Garden Therapy

I HAVEN’T POSTED in a few days because I got home from Spain and was hit with a bad case of ‘What now?’ I walked into my lovely Prospect Heights pied-a-terre, now fully furnished, decorated, and organized, and had nothing much to do. It would be different if I had a job, say, or children at home. Then my next steps would be clear.

I felt empty, lost. My apartment was silent, except for the raindrops and NPR. I usually crash a bit when I come home from a trip, physically and emotionally. This wasn’t a total crash, just a malaise, exacerbated by jet lag, gloomy weather, and a low-grade fever. I watched two seasons of Californication in 3 days.

This morning, though, dawned sunny and cold. I drove out from Brooklyn to my cottage in Springs in the company of a friend, which made the trip fly. I arrived to find my garden, especially the four beds around the front door, covered with brown leaves, looking wintry. Brooklyn’s daffs and forsythia are starting to bloom; here at the end of the Long Island, we’re weeks behind.

One thing that is blooming spectacularly: an old pieris

I made some lunch, procrastinated a bit, and then, for the first time since last fall, got my work clothes and rubber boots on. I went down to the basement and brought up the wheelbarrow, two rakes, a trowel for digging frost-heaved (deer-heaved?) perennials back into place, a pruner, and a grass shears.

Then I spent a couple of hours doing early spring chores: chopping dried four-foot-tall miscanthus (ornamental grass) down to the ground, cutting last season’s shriveled foliage away from salvia, catmint, and other perennials, raking fall leaves off the beds and carting them to the compost heap in the woods. The deer had done a lot of the cutting back for me, saving me the trouble altogether with the liriope (lilyturf).

I took note of casualties. There have been a few in the shrub department, for reasons unknown, including an abelia ‘Little Richard’ I really liked. My memory is another casualty, apparently. I can’t recall what was where and what things are called. For this garden, I haven’t kept obsessive records, though I do have a Zip-loc bag of plant labels which I will consult as the season progresses.

On the bright side, I discovered underneath the shriveled foliage, the tiny green leaves of emerging catmint, ladies mantle, ligularia, and other things the deer find completely unpalatable. A sign that things are happening as they should.

Below: Catmint, ladies mantle, pulmonaria

As I worked, the sun moved across the sky and into the woods. I kept going until it dropped behind  the fence of the neighbors next door and my fingers were frozen. At which point I noticed I had gone from enervated to exhilarated, and had stopped worrying about my ‘next step.’

Garden therapy does it again. I’m happy to be in Springs, happy it’s finally spring.

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.

Please Please Me, Perennials

ON SUNDAY, I WENT TO HEAR THE IRREPRESSIBLE GARDEN DESIGNER/WRITER DEAN RIDDLE speak at Madoo Conservancy in Sagaponack. I’ve been a fan of Dean’s since his ‘Dean’s Dirt’ column in Elle Decor some years ago. His 2002 book, Out in the Garden, about his creation of an exuberant planting scheme (and life, in the process) at his rented bungalow in the Catskills, has been on my night table since I moved here.

I’m writing about a glorious garden Dean designed near Woodstock, N.Y., above, for the July/August issue of Garden Design magazine. After his slide show, which ranged over several gardens he’d designed upstate and his recent trip to Japan, my head was swimming with visions of billowing perennials.

Dean’s a guy after my own heart: resourceful, down-to-earth, and budget-conscious. He’s encouraging and enthusiastic; he makes you feel you can do it. One of his trademarks is the extensive use of self-sowing plants like verbena bonariensis and echinacea, whose random appearances over time, he says, “weave everything together.” I also love his use of boxwood as a “rhythmic evergreen presence” (the boxwood ball at my front door has cheered me all winter long).

Dean began his talk with a “Garden in Four Days,” a 4-square plot he’d created for an upstate client who wanted to pretty things up in a hurry. Birch logs were used to edge the beds and Dean created a ‘cobblestone carpet’ (another of his signatures) with stones salvaged from a nearby stream. They planted 175 one-gallon perennials all at once — approximately 35 each of just 5 different plants.

So naturally, when I visited Spielberg’s nursery in East Hampton on Monday for some composted manure to improve my still lacking-in-nutrients soil, and went out back “just to see what they had,” I couldn’t resist buying a bunch of last year’s leftover perennials at 50% off. I came away with 23 plants for my ‘curb appeal’ beds, above, on either side of the gravel walkway from my new parking court to the front door (with the 10 bags of compost, it all came to under $200).

The plants don’t look like much to an untrained eye – just brown sticks with a few baby green leaves among them. But I know from experience what they’ll look like – if not this year, then next, and bought pretty much all they had of mostly shade-tolerant, deer-resistant stuff:

– 5 blue-violet ‘May Night’ Salvia (Dean mentioned it, so I grabbed, and will put it in my sunniest spot)
– 5 Bronze Sedge, a reddish-brown foot-tall grass said to work in part-sun
– 5 Alchemilla Mollis ‘Auslese,’ chartreuse ladies mantle, one of my all-time favorite edging plants
– 3 Digitalis (foxgloves) of two different types, on the theory that if one surprised me by blooming in the woods last spring, they like it here
– 3 Ligularia ‘Osiris Cafe Noir,’ 20″ tall, dark-leaved, good for shade
– 2 Aquilegia (columbine) in ‘origami yellow,’ which I know self-seeds abundantly, works in shade, and is difficult to transplant (so even though I can take columbines from upstate when I go there next month, I figured I needed the insurance of already potted specimens)

Now, of course, I have to put them all in. Started last night by dumping my 10 bags of compost and placing the plants more or less where I think they’ll flourish. Then I picked up my pointed shovel and found, once more, that my so-called soil is compacted and rockier than imagined. I didn’t get far before nightfall, and it’s raining hard today.

So I get a temporary reprieve from digging. But at least my dreams of perennial borders are underway.

Now, this shade-challenged area, below, is crying out for some foundation plantings:

And here’s a barren spot, below, if ever there was one. The Roses of Sharon, which I “hard pruned” recently – just as the books say – is an unattractive bunch of sticks, and I believe it’s late to leaf out. Any suggestions as to what I can do in these areas? They’d be most welcome.

GARDEN VOYEUR: Williamsburg Rooftop

This post is adapted from an article I wrote that appears in the current issue of Garden Design magazine. These are my own scouting shots, taken a year ago this month.

THE VIEW FROM THIS 4,000 SQUARE FOOT ROOFTOP TERRACE in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is a triple whammy, with the East River, the Manhattan skyline, and the monumental latticework of the Williamsburg Bridge all seen in close-up. It cried out for equally spectacular landscaping.

The client, who is in real estate, hired celebrity garden designer Rebecca Cole to turn the vast, 11th floor terrace into something two people could enjoy without feeling lost in space. Cole, a well-known TV personality and author, imagined the space as a sort of urban woodland, where you can “literally wander as you would through the woods, taking different paths around birches and evergreens, coming upon places to sit, noticing pretty little ground cover flowers.”

It does indeed feel like a natural landscape, which Cole designed by using the existing 24-inch-square concrete pavers almost like graph paper. She started with the trees (clump birch and red maple are the mainstays), “putting them in spaces that feel like they’re making winding paths. Then I figured out how many containers should surround them.”

Cube-shaped metal planters mimic the grids of steel across the river. They’re filled with tough  country-style perennials like rudbeckia, echinacea, Russian sage, coreopsis, spirea, nepeta, and salvia. Sun-loving and drought-tolerant, they are surprisingly happy on an exposed urban roof.

The client wanted a water feature, but because of the windy conditions, a fountain was out. So Cole came up with an architectural solution, simple and geometric — little ‘infinity pools,’ flush with the ground. Here, too, the experience resembles a walk in the woods, where streams pop up every once in a while.

Half a dozen shallow rubber trays, pre-planted with sedums in mixed shapes and colors, form patterned ‘carpets,’ positioned for all-season viewing from the loft’s floor-to-ceiling windows.

GARDEN VOYEUR: Meadow with a View

FIVE STORIES above Pacific Street, there’s a colorful meadow designed by Cynthia Gillis for the rooftop of the Boerum Hill townhouse she shares with her husband, architect John Gillis. “A roof deck is a kind of meadow,” she says, “because it’s open and expansive, and you are looking across a distance to the sky” — and, in this case, the buildings of downtown Brooklyn.

Since a roof is windy and exposed, and soil in containers is limited, Gillis chooses drought-tolerant plants to begin with, and uses drip irrigation, with hoses running to each individual container, as well as polymer crystals in each pot to retain water and help prevent flooding in heavy rains.

In keeping with the ‘meadow’ concept, Gillis rarely uses annuals. Among the perennials in wooden containers and pots made of resin or fiberglass (lightweight and frost-resistant, they look just like terracotta):

• calamagrostis x acutiflora ‘Karl Foerster’ (feather reed grass)
• purple salvia
• verbena bonariensis (a tender, self-seeding perennial)
• achillea ‘Paprika’
• coreopsis ‘Moonbeam’

A wind-tolerant Japanese black pine frames the view and provides screening (there’s a small ‘contemplation bench’ behind it).

You can see more pictures of Gillis’s work on her website, including the park-like garden behind this townhouse, shared with the building next door.