My Friends’ Gardens

FROM THE SUNNY SANDS of Far Rockaway in eastern Queens to the backyards of Brooklyn and the Upper West Side, from the Connecticut shore to the Long Island beachfront, many of my friends are enthusiastic amateur gardeners, and often share photos with me. It’s a varied lot, to be sure, but there’s a common denominator: we are all nurturers who delight in wresting beauty from sometimes-unlikely places.

Susan in Connecticut turned her driveway, below — the sunniest available spot — into a tidy and productive vegetable garden, with gravel pathways separating the raised beds.

Barbara created an appealing oasis in a Manhattan backyard with virtually NO direct sunlight, making the most of it with a wood deck and filling in with shade-loving container plants.

Nancy’s 30-year-old Boerum Hill garden, though north-facing, receives lots of sunlight. The climbing roses and hydrangea, along with stands of wood hyacinth and irises, do their thing year after year with a minimum of attention. The dark-leaved shrub with pinkish flowers is a lacy elderberry planted last fall, after a tree peony in that spot gave up the ghost.

On Long Island’s South Shore, Irvina created what she calls her ‘Giverny-inspired’ stoop. Yellow and purple flowers in blue and terracotta containers bringing abundant summer color to her gray-shingled house and cedar steps.

And a view of Marlene’s sun-drenched Far Rockaway beach cottage garden in its exuberant summer prime, along with one from last May when irises were exploding…

Finally, on Shelter Island between Long Island’s North and South Forks, Debre’s envy-inducing profusion of recent blooms included lilies, echinacea and dianthus. She’s worked hard to improve the rocky soil, and it seems the flowers have responded. (The photo at the top of this post, of the bee on the echinacea, is also from Debre’s garden.)

Behold the Lilies

CONSIDER THE LILIES of the field, and let’s not forget the hydrangeas, ladies’ mantel, astilbe, verbena and other things… July here at Green Half-Acre is turning out OK after all.

Lilies — whether fancy ones from a catalogue, yard sale buckets of roadside orange day lilies, hybrids passed on by a friend, bulbs picked up last summer at the Long Island Daylily  Society show and sale in Farmingdale — all seem to do well here, and they’re so EASY. More lilies, I say!

Above: Showstoppers alongside my front walk (Netty’s Pride, and mine too.)

The purple things are verbena bonariensis, said to be a self-seeding annual, and I hope it is in years to come. That backdrop of greenery is sweet-smelling native bayberry, which was here on my arrival three-plus years ago.

Your classic Hamptons blue hydrangea. True, I don’t have many such, but even a few are spectacular.

More rhodies! These a later-blooming native type, of which I have inherited some two major stands. I  missed seeing them last July and the one before (when the house was rented) and am thoroughly enjoying them now.

The long-blooming yellow ladies’ mantel in the foreground is a treat; I’ve tried it before, elsewhere, without success. Here it’s become a standout.

In the wooded part of the property, still largely ‘undeveloped,’ a profusion of white hydrangea blossoms from a bush bought for $5 from a local couple who have a nursery of sorts in their modest backyard.

I am pleased with my scallop shell mulch on one side of the front walk. The shells are available at the local recycling center, i.e. dump, where some commercial fishing operation evidently dumped them for the taking. The grasses are chasmanthium (sea oats) and, if I remember correctly, Prairie Fire grass that isn’t getting enough sun to turn red.

Things to come: Turk’s cap lily buds in abundance.