Garden Realities

SO, FROM THE FLORAL EXTRAVAGANZA OF RANCHO LA PUERTA to the bare dirt of my own garden-to-be in Springs, N.Y., above. It’s a tough transition, but I’m doing my best.

I spent yesterday afternoon moving things around. Early spring is the best time of year to do that for most perennials, before things get too far along and you’re dealing with floppy greenery.

My focus is on creating some curb appeal, so when I drive up to my house, I say “Wow!” instead of “Oy!” I’m slowly filling in the planting beds I carved out from the former driveway. Last fall, I sculpted the shapes I wanted with piles of oak leaves. In late winter, I had a truckload of topsoil (and a bit of compost – not nearly enough) delivered and spread by Whitmore’s Nursery. More recently, I schlepped and spread  an additional twenty-two 40-lb. bags of purchased compost myself.

Getting there…

I’m trying to create viable planting areas out of  completely useless, compacted soil. What’s alarming is I’ve seen exactly one worm so far this spring (worms being a sign of soil fertility). But when I dig down to plant, the soil looks reasonably rich and properly crumbly, at least on the surface and a few inches below. There are a still a lot of un-decomposed oak leaves, but I leave them in place to continue their cycle of decay.

This being tax month, I am trying to do what I can without spending a cent. That means, first of all, moving green things from the rear of the property to the front, and over the next few weeks, begging perennial divisions from gardening friends and relatives.

Here’s what I transplanted yesterday from back to front:

• 5 Korean boxwoods bought last spring at Home Depot. I adore boxwoods – they’re tidy, evergreen, and deer-proof. These are small — just 1′ tall and 1′ wide, eventually to double in size. Can never have enough boxwoods.
• In addition to a wonderful glade of foot-tall ferns in the backyard, there were two existing clumps of another, taller type. I dug up one longstanding clump of these three-footers — easier said than done, as the clump was a couple feet across, with several starting-to-unfurl fronds and a thick mass of roots — and sawed it into five sections. I transplated them around my small front deck and watered them in well with a fish emulsion fertilizer — for no particular reason, except that’s what I had in the cupboard.
• Six astilbes that had been stuck in the back for temporary holding

Along with the half-price perennials I bought at Spielberg’s in East Hampton (I can’t say they’ve taken off yet, but they’re settling in) — including five each of lady’s mantle, blue ‘May Night’ salvia, an ornamental grass, some white creeping phlox, three ligularia — well, there’s still a whole lot of bare dirt, below. But I remember how quickly my garden at Dean Street in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, came together once things got growing (“from nil to abundance in two seasons,” as my own blog post put it), and that gives me hope.

…but still quite a ways to go

My color scheme? Blue, purple, yellow, white, for the most part. This partly of necessity, as orange and red flowers seem to be mainly sun-lovers, and while it’s pretty bright around here at the moment, I expect things to become considerably shadier once the surrounding trees leaf out.

Note: I’ve been contributing blog posts to Garden Design magazine’s website. They mostly link back to this blog, so it’s all rather circular, but if you’d like to take a look, go here (there’s other stuff on the site besides my blog posts).

BOOK REVIEW: A Very Modest Cottage

THIS SWEET LITTLE BOOK attests to the power of the idea of ‘cottage’ — the emotional pull four walls and a roof can exert.

Tereasa Surratt, author of A Very Modest Cottage (Hearst/ Sterling), went to great lengths to rescue and lovingly restore a broken-down 1920s shack that sat on her grandmother’s property  in rural Illinois. The cottage was Surratt’s childhood playhouse in all its “twelve-by-twelve foot glory.” Then thirty Midwestern winters took their toll, and it was abandoned for decades by all but mice.

With the help of her handy husband, David Hernandez, and her brother Sam, whom she coaxed into the project with “homemade cookies and sisterly guilt trips,” Surratt moved the diminutive dwelling to a Wisconsin lakefront and, over a period of three months, turned it into something worthy of Country Living magazine (whose imprimatur is above the book’s title).

An advertising creative director in Chicago when she’s not saving derelict cabins, Surratt documents the move, the renovation, the decorating, and the landscaping (mostly with hostas) in great pictorial detail. Graphically, the book is a charming  product, with endpapers in a 1940s floral barkcloth design, even an ersatz library card in a pocket. Inside, it has a scrapbook feel, with sketches and swatches, inspiring quotes (the book’s title comes from Thomas Jefferson), and information-packed sidebars.

The book is also a high-spirited how-to, with instructions for refinishing wood floors, hooking up a potbelly stove, and what Surratt calls “the fun part”: shopping for period-appropriate furnishings and accessories like a junk-store mirror and dresser, camp blankets, fishing reels, and paint-by-number pictures.

Later, when Surratt got around to research, she discovered the cottage had several prior lives. A tourist cabin in the early days of the automobile, it was booked by the hour in the 1930s for the “hot pillow trade.” In the ’40s, a rod-and-gun club used it for Friday night card games. In the ’50s, it served as the office for a trucking company. Then it was a storage shed before being finally abandoned. Now it’s a guest cottage once more, on property owned by her husband’s family.

A Very Modest Cottage would make a fine gift for anyone embarking on the hands-on renovation of a house, which — no matter how modest — has got to be grander than this one.

Go here for a video of the cottage’s history and much more.

Rancho La Puerta: Garden Close-Up

I’M HOME FROM RANCHO LA PUERTA and not too happy about that. The sun is shining here in East Hampton, N.Y., and things have greened up slightly. The daffodils are still in force; my scrawny magnolia is in what passes for full bloom. But the goutweed is also back in full force, and the expanses of brown dirt seem enormous. I prefer to remain at Rancho for a while longer, at least in my head. I’m thinking back on the past week of sun-soaked floral abundance and wondering how I can transpose all I saw and learned there, in some small way, to my Northeastern half-acre.

Last Thursday at Rancho, I took the Landscape Garden Walk with Enrique Ceballos, below, the person most responsible — after Sarah Livia Brightwood, daughter of the Ranch’s founders and a landscape architect — for the phenomenal landscaping of the Ranch’s eight exuberantly cultivated acres. A former botany professor, he has been involved with the Ranch since 1988 and knows everything there is to know about its horticultural bounty.

It wasn’t really much of a walk; we joked about that afterwards. We began under the gazebo in the central area, near the main guest lounge, and because the plantings are so intensive, and the large group so enthusiastic and inquisitive, we barely moved from our starting point in the allotted hour, yet there was plenty to see. We walked perhaps 50 feet in all, as Enrique gave us some background on the climate (double the normal rainfall in the past year, which is why this spring is so green), the alkaline soil, and the highly eco-conscious philosophy of Rancho La Puerta’s garden maintenance program (I saw only one sprinkler going the whole week; of course, the water is all reclaimed and recycled).

“This is a landscape with no chemicals,” Enrique stressed. No pesticides: insects are welcome (some prey on others, he pointed out, so why kill the helpful ones?) No herbicides: hand-weeding is preferred. No slug-icides, either: the birds take care of that.

The aesthetic intent, he said, is to create “an abstraction of the chapparal inside the garden,” with contours and rhythms that echo the shapes of the surrounding terrain. I now know that chapparal is the native eco-system in the foothills of Mt. Kuchumaa, considered sacred by the area’s original inhabitants;  the mountain dominates the Ranch’s longer vistas, partly because the design is intended to do just that.

The Ranch uses either native plants or “eco-equivalents” – plants from similar climatic conditions, particularly the Mediterranean region, which are not native but thrive and grow like natives. A ubiquitous example is rosemary, which I never walked past without picking a sprig and holding it to my nose. It was introduced to Baja by Franciscan monks from Italy, Enrique told us.

Some of the highlights of our “walk”:

• AGAVES – 80% of which are from Mexico, we learned. They bloom once, spectacularly, and then die, in a 7-year life span. There are eight different agave species at the Ranch.
• ALOES – these are eco-equivalents from Africa. The coral aloes, below at right (with orange gazanias to the left of them), now in bloom throughout the property, are outstanding. I couldn’t get enough of looking at them.



• MONTEZUMA PINES – pale green and feathery
• EUCALYPTUS TREES – Enrique called them a “big weed, aggressive and flammable.” He is not a fan of eucalyptus.
• GAZANIAS (African daisies) – orange flowers, below, with delicate magenta undersides and juicy succulent stems, they are used in big drifts for sheets of color.



• EUPHORBIA – not the type we have here, but recognizable, with chartreuse flowers
• NANDINA (Heavenly Bamboo) – now bursting with red berries, below



• FRENCH LAVENDER – not part of this walk, but used to great effect, below, along with tall Italian cypresses and more of that fabulous coral aloe, around the circular fountain in the Villas Luna area



• CALIFORNIA PEPPER TREE – huge and venerable, resembling weeping willow, on the lawn near the dining hall, below



• ROCK ROSE, or cistus – a marvelous, rather funny-looking pink flower, below, with red triangles inside



• SALVIA (sage) – there are 25-28 species, native and non-native, all well suited to the Ranch’s conditions
• ARTEMISIAS – semi-desert plants which do very well at the Ranch
• DATE PALMS from the Mideast, QUEEN PALMS from Africa, others from California
• ICE PLANTS – wonderful architectural feature, used everywhere for big drifts of color (such as the pink ‘river’ in photo at top)
• ECHEVERIA (Hens & Chicks), below – gigantic, compared to our Northeastern varieties



• TRUMPET VINES – invasive elsewhere but here, said Enrique, all that’s necessary to control them is to cut their water supply
• WISTERIA, now having their moment on pergolas throughout the Ranch, originally from China
• STAR JASMINE – many different types on arbors
• PYROCANTHA – red-berried and not native, but successful
• ROSES – many species throughout – the most magnificent, to me, are the yellow ‘Lady Banks’ on the pergola near the Montana gym, below

You can see why we didn’t get far. The above list represents just a fraction of the Ranch’s plantings. And I understand the wildflowers in the upper altitudes of Mt. Kuchumaa, reached only on the 5.5 mile Coyote hike (which I chickened out of, preferring to save some energy for Bar Method, swimming, and African dance) are beyond belief.

For more on Rancho La Puerta, go here, and see my two previous posts below.

To Roundup or Not to Roundup?

OVERWHELMED AGAIN as I contemplate all that needs doing, landscape-wise, here at Green Half-Acre. In rough order of priority, this is what I hope to accomplish this fall/winter:

• Board fence and gate across the front of property (80 feet) to create a feeling of seclusion and perhaps block traffic noise  — which no longer bothers me a fraction as much as it did when I first moved here in May. (It’s true what my neighbors said: “You’ll get used to it.”) I’m allowed a fence 4 feet tall without a Town of East Hampton permit.
• Eight-foot-tall deer fencing around the other three sides of the property.
• Gravel parking court in front, outside the fence/gate, big enough for 2-3 cars.
• Removal of 4-5 large trees to allow for more sunlight and expanded gardening opportunities in backyard.

Last, possibly not until late winter/spring:

• Construction of a patio. I haven’t decided on size, shape, or material yet.

Then and only then will I begin planting. I’m inspired by an article in a recent special issue of Fine Gardening magazine, called Green Gardens, about preparing garden beds without tilling. You just (“just”) outline their proposed shapes and start heaping fallen leaves, manure, etc. Composting on the spot, as it were. It takes time but saves digging. I hope to outline and prepare some of these beds in late fall and start planting next spring.

When I feel overwhelmed, it helps to remember all I’ve done so far. Above, my overgrown backyard in May ’09, before a major clearing of the property. The more I remove, the better I like it.

Meanwhile, I’ve created a monster in my attempts to do away with the rampant wisteria that invades the entire property. It’s bad throughout, but I’m particularly bothered by one area near the driveway, below, that measures roughly 10’x40′. I spent several hours in June digging and pulling and cutting the roots of wisteria (intertwined with lily-of-the-valley, which made a lovely fragrant bed in May).

Wherever I cut, apparently, fresh new sprigs of wisteria have sprouted up. For every one, there are now ten. I’m at a complete loss what to do. This particular area will be part of my new gravel parking court, so a backhoe will be coming in to excavate and break up existing asphalt. That ought to go a long way toward eliminating the pesky wisteria.

But the situation is almost equally dire elsewhere on the property. Digging and pulling wisteria is a losing game, like trying to stop the ocean from making waves. To Roundup or not to Roundup? That is the question. Besides disliking the very idea, would it even work?

Boring Stuff

MAYBE SOME OF YOU HAVE NOTICED I’ve reduced my blogging schedule from daily (as if that was ever gonna be sustainable) to a few times a week. I’ve been occupied with such matters as:

• cleaning out my basement (still)
• painting a green rattan sofa white (Why does everything worth doing, like painting a rattan sofa, turn out to be either harder than it looks or more time-consuming than you think it’s going to be?)
• mulling over what to edge my driveway with — logs, railroad ties, steel, cobblestones, nothing — when I get around to having a driveway built
• considering what kind of material to use for a patio (flagstone, wood decking) when I get around to having a patio built
• paying bills that built up over two months of vacancy in Cobble Hill
• having house guests — better enjoy them now, I figure, they’re not going to come in January
• going to the beach:-)

I’m feeling very indecisive lately regarding my landscaping choices. Everyone who visits has different opinions. For instance, the old, misshapen, non-flowering cherry tree in the middle of the backyard. One friend says lose it. Another says prune it. A third says keep it. I say…I don’t know.

The roses of Sharon are blooming, weakly. They’re weed trees, essentially. I never knew how easily they sprout and how invasive they can be. The forsythia’s out of control too, to name another plant I always throught was ‘desirable,’ and took great pains to nurture along. Oh, and the wisteria’s back. It’s like something out of Sorcerer’s Apprentice, popping up again everywhere. A force of nature, like the ocean.

It’s August. Time to do nothing, I tell myself. Just to bide my time, until the landscapers’ calendars slow down and their prices get (hopefully) more reasonable. And I’ve made some decisions.

Deer count, last 24 hours: 4