Fall Planting to Foil the Deer

THERE’S A GROUP OF FOUR — two does and two yearlings — that lives here, too. And they seem to feel my garden is their pantry. When I was kneeling out there today, putting in some of the supposedly deer-resistant perennials I just bought, I looked up to see a lithe brown creature eyeing me as if to say, “Planting something tasty? I’ll check it out later.”

These Hamptons deer, pressed as they are for grazing space, have been having a picnic here these last few weeks, chowing down on begonia, astilbe, caladium, cranesbill geranium, Japanese anemone and other things generally considered deer-resistant, reducing them to sticks. I haven’t been quick enough on the trigger — the pump on my bottle of “Deer Out,” that is. Anyway, it’s not very effective.

Yes, yes, I’ll get a deer fence in due course. Meanwhile, it’s fall, the nursery sales are on, and I’m determined to outwit the deer by planting only things they find absolutely inedible. There are a few.

I’ve been to three area nurseries: chic Marder’s in Bridgehampton, pedestrian Agway, and old-school Hren in East Hampton. At discounts from 30% to 75%, I bought the following, which my experience over the past year tells me should be OK (along with careful reading of labels and asking questions, though I’ve learned not to wholly trust the labels or the answers). The reason there’s only one or two of some things in the list below is because that’s all they had left — I would gladly have bought more at these prices.

I’m working the variations on things I’ve already got that have survived, with emphasis on colored and variegated foliage.

• 3 Salvia ‘May Night’ – deer-proof stalwarts, easier to grow than lavender

• 2 Buxus sempervirens ‘Auero-Variegata’ – boxwoods edged in yellow – tiny now, 8′ at maturity

• 1 Berberis thunbergii – ‘Rose Glow’ Japanese barberry

• 2 Lonicera nitida ‘Lemon Beauty’ – never heard of these before – another variegated shrub that will eventually be 3-6′ tall

• 2 Pleioblastus viridistriat – dwarf bamboo – more yellow

• 1 feather reed grass

• 1 Ligularia dentata ‘Othello’ – my 4th type of ligularia – the slugs go for them, but the deer don’t

• 1 Stachys ‘Silver Carpet’ – lamb’s ear – a narrow-leafed variety I don’t have

• 1 Brunnera macrophylla – chartreuse heart-shaped leaves

• 1 Euphorbia ‘Glacier Blue’ spurge – blue-gray and Mediterranean-looking

• 1 Itea virginica ‘Sprich’ aka Sweetspire ‘Little Henry’

• 2 Bergenia cordifolia  – edging plant with glossy, red-rimmed leaves in fall

I spent this first day of the Jewish new year in the garden instead of the synagogue. I worked from morning ’til night putting new plants in, moving others around, weeding as I went along, and finally spreading five bags of compost and mulch (no – finally taking Advil). More than once, I thought of something I read long ago in a gardening magazine. An elderly woman was asked the secret of her beautiful garden. She replied: “Work like mad in spring and fall, and you’ve got it made.”

And Now to the Backyard…

On its way to pristine (those are hammock posts in the middle, by the way)

I ALWAYS LOVED THE INITIAL PHASE OF RENOVATION: DEMOLITION. Smashing walls, pulling out old fixtures, ripping up nasty carpet is a whole lot of fun, makes an instant difference, and costs very little.

Recently I’ve realized that landscaping has an equivalent to that first heady phase of renovation. Last fall I had five or six big trees taken down on my Long Island property, and a number of smaller ones. The more I got rid of, the better I liked it.

I’m not done yet. This spring, I’m continuing to pare away excess plant material (including, of course, weeds). My guiding light is a section of Julie Moir Messervy’s 1998 book, The Magic Land: Designing Your Own Enchanted Garden, called ‘Abstracting the Landscape.’ Here’s what she says:

“When you abstract a landscape, you strip it down to its essentials and choose certain elements to stand out as important [for me, those include a ‘pinetum’ or stand of evergreens, and a quirky old cherry tree with over-arching branches]. You can create an abstracted landscape by making what exists more pristine…

When you have a beautiful piece of land, sometimes the most appropriate thing to do is simply clean it up — to abstract it by making it pure. The easiest method is to remove all dead limbs and undergrowth. This allows you to see each undulation on the ground plane, to enjoy each stone that may have tumbled there, to appreciate existing trees as individuals or as groupings.

Encouraging the growth of existing ground covers or importing new ones can help you emphasize the beauty of the land; carefully pruning your trees to rid them of deadwood or diseased branches, to limb them up off the ground or to open their canopy up to light and air, allows you to honor what exists as beautiful and to make it the backbone of your garden.”

I’m so on it. On Saturday, a hard-working, knowledgeable guy named Dong, whom I hired from an ad in the East Hampton Star, and his helper, spent five hours pitchforking and hand-pulling goutweed from areas where it had spread (that’s how I’m handling the goutweed situation, after rejecting the suggestions of a garden designer and landscaper who wanted to spray Round-Up as the most expedient solution).

While they worked, I continued to wage my private war against re-sprouting wisteria. From every green bit of wisteria growth, I followed the underground roots, ripping them up and cutting them when I could rip no more, then applying Round-Up to the cut ends with a sponge paintbrush (I’m not utterly opposed to Round-Up; I just didn’t want it sprayed widely, making my backyard uninhabitable for 2-3 days to me and who knows how long to worms, bugs, and birds). I filled 5 contractor trash bags with coils of wisteria root, while Dong filled the back of his pick-up with goutweed and its spindly white roots. Cathartic! No less satisfying than filling a dumpster with plaster, linoleum, and old appliances.

Now that I’ve established a relationship with Dong (though I’m not his first priority, I can tell), I’ve typed up a list for him. I’m envisioning us walking the property tomorrow, if he shows up, tying pink ribbons on excess saplings, raggedy shrubs, piles of brush, and fallen logs to take away.

Meanwhile, the deer are also helping remove plant material, only not the undesirable stuff. They decimated a pair of heuchera ‘Palace Purple the first night after planting (I moved them streetside, where I think they’ll be safe), and have been sampling newly planted weigela, kerria japonica, and dappled willow. They’ve eaten the buds and flowers from perennial geranium and even astilbe. Will somebody please tell me why they don’t eat goutweed and wisteria?

Deer-ravaged heuchera

A Year in Springs, and How My Garden Does Grow!

My front beds have gone from bare to ongepotchket (‘Slapped together without form, excessively decorated,’ according to one Yiddish dictionary) in a month. No, not true, but I see how easily it could happen…I can’t stop planting!

EXACTLY ONE YEAR AGO, I had just moved to my new home in Springs (East Hampton), N.Y. I had no heat. No refrigerator. No driveway — just a sea of mud. And a backyard that was impenetrable, due to overgrown wisteria and weeds, with a fallen-down shed in the middle of it. I was cold, scared, and lonely; I didn’t know many people in the area. The weather was foul, and I prayed for a bit of sunshine to put a more comforting spin on things.

Greener than brown…

These days, I’m warm and toasty, with a fully functioning kitchen, a new roof, and a yard that’s at least partly under control. To be sure, there’s a ways to go: I still need a new bathroom, a deck, and a paint job. But I love living here. It’s home. I have wonderful new friends and neighbors. I no longer choke on the word “Hamptons.” I’ve even caught myself saying “up-island,” as in “Whenever I go up-island, I stop at IKEA [Costco, Home Depot…]” (Up-island is a term we East Enders use to refer to parts of Long Island closer to…what’s the name of that city again? Right, New York.)

Still rock-hunting for those edges…only the best will do.

Today, in fact, I went up-island, to visit my cousin Barbara and pick up her birthday present to me: five big bags of compost — a most welcome gift. Yes, it was teeming, but that didn’t stop us from dividing some of her astilbe, epimedium, and liriope, which I hauled back in my trusty Honda. Tomorrow I’ll plant it, rain or shine. My front-yard beds have gone from bare to practically stuffed in about a month.

Moving on to containers…

A very satisfying day. While the Long Island Expressway is still soul-numbing (I listened to a new Anne Tyler book, Noah’s Compass, on CD — also somewhat numbing), I didn’t mind the rain. As a civilian, I would have preferred pleasanter weather. But as a gardener, I’m thrilled that Nature is doing the watering.

New favorite: an old concrete birdbath planted with sedum and scaevola, an annual.

Anomalous April

View of the Hudson River and Catskills from Montgomery Place

THIS APRIL IS A STRANGE ONE in the Hudson Valley. The forsythia is not quite finished, which is normal for the time of year, but the lilacs are already in full bloom; ordinarily that doesn’t happen until mid-May. Forsythia and lilacs simultaneously? Weird.

Things are generally much greener than they ought to be. Loomis Creek Nursery’s e-mail newsletter says  the growing season is at least two weeks ahead, due to unseasonably warm weather early in the month, and yesterday at Montgomery Place, the romantic Hudson River estate whose gardens I popped over to see, I overheard the woman who runs their farm stand saying this is the earliest spring since 1945. I believe it.

Montgomery Place, designed by A.J. Davis in the mid-19th century, is actually rather unpretentious, of modest size, with a grand open-air verandah

I just wonder what will happen from here on. Will the lilacs stay in bloom longer than usual while the calendar catches up, or fade and be gone by Mother’s Day? Will the peonies be out in May instead of June, and the day lilies in June rather than July? Remains to be seen, I guess.

Above and below, the gardens at Montgomery Place were designed in the 1920s and ’30s. The brick pathways between beds have delightful scalloped edges.

For my purposes, the season being a bit ahead is not a bad thing. I’m up here to divide perennials from the Dutchess County property where I gardened for several years. Dividing perennials has never been my favorite thing, but this year it’s imperative, both because I have lots of bare dirt to fill at my new place on Long Island, and because certain things, like threadleaf coreopsis and rudbeckia (black-eyed susans to lay folks) have been getting out of control and taking over the central island bed, below (as it looked last September).

I spent most of Saturday digging, and amassed a huge number of pots filled with catmint, lamb’s ear, coreopsis, astilbe, cimicifuga, mint, epimedium, and more. In the end, I took only a small amount of rudbeckia because it is very late to show, even this year, and I wasn’t sure what was what.

Add to that a bunch of stuff from a local couple who sell fresh eggs and potted-up plants from their own garden, for a relative pittance: a kerria japonica bush, a viburnum, bee balm, obedient plant, iris tubers, more astilbes.

Now the big question is, how much can I get in my car?

Winter Drags On…

THE IDES OF MARCH are almost upon us, and what a pain. I’m up in the Hudson Valley now, cat-sitting for a few days, and if ever I thought I was going to do some gardening, which I foolishly did, I’ve had to let go of that notion. The snow was thick on the ground when I got here, and now, after two days of rain, what’s not snow-covered is mushy and boggy and muddy (here’s how it looked this morning, above). True, I did manage to shovel some compost into bags for my garden in East Hampton, and cut down some of last season’s zebra grass before the rains came.

But my hope was to dig and divide some of the cottagey perennials that are here in abundance, all deer-resistant, planted mostly between 2002 and 2006 when I spent a lot of time gardening up here in Zone 5 northern Dutchess. (See one of the beds to be pillaged as it looks in mid-summer, above.) That was, it turns out, a ridiculous hope. With temperatures here in the 40’s recently, I figured the ground would be un-frozen, and I could get some rudbeckia, bee balm, catmint, ladies mantle, coral bells, lamb’s ear, astilbe, bleeding heart, and any number of other things into plastic pots, ready to be transplanted into my newly prepared Zone 7 Long Island garden beds, below, next week.

Waaaaayyyyyy premature. I shall have to sit tight, along with gardeners throughout the Northeast, and wait for the winter to finish up in its own good time.

It’s good to know, however, that the curved beds at the front of my property back in East Hampton — about 400 square feet of them, leading from my new parking court to the front door of my cottage, are pretty much ready to go. Last fall, I laid them out by raking piles of fallen oak leaves into the desired shapes. Through the winter, I woke up more than once in the middle of the night wondering how I was going to turn piles of leaves into plantable soil, quickly.

The answer came in the form of a delivery truck from Whitmores last Wednesday, containing 7 cubic yards of topsoil and compost (cost: about $400). It was shoveled, spread, and raked smooth for me right on top of those leaves, ready to be planted up as soon as the time is right.

I haven’t ordered anything from those tempting catalogues; I don’t have the patience to wait for tiny specimens to grow. I’ll buy shrubs and perennials from wholesale nurseries, and places like Lowe’s and Home Depot, which may not have anything exotic, but in recent years seem to have gotten their act together to at least provide healthy plants. I’ll divide what’s here upstate, beg divisions from other gardeners I know, and take whatever can be spared from the backyard of one of my buildings in Brooklyn, above.

My goal: curb appeal, fast. It’s going to be a happy round robin of plant-moving and schlepping, and I can hardly wait.