was waiting for me in one of the new wings. The old cycads hadn’t been discarded but had been moved to a temporary bed while a permanent one was prepared. The people in charge valued what was around them; they weren’t just taking care of a place. They are stewards, honoring the past, living in the present, and planning a positive future. My wish is many more years for the cycads and all of us.

I had a hard time thinking of a vegetable that belonged with this group and then it hit me: Asparagus. Named varieties are usually all male but the grower missed this one. Asparagus is my number one favorite vegetable and the plants from the garden are the sweetest I’ve tasted. Male and female are equally good but do remove the seedlings as a crowded bed will become impossible to tend.

This seems the right place to state that marijuana is also a member of this exclusive group. In this case, it is the female plants and their buds that are the objects of desire. Or so I’ve been told. Although I came of age in the late 60s and 70s, I’ve never had the desire to indulge in the herb. However, I did one time partake of it baked into brownies. My thoughts and perceptions seemed the same after imbibing as they did beforehand, so I can’t truly say if a high was achieved. But my memory of the brownies’ sublime chocolaty goodness still lingers, so who knows.

If you were to cross a rush with papyrus, added a touch of bamboo and seasoned with horsetail, the result might be a Restio. In this case, the entire family is dioecious. Originating mostly in South Africa and Australia with a smattering of species in other countries in the southern hemisphere, these are tough plants that can take a lot of drought and seasonal wet, don’t require intense fertilization, and aren’t bothered by pests. Their sin is they aren’t cold hardy but they can take colder temperatures than once was believed. Their foliage is usually a variation on non-branching reed-like culms but there are also plants with feathery groupings of fine hair-like stems that make great contrasts to other plants. Plant size can vary from 18 inches to 10 foot specimens, depending on the species. Sexual dimorphism can come into play as Restio females are often larger and more robust than the males.

We’ve been growing one of the more common ones for five years and it makes the seasonal cycles from indoors to outdoors and back with aplomb. Its needs are simple – water, light and protection from winter. It doesn’t require feeding and doesn’t get bugs. It’s the earliest to go out in the spring and one of the last to return in the fall. It doesn’t fall apart if a light to mild frost hits it. It takes division beautifully and mixes well with its neighbors. What’s not to like?

Part 5 of a 6 part series. Tomorrow – wrapping it up.

I never considered it before I started looking for these plants but some of them exhibit sexual dimorphism, an obvious physical difference between male and female. The Silene is a good example. The male leaves are narrower, its sepals are pigmented and the flowers are smaller but more abundant. The females are a brighter white, their bases are inflated and they rise on taller stems.

Bittersweet also exhibits differences when young. My male is smaller but its leaves are broader. The female is a vigorous grower and is four times as large with narrower leaves. There are generally two kinds of plants available, American and Asian. I suspect my plants are Asian, based on the way the flowers and fruits are distributed and arranged on the stems. My desire is to grow only the native species. Well that’s the excuse I’ll use for their removal because, except for the little fruits, there is nothing distinguishing or interesting about their growth or foliage. I’m happy to try something new. Maybe from the next group of plants.

Kiwis from the market are also vining plants and yep, they have two houses too. Buy plants from a reputable seller if you want fruit and be sure to always get two. The Kiwi genus is Actinidia (ak-tih-NID-ee-uh) and if you’re willing to venture into new territory there are ones that are hardy into zone 4 and maybe even 3. Their fruit is smaller and hairless than the typical Kiwis and they’re also green when ripe. I recently bought some of these fruits, marketed as “Kiwi berries”, that were the size of large grapes. No peeling was required as the skin is soft and edible and so are the miniscule seeds. The taste was delicious, showing a flavor kinship to grapes, bananas and custard. If you think of them as “fancy” or “gourmet” grapes you’ll really enjoy them. Actinidia plants themselves are handsome enough that even if they didn’t fruit you would want them climbing on something. In fact, the species kolomikta (koh-loh-MIK-tuh) is grown for its foliage. The leaves are naturally variegated with a large pale area at the tip of each leaf. The best cultivars tend towards white and sometimes even pink. The male is the showier of the two.

If there is one plant that most people know you need two for fruit it would be Holly. A mainstay for the holiday season, the evergreen ones are often the backbone in many borders. There are many species, varieties, and hybrids. Lists are available that recommend which males and females are the most compatible with each other. Think of the list as a dating service that has pre-screened and matched up the possible partners based on their flowering time and the species involved.

There is another shrub that is also associated with holidays but you’re more likely to have sniffed it than seen it and that’s Bayberry. Plants grow best in part shade and are nominally evergreen but its steel blue berries are the real reason to grow it. A friend with an herb business used to collect the berries and their seeds from a splendid patch growing at the largest mall in the Albany region. But they’re no longer there as the mall removed the plants and created an employee break area in their place. I keep hoping a seed or two might have been overlooked and the plants can grow again but so far nothing has come back.

The Staghorn Sumacs around here are what helped push me to write about this subject. Some plants had large red fruits on their terminal growths while others didn’t and I wondered why. I wish it had come to me intuitively but no, I looked it up. These are large plants and their non-stop suckering makes them ill-suited for any but the largest gardens. I mature clump can easily be 30 x 30’ and larger. The golden leaved variety “Tiger Eyes” is reputed to be smaller and less aggressive.

Sumacs have fantastic fall color but beyond that I couldn’t see the point to growing them. That changed one day in early spring. After a short spate of warm and sunny days, the weather turned cold again and then shifted over to snow flurries. Denied easy access to the ground, Robins flew onto the plants, settled down and began actively dismantling the fruits. I’ve also seen wild turkeys in midwinter take advantage of the bounty. One athletic bird was balanced on top, opening and eating the fruits. It was also inadvertently knocking down others to its cohorts below. Part 4 of a 6 part series. Tomorrow – part 5

The swelling flower buds of Red Maples give some of the first colorings in spring, letting us know that most of winter is behind us. The open flowers reveal that they’re part of this group, too.

Another dioecious American native is Kentucky Coffee Tree with the challenging name Gymnocladus dioica (jim-NOK-lad-us dy-oh-EYE-kuh, try it, it’s fun). Ungainly as saplings, they appear as nothing more than sticks but with handsome and large compound leaves. I have a liking for plants in the pea family and planted three small ones. I’m hoping I have both types but it will be many years in the future before I’ll know.

If you noticed the similarity between dioecious and dioica then you’re quicker at perceiving patterns and relationships than I am. But once my attention was drawn to it I’ve been seeing this species name more often than I expected.

A commonly encountered garden perennial is Goatsbeard, Aruncus dioicus. Its extravagantly creamy flowers enliven shaded beds in summer and its commonness here allows it to escape close scrutiny. I feel fortunate that mine is a seed-grown clump rather than clonally (vegetative) propagated and double lucky to have both sexes. The female is the plant with the slender plumes on the far left in the above picture. After the flowers are gone the seedpods look as if small green chains have been threaded along the stems.

False meadow rue, Thalictrum dioica, is a native woodlander. It’s not locally abundant but I see it every so often, especially now that I’ve been looking for it. It doesn’t have the wow factor of the garden selections and hybrids but has its own grace. The flowers in close up remind me of sea creatures; the male are little jellyfish and the female are tiny octupuses or anemones. A more familiar plant is stinging nettle, Urtica dioica. We used to call it electric weed as we plucked young seedlings from cutflower beds. It was onerous and never-ending work but preferable to handling the mature stems. I’m crazy enough to consider growing it again because it is a preferred food plant of Red Admiral butterflies.

If you’re in the mood for something different how about Glade Mallow, Napaea dioica? These can be big plants and in their preferred habitat of part shade and good moisture the leaves are large and the flowering stems are tall – up to ten feet. Small white flowers in clusters on top are reputed to be fragrant. I haven’t grown this one yet but I keep eyeing seed lists and I know I’ll succumb at some point.

Red Campion, Silene dioica, is an English wildflower I might want to grow in the future. Until then I’m enjoying its European stable mate white Campion. There’s no question it’s a field weed but it’s so pretty and carefree that I don’t discourage them when they wander into the garden. I like all kinds of Dianthus but they haven’t grown well for me. Silene is also a member of the Pinks family and I’ll use it as a substitute until I’m able crack the code of my Dianthus deficiency. Part 3 of a 6 part series. Tomorrow – part 4

In the Oakland hills near the Berkeley border is Chapel of the Chimes, a columbarium. Renovated and expanded by Julia Morgan, the architect of Hearst Castle in San Simeon, it is a melding of Spanish and Gothic styles with arches, latticing and copious stained glass. I’ve been visiting since I was very young and it remains one of my all time favorite destinations. I reacquaint myself each visit with its myriad fountains, conservatory gardens, retractable skylights and hidden rooms.

Chapel of the Chimes is built into a hillside and Morgan’s building takes full advantage of the site. From the main entry hall the original building rises in three terraces. Two palms dominated the first terrace. As I grew older and embraced the world of horticulture, I realized they weren’t palms but cycads, members of an ancient group of plants. These plants were tall and splendid and had been there for many decades. When they flowered it surprised me. Closer inspection revealed the inflorescences were different and I realized they were female and male plants. What were the chances that one of each would be there? I took it as a sign of providence and fate.

Ginkgo trees are also relics of an earlier time and share the fact of separate male and female plants. Most named cultivars are male as the females are accused of being “messy” with their fruit drop. If you have the space why not plant a group of both kinds and let them fulfill their destiny.

The native Black tupelo mostly fits in with this group of plants. Considered dioecious, it occasionally produces flowers of the opposite sex as well as perfect flowers on the same tree. I hope you’re not thinking confused gender identity too. Part 2 of a 6 part series. Tomorrow – part 3

The street I grew up on was lined with Sycamore trees. Their leafy masses were a delight in summer and always produced some good-natured grumbling during fall raking. These were small city lots and as time moved on problems developed. Blocked sewer lines became common and sidewalks started to lift and shift, making walking difficult and potentially hazardous. The repair costs were a burden for most owners so my family and most of the other homeowners had their trees removed. The city proposed replanting with new trees of a different type and most of us accepted their offer. The trees they planted were selected for their smaller mature size and evergreen leaves. The homeowners were satisfied but something was lost and the feeling of a neighborhood was gone, at least to my eyes.

After several years of living with the new trees it was apparent something was different with ours. Most of the others remained tidy, growing modestly and seemed unchanging from year to year. Ours insisted on being different. It grew faster than its street mates, always suckering madly. Its branches were longer, its leaves more lustrous and luxurious. The reason it was different was revealed when pods appeared and dropped on everything below it. The city had planted Carob trees and ours was one of the few females around.

Whether for beauty or fragrance or the fruit that may develop, we enjoy flowers for many reasons. Their real purpose, however, is reproduction and continuance of their genetic lines. Most plants have flowers with pollen and seed-bearing parts, their stamens and pistils, in one flower. These types of flowers are described as “perfect”.

Imperfect flowers are unisexual, being either staminate (pollen-producing) or pistillate (seed-producing) but not both. Monoecious (moe-NEE-shus), meaning one house, have separate flowers on the same plant. My alders already have small pollen-laden catkins waiting for spring and their assignations with the cone-like females. Corn, squash, calla lilies and other aroids, and tuberous begonias are common examples.

Dioecious (dye-EE-shus), meaning two houses (see the pattern) are imperfect flowers on different plants. This is a very small group in the floral kingdom and you have to wonder why this was thought to be the path for survival and continuation of their lines. But it works and the plants are still with us. Allow me to introduce you to some of these odd plants. Part 1 of a 6 part series. Tomorrow – part 2

When we first started the process of buying our new house, I thought we’d be moving in August. In early July I started digging up colchicum corms as the leaves died down, indicating they were going dormant. It turns out the first date proposed for closing on a house is usually wildly optimistic, and my first opportunity to plant the corms in their new homes was Labor Day weekend–when it was raining.

I dug these colchicums in early July, when they went dormant.

The weather has not been cooperating, but neither is the soil. This is what the native soil at the new place looks like:

The saturated clay soil is heavy and difficult to work with

For the Plant Geeks Among Us: Colchicum Botanical Structures

The silver lining in this horticultural cloud is the opportunity to see how colchicums “work.” Compared to other bulbous plants, they have an odd structure–a foot–that extends below the base of the corm. You can see in the photo below that the primary flowering shoot emerges from this foot.

The primary flower stalk emerges from the foot of the colchicum corm.

The leaves are from this past spring. If the ovary is fertilized, the seed capsule will emerge with next spring's leaves.

Rose ovaries--the hips--are right behind the blossom.

That’s one reason why I like colchicums. Besides being pretty, they are seriously weird.

Queen of the Prairie in the Secret Garden, early July

By the end of July, Queen of the Prairie is just about done blooming.

Queen of the Prairie provides pollen for bees, beetles, and flies, according to Plants For a Future.

Recently some road work has caused me to take a detour on my way to town, and gave me the opportunity to see several stands of Queen of the Prairie growing alongside the road. It seems to be native to my immediate area, which makes me feel that it was a good choice for the Secret Garden, where I try to plant local natives exclusively. While I have acid clay, the Pennsylvania Natural Heritage Program says it is native to fens, which are “calcium-rich peat-producing wetlands.” What this tells us is that Queen of the Prairie hasn’t read the reference books, so if you are in Zones 3-7 and have a sunny, moist area where it can send its rhizomes out without overwhelming other plants (or are willing to be vigilant), give it a try.

Posted for Wildflower Wednesday, created by Gail of Clay and Limestone, to share wildflowers/native plants no matter where you garden in the blogasphere. “It doesn’t matter if we sometimes show the same plants. How they grow and thrive in your garden is what matters most. It’s always the fourth Wednesday of the month!”

Herbert Butterfield’s essay (The Whig Interpretation of History) was an attack on liberal triumphalism [i.e., the 'Whig interpretation']…Whig history purveyed a concept of progress as the central theme of English history…It has become common among historians to speak of ‘whig history’ for any subjection of history to what is essentially a teleological view of the historical process. ~ John Burrow, A History of Histories

This morning, I almost dug up the dead golden-foliaged hoptree, Ptelea trifoliata ‘Aurea’. It is dead, I know; dead, gone, finished, kaput. There was no rhyme or reason for its dying. It is on the Front Lawn, protected from all of winter’s hazardous winds, the books say it is hardy (to Zone 3 according to an ancient Lost Horizons catalogue; to Zone 5 if we are to believe the heavyweight RHS Encyclopaedia), it flourished exquisitely last year, it is surrounded by other apparently healthy young trees that have no right to be here at all, and its sibling – though not golden-leaved – survives and grows, little by little each year, in the Maze where it is exposed to all the miseries that winter can manufacture.

It is this caprice that would drive gardeners to a condominium with air-conditioning and a concierge. It is this same caprice that teaches them to be stubborn, to understand that gardening sometimes appears to be an obstacle course, that sloughs of despond, hills of difficulty, doubting castles and mountains of error, are all there to be avoided or negotiated so that on this very same morning as I weed in Charlie’s Place at the entrance to the driveway, I am tempted to an uncorrupted happiness by the intense, sensual fragrance of Daphne alpina at my shoulder.

The loss of the hoptree is not just the loss of a golden exclamation point, but the loss of fragrance, too. It has, in spite of an ungenerous occasional name–tastes do vary–of Stinking Ash, small yellow flowers that make it “probably the most fragrant of any hardy tree” (Hillier). It doesn’t do anything very exciting in the fall, so it violates the late Henry Landis’s criteria for selecting any tree for the garden: good bark, good foliage, good fall colour; flowers are an unnecessary bonus.

Trees That Do Well Here

What makes the loss of the ptelea particularly surprising is that a number of other small trees thought to be more fragile came through with flying colours. Fraxinus ornus, the Manna Ash from southern Europe, with some shelter from spruce trees on the west side of the Western Triangle, lost not an inch at the top, though it seems to have lost a lower twig or two to deer. It is unlikely, given its provenance, the fact that it is a member of the olive family and its May flowering time, that we shall ever see the “showy, creamy white flowers.” Never mind, says Hugh Johnson (The International Book of Trees), the flowers “are only half the story. The whole tree is so voluptuous in glossy leafage that…it stands out in staid parkland like the velvet-framed bosoms of Nell Gwynn and her contemporaries on ancestral dining-room walls.” Even at my age, that’s a cheery thought.

Three other trees are worth a mention. I first saw Aesculus pavia, the Red Buckeye, flowering in the Leonard Buck garden in New Jersey almost twenty years ago, and have longed ever since to be able to grow it. It is a native of the southern United States, a small tree eventually to about 6m, with deep crimson flowers in typical horse-chestnut racemes in June. The buckeyes, both the Ohio and the Yellow, have thrived here, but pavia has been a struggle even though it has the protection of the north fence in the Nursery Garden. This spring it has grown forcefully for the first time, and even though it is less than 2m high, its foliage is striking. The Ohio and Yellow buckeyes flowered well this year, but our Horse-chestnut had not a single flower.

Yet the past winter cannot have been harsh. I am permitted to be definitive on that because Stewartia pseudo-camellia, a tree that meets all of Henry Landis’s criteria, is also about to reveal the bonus.

Stewartia pseudocamellia (photo courtesy Brian Bixley)

Finally, a Chinese tree, the Golden Rain Tree, Koelreuteria paniculata.

Koelreuteria paniculata (photo courtesy Brian Bixley)

I am going now to check on the Northern Catalpa that we planted to replace the ancient Manitoba maple that I wrote about last year. While I am doing that, I’ll take a look at the ptelea, just in case.
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Time and the Garden

One of my spring books has been John Burrow’s A History of Histories (2007). It is a survey of writing by historians from pre-Grecian times up to Eamon Duffy’s The Voices of Morebath (2001). Burrow’s central enquiry is, How did earlier historians view the past and how did they write about it? The book is eloquent, witty, texturally dense, so much so that the brilliant passages I determine to retain on Thursday evening have slipped through the sieve of my mind by Friday morning. Never mind. Next time I need to know about Herodotus or Vico or Ranke, I shall know where to turn.

Just as when I go to concerts I think about the garden (‘We need more adagio passages’), so it has been difficult for me to read A History of Histories without occasionally asking myself how the text relates to gardens. Gardens are the most history-shaped of all art forms. It may take several years to put up a building, but that is because of the size or the technical issues of the project; if the building could be put up faster, everyone would be pleased.

But time is the essence of a garden, both within a year as the garden passes through its seasons, and from year to year as plantings multiply or recede, as shrubs expand or shrink, as trees grow slowly into their mature shapes. There is no right moment when the garden will be complete, no Celestial City to signify arrival; the garden is always coming from somewhere, going on to somewhere else, but it is a garden now, at this very moment, and we take our pleasure from the process of growth and change. Just as we are, in our personal lives, the integral of our experiences–our ‘history’–so gardens are the slow and irregular accretions of past decisions. There is no destination for a garden. Gardening is inherently anti-teleological.

Among the visitors on our first Open Garden day this spring was a woman who lives most of the time in the Barbados but who also has a house in Owen Sound where she plans to make a garden. She had read about Essays on Gardening in a Cold Climate and about our garden on this very website and she has her own gardening blog, Green Theatre, where you can see, if you should so wish, some of the photos she took at that early moment in the gardening season. (It is quite astonishing for us to look at them and remember how excited we were at such a minimal canvas.)

Deborah–for that is her name–surprised me by stating, rather than asking, “You must have had a plan,” to which I could only reply shamefacedly, “Well, not really, at least…” “At least” meant two things. In the first place, there never was, never has been, any clear notion of where this garden was ultimately headed, no sense of an unwavering direction, no belief that anything is essential. Anything that had been achieved had come about through a series of ad hoc piecemeal design engineering responses to problems that suddenly or slowly made themselves manifest.

But, secondly, in the 1990s we finally drew a plan of how the garden then was, and a series of plans of what the garden had looked like at various times over the preceding thirty years. Those plans both revealed to us the follies of the past and suggested changes that might compensate (or at least cover up) the flaws; and they also suggested lines of future directions.

The failure to plan means the garden is filled with design aberrations, of curves that do not trace out the Hogarthian Line of Beauty, of straight lines that wander in order to accommodate some earlier transgression or afterthought. We have imposed little on the natural shapes and contours of the landscape, and the decreasing formality and maintenance as you move away from the house links the garden integrally with the surrounding countryside. Perfection is intolerable, inhuman. We stumble forward, with the happy feeling that we are making a garden outside the Whig tradition. Three cheers for Butterfield!

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What Blooms Here in Mid- to Late June

Middle, late June is one of the most exciting moments. If the weather cooperates, the Peony Hedges will be in flower at the same time as the Martagon lilies.

The Peony Hedges looking toward the Blue Bench (Photo courtesy Brian Bixley)

The Beauty Bushes (Kolkwitzia amabilis) will face the row of Japanese Lilac trees along opposite sides of the driveway. Abelia mosanensis in the Nursery Garden is even now covered with dark pink buds that will open to light pink flowers with a fragrance “better than a lilac”. Immediately to its north Calycanthus floridus is producing its unusual maroon flowers with a fragrance, one writer says, of “strawberry-pineapple” (I have been on my knees, sniffing, without detecting either); and to its north the enormous Rosa moyesii will be sprinkled with small, bright rose flowers. The exotic Lilium hansonii–exotic for its colouring but also for its provenance: in the wild it is said to be found only on the small island off the coast of Korea–is poised to flower in the Barnyard Beds.

Lilium hansonii blooming in the Barnyard Bed. (photo courtesy Brian Bixley)

The next open garden at Lilactree Farm will be September 18th. Visitors at other times are welcome by appointment only.