Happy Houseplants

MY HOUSEPLANTS ARE THRIVING indoors for, like, the first time ever.

A huge split-leaf philodendron, an asparagus fern, a peace lily that never bloomed, a variegated ficus I thought had a ‘weeping habit’ because it was so droopy — all struggled for years in Brooklyn, with weak light from north-facing or obscured windows.

Put them under skylights on Long Island, and all hell breaks loose! The peace lily is blooming, the ficus standing tall.

One of the things I feared when I bought this house was an excess of skylights. They turn out to be a boon in these short end-of-season days, for my state of mind and for the plants.

And my amaryllis are such fun to watch; they grow an inch a day. I ordered three bulbs this year from White Flower Farm and potted them up. I don’t remember which is which, but I’m really looking forward to ‘Evergreen,’ below, a new offering from South Africa, smaller than standard amaryllis, but what a great, unusual color.

“It’s a Start”

SO I HAD THREE EVERGREENS planted in the front yard to screen the view of the road. Of course, they don’t screen the whole view of the road, just a bit of it. But as the guy from Whitmore’s, the tree farm, said, “It’s a start.”

I’m glad it’s warm and raining now. Two 8-foot trees (a thuja ‘Green Giant’ and a white pine) and a 4-foot-round holly bush that looks like a boxwood (ilex crennata) — in the photo below, it’s the three in the middle ground — went in December 10. Very late, I thought, but there hadn’t been a freeze. That night it went down to 22 degrees.

I wasn’t entirely happy with the way they put them in. I didn’t get the positioning advice I hoped for from the nursery (the boss showed up late), so I had to decide myself where to put them, while four guys with shovels waited. I’d been weighing the factors for two weeks (the need to obscure the commercial building across the street, relate to plants and trees already in place, get enough sun, have room to grow, etc.). It was a tad nerve-wracking, but I think it turned out OK. There seems to be some kind of balance there. And I feel less exposed already. $500 well spent.

I can’t imagine the roots, still in their burlap sacks (said to degrade) are very happy. The workers didn’t seem to dig holes as wide as “the books” say. It was cold, it was late, the guys were no doubt tired. They wouldn’t have watered at all if I hadn’t had several buckets (pots, wastebaskets) at the ready.

But when Brendan, the boss, showed up, he was all professional and confident about flying in the face of what the books say about planting season, depth of hole, width of hole, and need for water.

Oh, and the soil’s no good. I’ll do something about that in the spring.

Anyway, they’re guaranteed.

View from the road:

Brooklyn ‘Gingerbread House’ $12M

YOU HAVE TO SEE IT to believe it. I once drove to Bay Ridge specifically looking for this odd Arts and Crafts-style house I’d heard about, just to prove to myself such a thing could exist in Brooklyn. It does.

Now it’s on the market for the first time since the 1980s. If it brings its asking price of $12 million (highly unlikely), that would set a record for the borough. Designed by James Sarsfield Kennedy in 1917 and built of uncut stone, its most amazing feature is the roof, which looks a lot like a thatched roof on an English cottage out of the Doomsday Book, but is in fact artfully rounded asphalt shingle.

People have taken to calling it the Gingerbread House for some stupid reason. The 5,800-square-foot, 6 BR house, on 1 acre near New York Harbor, is coffered and paneled, with huge fireplaces, a “fountain room,” whatever that is, a chauffeur’s room, a theatre and more. For more info and pictures, see the realtor’s listing.

A New York City landmark, it was originally built for a shipping magnate and has been owned for the past 25 years by Jerry Fishman, who grew up in the neighborhood and wanted to own the house since he was in high school. His mother even claims he tried to crawl out of his stroller at age 2 to get to the house. Really. The whole cockamamie story is here.

Plant Lit

I HAVEN’T READ A NOVEL in ages. My reading these past few months has consisted almost solely of gardening books. I pore over them, turn down corners, highlight, post-it. (If they’re from the library, which many are, I xerox.) Most are picture books. Some are practically literature, which I read for the pleasure of the writing as well as for information and inspiration.

The classics of the genre hold up well, even if they’re a few decades old. In this category are Russell Page (1906-1985) and Henry Mitchell (1923-1993), both of whom I discovered only recently.

I’m just a third of the way through Page’s The Education of a Gardener, first published in 1962. Essentially a memoir of his career designing gardens all over the world, I found this bit particularly relevant to my own half-acre, above, whose view into the woods is the best thing about it:

• “In a small garden designed to ‘borrow’ the world beyond its boundaries, a few carefully placed trees or clumps of foliage, an uncluttered groundwork of grass or sand or low green planting can be correctly scaled to the outer scene, while a simple seat or a few carefully set paving stones will be enough to indicate that is a humanised landscape, in fact a garden.”

Page can be quite funny. These sentences, written almost 50 years ago, were prescient, too, since planting in masses or drifts of just one thing has become one of the signatory elements of 21st century landscape design:

• “Nothing is so unsatisfactory as a walk through a garden where the same plants or combination of plants keep recurring in small patches at every turn. I immediately want to dig them up, replant them all together in one place, and let them tell their story fully and just once.”

Talking about the ‘decadent formality’ of 18th century French gardens, Page writes:

• “One glance from the centre of the main axis of their dreary compositions is enough. There seems no point in setting out for a long and monotonous walk during which one will meet with no surprises and nothing of horticultural interest.”

For 23 years, Henry Mitchell wrote a gardening column, “Earthman,” for The Washington Post. In a collection called The Essential Earthman, published in 1981, he applies lessons from his own small city lot to the world at large. Right now I’m taking comfort from his advice for surviving winter, the gardener’s gloomy season:

• Whenever it snows, go out with a broom and swat all conifers likely to be broken.
• Whenever there are ice storms, pull the window shades down.
• Resolve not to try delphiniums, tuberous begonias, or carnations again.
• Start saving money for next fall’s bulbs.
• Make up your mind whether you will give space to a pussy willow bush. Whichever you decide, decide, and stop being of two minds about it.

Mitchell often makes me laugh. In a riff on garden envy, he writes of a man he once knew: “If there was some plant you had mentally been saving up to buy next year, you could be sure he had at least a dozen mature specimens of it in his woodland.” He reminds gardeners not to feel sorry for themselves, because “Even the great gardens lack many things,” and winds up with “I was sorry because I had no lorapetalum, and then I met a man who had no snowdrop.”

I’m glad the supply of great garden books is almost inexhaustible.

Saving Philly’s ‘Mongrel’ Sites

A COUPLE OF WEEKS AGO, Philadelphia architect David S. Traub had a letter published in The New York Times. He was responding to a column by Christopher Gray on ‘vanishing guideposts’ (in that case, the old NYC bookshop E. Weyhe) and mentioned his founding, with John Dowlin, of a new Philadelphia preservation organization called SOS, for “Save Our Sites.”

Wanting to know more, I called him.

Save Our Sites, Traub told me, seeks to promote the preservation of elements of the Philadelphia cityscape that might escape the attention of mainstream organizations like the Preservation Alliance of Greater Philadelphia. Their interest is not in pedigreed historic structures or important architectural monuments, but what Traub calls “the mongrels and mutts” — overlooked buildings, or groups of buildings, and streetscapes that are “little-known, uncelebrated, neglected, and/or poorly maintained” but that nevertheless add value to the city’s fabric. “We’re not a historic preservation organization per se,” Traub said. “Urban preservation” is more accurate.

The loosely structured non-profit group, led by a steering committee of 12 drawn from the general membership, is poised to respond to preservation crises. Sadly, a couple of key sites have already been lost: the 19th century Garrett-Dunn mansion on the outskirts of the city, vulnerable and unprotected, was destroyed by fire just last summer, and Rindelaub’s Row, below, a group of four 1850s commercial structures on Sansom Street in Center City, fell to the wrecker’s ball to be replaced by a high-rise tower.

Sansom Street, which SOS regards as having “immense potential as a charming, narrow pathway threading through Philadelphia’s downtown,” may be the focus of a walking tour next spring.

At its last semi-annual meeting, in spring 2009, attendees came up with a list of sites in some kind of danger. Among them:

• The Grand Lobby of the Old Main Post Office, 2930 Market Street; closed to the public.

• Old Farm House, 1817 S. Vodges Street; Built circa 1764; Architect unknown; neglected and deteriorating.

• Shawmont Station, 7938 Nixon Street; Built 1834; possible architect: William Strickland; in need of restoration.

• Royal Theater, 1524 South Street; Built 1920; Architect Frank E. Hahn; abandoned and in need of restoration.

• The Wood Street Steps, 300 Block Front Street; Built late 18^th century.  These steps are the last remaining such steps that lead down toward the docks on the Delaware River from high ground to the West.  They are relatively unknown, uncelebrated and in need of restoration.

• Headhouse at Wayne Junction, 4481 Wayne Avenue; Built circa 1900; Architect Frank Furness.

• McIllhenny Townhouse, Southwest corner of Rittenhouse Square; 1916 Rittenhouse Street; vacant and in need of restoration.

• Bauhaus-style House, 515 W. Godfrey Avenue, in the East Oak Lane Neighborhood; Built circa 1939; Architect Israel Demchick; in deteriorating condition.

• Sellers Hall, Christian & St. Anne, Upper Darby, Built 1682, 17^th century; Builder, Samuel Sellers; unused and in need of repair and maintenance.

It’s an intriguing list. I know Philly pretty well, but I’ve never heard of most of those buildings. It makes me want to head down there with map and camera in hand.

Sketches from the SOS website show the northern Philly neighborhood of Fishtown, top, and the Italian Market on 9th Street, bottom.