Category: The Gardening Guy

Put some thought into creating a gorgeous garden

Let’s say you have recently purchased a house and want to create beautiful gardens. How should you begin? I recently visited Gordon and Mary Hayward, both garden designers, at their home in Westminster West, Vermont. Their gardens are as nice as any private gardens I have seen, and I wanted to understand their thought process.

The Haywards bought a 1790s farmhouse 36 years ago that needed a lot of work. The landscape was full of brush and abandoned cars. But they were undaunted. They explained that they wanted a house in a garden, not a house with gardens you walk by. They wanted to be surrounded by gorgeous flowers and trees, with sculpture and walkways. They wanted gardens all around them.

The first thing they did was establish the central axis of the gardens. They did this by tying a string to the front door plate and running it straight out to the trunk of a mature apple tree, thereby creating a focal point. All the main beds are either parallel or perpendicular to that string. I’d estimate that the pathway along the central axis extends from the house for a couple of hundred feet.

At the end of that central path is a magnificent old apple tree, surrounded by an 80-foot circle of lawn, because the drip line of the apple tree is circular. Flowers in curved beds surround the lawn. As Mary Hayward said, “Curves need to make sense.” Most of the paths and lines in their garden beds are straight, only occasionally curving or meandering to go around a fixed feature.

“Pay attention to views from the doors and windows because they’ll suggest garden placement,” said Gordon. Look at them, make sure what you see pleases you. Not only that, he said you gain confidence in your design if you pay attention to the house. There needs to be a relationship between the house and the garden spaces. “The garden is an extension of the house and the people in it,” he said.

What else should one consider? The north-south orientation is important, Gordon said. You can grow roses on the south side of a barn, for example, but not on the north side, as there is much less sun. Where is sunset? Most of us like to rest at the end of a day in the garden to watch the sun go down. You can design that — and maybe steal a view of distant hills owned by others. You may need a chainsaw to accomplish that.

Mary Hayward grew up near Hidcote Manor Garden, one of England’s finest old gardens, and visited often when growing up. Those visits shaped her view of how a garden should look: a series of connected rooms. Gordon Hayward grew up on an apple orchard, and so he wanted apple trees on his landscape as an adult. It makes sense to have elements of a garden that resonate with each person, based on personal history.

“Every decorative element in a garden should have a story, a reason,” Gordon said. “Don’t go buy a cute elephant. Consider what your grandmother or grandfather had.” In the long run, that will resonate with you better.

When Gordon designs a garden for someone, he always asks what their parents or grandparents had for gardens. Are there special plants that bring back memories of simpler times? So, for example, I have a piece of a peony my grandmother (who passed away in 1952) grew called “Festiva Maxima,” and I would hate to be without it. It’s my favorite flower.

Mary and Gordon spent time researching the farm they bought, learning about how it operated and where long-gone outbuildings were located. They have three old milk cans where the milking parlor once stood, and other features that remind them of the farm’s history. They unearthed granite fence posts and old bricks, and put them all to good use.

There is an old tobacco-drying shed in the gardens, and they used the proportions of that to determine the size of beds near it. The door of the shed is eight feet tall, so they used multiples or fractions of 8 for beds around it. The barn itself is 16 feet long — the same measure as the dirt road in front of the property, an old unit of measurement called a rod.

Gordon pointed out that for five months of the year there are no perennials visible in their garden. It is thus very important to have stone walls, trees, sculpture, pottery and outbuildings that are handsome and clearly visible from key windows of the house all year long. Designed properly, a garden can be as beautiful in winter as it is in summer. And since trees and shrubs take time to reach maturity, they are a logical early step when designing your garden.

I bought my house 50 years ago this August. It’s an old creamery, a butter factory built in 1888. It came with an acre of land, though I have since added more land. It had no perennials or shrubs, just a big native cherry tree, a few sugar maples and two huge elms, now long gone. Lawn surrounded the house.

If I were starting all over again, I would begin by designing a garden layout. To help me in that endeavor, I would study good gardens in glossy books and by visiting as many fine gardens as I could. I would take classes and go to arboretums to learn about trees and shrubs that might be used to improve the landscape. I would join a garden club and go on garden tours. And I would certainly want to read all of Gordon Hayward’s wonderful gardening books.

Henry is the author of four gardening books. He is now offering Zoom presentations to garden clubs and library groups. Email him at henry.homeyer@comcast.net for more information.

Featured Photo:Sculpture adds beauty and interest to a garden. Photo by Henry Homeyer.

How to make your flowers happy

It is mid-summer now, and my garden is full of gorgeous flowers, some finishing up their display, others just beginning. Here are some I love, and what I do to make them happy.

The first flowers I see when I walk out my front door are annual poppies. I didn’t plant most of them, or not this year. Each year I let them bloom and drop seeds after they’re done. They reward me with dozens of blossoms the following year. Sometimes I pick the pods and save them to sprinkle seeds on the snow, an easy way to plant them in the dead of winter.

My poppies are in full sun and soil that is not particularly rich. I like these poppies because they ask nothing of me and each year the palette is a little different as they hybridize, offering some new colors and sizes. I have a nice deep red double annual poppy that blooms every year in one row of my vegetable garden. This year it is with the tomatoes.

Another favorite of mine is pink mallow. This is a big, often floppy perennial with lots of pink blossoms that resemble those of a hollyhock. In my garden it pops up anywhere and everywhere. I have to treat it a bit like a weed to keep it in control. It does best in full sun and rich soil that stays lightly moist.

Pink mallow has a tap root and does not transplant easily, unless you do so when small. I often stake mine to keep them upright — it can grow to be 2 to 5 feet tall. It’s not often seen in garden centers, so get a seedling from a fellow gardener, and let it go to seed so you’ll get more plants.

Another flower that moves around the garden, appearing by whim, is feverfew. Feverfew has white daisy-like flowers with a yellow center, blossoms just three-quarters of an inch across but appearing in vast numbers. It is a short-lived perennial that sows seeds freely, so if you don’t want more plants cut off the flowers before the seeds are dropped.

Feverfew will grow in average soil but prefers moist, rich soil. It’s blooming for me now and will continue for the rest of the summer, or nearly. The flowers do well in a vase.

My bee balm is just coming into full bloom now and is deliciously fragrant. It is in the mint family, with a square stem that is relatively fragile. But they make great cut flowers, in part because of their fragrance. Bees love them (hence the name), but hummingbirds do too. Mine grow to 5 feet tall.

Many books claim bee balm is a full-sun plant, but I disagree. It does best in morning sun or partial shade in rich, moist soil. It goes by quickly in hot, dry areas. The best blossom colors are red and purple, though cultivars in white and bluish are sold. Recently short varieties have appeared in the marketplace, but I have not found that they are very hardy. Bee balm spreads by root but pulls easily if it gets too rambunctious.

Daylilies are in bloom now, too. The common orange daylily is the friend of anyone who thinks they can’t grow flowers. You cannot kill a common orange daylily. I have dug them out, placed them on the lawn without any soil preparation, and they have thrived where placed.

Each blossom of a daylily blooms for just one day, but each scape, or flower stalk, has several buds that bloom in succession. The buds will open in a vase, too, so don’t be afraid to use them in flower arrangements. Unlike true lilies these beauties are not eaten by lily-leaf beetles. They come in many colors from deep red to light yellow. I have tiny daylilies, and one variety that blooms on scapes as tall as me.

Great masterwort is an awkward name, so I prefer the scientific epithet, Astrantia major. This is a medium-height flower in the carrot family, along with Queen Anne’s lace, a wildflower or weed I love too. The flowers range from white to purple-white and bloom in great profusion. It is a good cut flower, too. Each blossom is just an inch across and resembles scabiosa.

Astrantia does well in part shade but will grow in full sun if adequate moisture is present. The foliage is attractive even when the plant is not in bloom, and it is very well-behaved — it stays as a nice clump and does not take over the garden.

I love knautia both for the smallish (3/4-inch) purple-red domed blossoms and for its willingness to keep on blooming from now until fall. Most perennials have much shorter bloom periods, but knautia is a real trooper.

It has thin stems and delicate leaves, so is hard to display in a vase, but it is worth mixing with daisies or something else that will hold the blossoms up in a vase. I grow it in full sun with average soil, and it does well and will occasionally provide volunteers from seed.

Each garden has its own winners and losers. Good gardeners try a lot of plants to find those that do best for them. So go buy some or trade with a friend.

Featured Photo: Feverfew. Photo by Henry Homeyer.

What your plants, trees and lawn need

June, for most of us, was a very dry time. When weeds and established perennials started to droop, I knew it was time to water, and I did. But watering done well takes time and, done poorly, wastes a lot of water — or doesn’t do the job. I have no crystal ball to know what the rest of the summer will be like — July started well with plenty of rain — but it’s good to plan ahead.

First, how much rain do we need each week to be able to avoid watering? About an inch. If you have sandy soil, water runs right through it, so you need more. Clay soil has tiny soil particles and holds onto moisture nicely. But if clay goes bone dry, it can turn into something like cement that will let water run off the surface and downhill instead of soaking in.

In either case, you can make watering easier and your plants more vigorous by adding compost to your soil. That is easiest to do before planting, of course, but you can top-dress the soil with compost and let earthworms, roots and rain work it into the soil over time. Half an inch of compost on the lawn each spring and fall will help a lot. And mulching with compost, an inch or so, will help your flowers and veggies considerably.

In general, I don’t like overhead watering systems. Yes, they do mimic a rain storm, but they waste a lot of water, and water the walkways and weeds as well as the plants. So long as the soil is not parched, I like to water plants using a watering wand.

My watering wand is a 30-inch-long aluminum tube with a watering rose on the end and a shutoff valve that allows me to increase or decrease the flow of water. I like those made by Dramm, a company that specializes in watering devices and has figured out how to deliver lots of water while not disturbing young plants.

In the vegetable garden, I walk up the rows directing the water around my tomatoes or irrigating the lettuce. The wand allows me to spray water close to the ground level — it’s not falling from waist high, the way a nozzle on the end of a hose would. I place hardwood grade stakes at the end of each row to guide the hose and keep it from damaging plants

But during an extended period of hot and dry weather, I know I need to water each bed entirely, from side to side, but not the walkways. If you just water right around the tomatoes, for example, the surrounding soil will wick away the moisture that you gave to your plants. So you need to soak the soil around your plants, not just at the stem.

When watering newly planted trees, or those planted last year, water in a circle around the tree or shrub that extends at least to the drip line. Later on, when a tree is mature, the roots can go far beyond that. If the soil is dry, you might be surprised how long you need to water around a tree in order to get water to get down 6 or 12 inches — which is where the roots are.

Another way to keep your plants happy in dry times is to mulch them well. This will keep the soil moisture from evaporating and will minimize those thirsty, greedy weeds.

In the vegetable garden I put down four to six layers of newspapers or a single layer of cardboard or large brown paper bags, and then cover that with straw. To make sure a light rain gets to my plants, I don’t mulch right up to the plants. Or I’ll mulch with chopped fall leaves or grass clippings right next to the plants. Leaves or grass let rain pass through more easily than paper and straw but keep down weeds.

Why use straw instead of hay? Straw generally costs more — $10 a bale or more versus $5 or less. Mulch hay has seeds, that’s why. Straw is not supposed to have seeds, though occasionally it does. I was told that even if you see seeds in straw, they are immature and won’t germinate.

I don’t like to use black plastic in the garden. It does keep down weeds and holds in moisture, but it ends up in the landfill a year later. And it may interfere with the beneficial microorganisms in the soil — it gets pretty hot under the plastic. It can also create pools of water, a good breeding place for mosquitoes. So I avoid it.

In flower beds I prefer to grow plants so close together that few weeds grow there. But in new beds I use finely ground bark mulch. Never the colored kind, orange or black, as they have chemicals I don’t want.

For big areas of new plants or lawn, a sprinkler of some kind is good. I like a Melnor brand flip-flop sprinkler, model XT360 M. It is easy to use and comes with a lifetime warranty. For small areas, I like a fixed sprinkler like my brass frog that waters calmly in a 20-foot circle.

Plants will usually recover from getting dehydrated, but it takes a week or more, so you lose valuable growing time. I want my tomatoes sooner, not later. So I make sure they don’t dry out too badly in dry times.

If you pay attention to your plants, if you really look at them, you will see when they start to wilt. That’s the time to water. So get a good watering device, and be ready!

Featured photo: A watering wand directs a soft spray just where you want it. Photo by Henry Homeyer.

They’re easier to grow than you might think

I love roses, but I avoided planting any for a long time. They had a reputation for being fussy. I thought they would attract Japanese beetles and carry black spot and other diseases. In recent years I have been enjoying growing roses and find that modern breeders have come up with many fine roses that are easy to grow, and not fussy.

So what have I learned? First, roses love full sun, but will grow in part shade. But the more sun they get, the better they do. Six hours of sunshine is considered full sun by most authorities. Afternoon sun is more potent than morning sun, so the west side of the house is better than the east.

Second, roses need good, rich soil. If you have sandy soil or a heavy clay, you will need to improve it in order to succeed. What does that mean? Dig a hole that is at least three times as wide as the pot it was in when you purchased it. If your rose came in an 8-inch pot, a 24-inch hole should be the minimum you dig.

The late Mike Lowe, a rosarian who grew 2,000 kinds of roses in Nashua, told me to dig a hole 36 inches wide and 24 inches deep — if possible. If you have heavy clay, he said, put a couple of inches of pea stone in the bottom of the hole for drainage. Then fill it with an equal mix of topsoil and compost.

When planting a tree, it is important to dig a hole shallow enough so that the tree does not get its trunk flare buried. The trunk flare is the portion of the tree that was above ground when it was growing before it was potted up for sale. Often that trunk flare is covered with soil when you buy it, and needs to be exposed.

Not so for roses.

Many roses are grafted onto rootstock. The bud union — a scar — should be buried in the soil. The colder the climate, the deeper that graft line or bud union should be. For Zone 4, it should be about four inches below the final soil line. Zone 5? Three inches. Zone 6? Two inches.

Third, roses like soil that is just slightly acidic — pH 6.0 to 6.8. If you have acidic soil, say somewhere in the 5.0-to-6.0 range, you should add limestone to bring up the soil pH and make it less acidic. Mike Lowe suggested burying a three-inch square of gypsum wallboard directly below each rose to provide limestone over the long haul. I’m not sure just how effective that is.

Don’t know your soil pH? You can get an inexpensive pH testing kit at your local garden center. Or you can send a sample to your State University Extension Service.

Roses need more water than most other things, but do not want to sit in soggy soil. They should get an inch of water per week from rain, or a couple of watering cans of water applied slowly so it can soak in. A deep watering once a week is better than a little sprinkle every day.

I called Mike and Angie Chute of East Providence, Rhode Island, to pick their brains about roses. They have been growing roses for 25 years, and are the authors of Roses for New England: A Guide to Sustainable Rose Gardening. They are well-known speakers at the spring flower shows. Their web site is rosesolutions.net.

I asked them what they thought of the new roses that have been developed in the last 25 years, and how they rate them against the old heritage roses. Mike explained that the trademarked “Knock Out” roses have become immensely popular. I have some, and agree that they are wonderful. They bloom most of the summer and well into the fall, seem to get no diseases and do not attract pests.

On the other hand, most of the Knock Out roses have no fragrance, and do not have the long stems that lovers want to present to their sweeties. Mike and Angie grow them, along with 150 other kinds of roses, and said that the “Easy Elegance” series of roses is at least as good, and maybe better.

Want more blossoms? Mike said that roses do better if they get some fertilizer a few times during the course of the summer. They use chemical fertilizer, a 10-10-10 for a “kick in the pants,” and mulch with chopped seaweed. They like an organic, slow-release bagged fertilizer called Rose Tone, and sometimes use liquid fish and seaweed fertilizers made by Neptune’s Harvest.

My roses grow in good soil, and I have been neglectful of them — I rarely fertilize. But a dose of liquid fish and seaweed fertilizer two or three times in the summer might help. I’ll do it this weekend.

Want to learn more? The Chutes’ book, mentioned above, is excellent and worth reading. I also like one published by Rodale Press in 2002, Growing Roses Organically: Your Guide to Creating an Easy-Care Garden Full of Fragrance and Beauty by Barbara Wilde. It has a half-page description with a photo of each of 100 roses that will do well with organic care.

June is over, but roses are not. Nowadays, many roses will rebloom every 45 days or so, and some bloom almost constantly. Just be sure to cut off spent blossoms, and down to another shoot with five leaves or more.

Featured photo: ‘At Last’ a re-blooming hybrid developed by Proven Winters is a zone 5 rose that I have had for 4 years in Zone 4. Courtesy photo.

Eradication without chemicals

My gardening grandfather came over from Germany around 1910. He was an organic gardener, perhaps because there were few chemicals sold to kill bugs and diseases back then. He gardened the old-fashioned way: hen manure for fertilizer, hand picking to keep potato beetles under control, and a good compost pile to nurture the soil.

When Organic Farming and Gardening Magazine started up in the 1940s, Grampy was an early subscriber — and a believer in organic gardening. He grew great vegetables and prize-winning flowers. I grew up spending time on his small farm every summer, and helping in the garden. I’ve always believed in organic gardening: gardening without chemicals.

That said, I understand why many gardeners use chemicals: something is threatening their roses or their broccoli. Flea beetles are making holes in their cabbage. And what about chemicals to make the tomatoes grow faster and bigger? I get the urge, too. But there are alternatives.

First, I want to explain that chemical fertilizers are generally salts of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. They are water-soluble and can be taken up fast by plants, pushing fast growth. But fast growth is not always good — stems are often weaker, and excess nitrogen in plants attracts insect pests. Bugs need it to form proteins needed to grow and have babies. Not only that, a few days of heavy rain can dissolve your fertilizer and wash it away.

But if you are used to using bagged fertilizers, you can use bagged organic fertilizers. They are made from things like seaweed and ground oyster shells, cottonseed meal or ground peanut shells. They are broken down by microorganisms in the soil and made available over a much longer period of time. Unlike chemical fertilizers, they can’t burn root hairs if too much is applied.

Then there is compost. Compost improves soil qualities as well as adding needed minerals to the soil. It makes heavy soils fluffier, and it makes sandy soils better able to hold water. Make your own, or buy it in bags or by the truckload. You can use it as mulch, and let the earthworms carry it down into the soil.

What about bugs? First, please understand that not all bugs are bad. There are many beneficial insects, bugs that eat the bad boys. I have few insect pests, but never spray anything to kill bugs. If you spray your roses to kill the Japanese beetles, you may be killing beneficial parasitic wasp larvae that are on the roses but unseen.

My first line of defense is always to hand pick problem bugs. I get to recognize them, and then pick them and drop them in soapy water. If you don’t like handling Japanese beetles, get a gallon milk jug and cut away part of the top, leaving the handle. Add soapy water and hold the jug under the leaf and tap it until the culprit falls in. Or you can just crush them with your fingers, as many gardeners do. They are easy to catch early in the morning, before they have had their coffee (or perhaps warm up in the sun).

Gardening practices can help, too. For example, I plant my potatoes in June, long after most books say to. I find that I get fewer potato beetles that way. And once the leaves are up, I check for beetles often. I look under the leaves for orange egg masses, and scrape them into a jar of soapy water. I drown the larvae and beetles if I see them.

I have read that the life cycle of a Colorado potato beetle from egg to adult is 35 to 40 days. Plant in early April, and each potato beetle can start another generation four or five times or so before harvest. Break the cycle early to keep numbers down, as each momma beetle lays many eggs.

I have had trouble with a beetle eating my cucumbers and squash plants, defoliating them when they are small. The beetles are fast and hard to catch. So what do I do?

I drape a lightweight gauzy film of agricultural fabric over plants to keep bugs from physically getting to my plants. This cloth allows sun and rain to pass through, but not bugs. It’s called row cover or known by trade names like Reemay and Agribon. There are other brand names, too.

Sometimes I use wire hoops to keep the row cover off the plants; other times I just lay it over them. I pin the cloth down with earth staples to keep it from blowing off. Since vine crops are insect pollinated, I need to take it off once the plants start to bloom.

Row cover is not perfect: Striped cucumber beetles live in the soil and sometimes will appear under the row cover, but mostly it prevents them from getting to the plants. To be on the safe side I start cukes and squash inside the house three weeks or more before planting time (or buy a six-pack of starts). That gives me good-sized plants that can survive some beetle munching.

As an organic gardener I accept that sometimes bugs or diseases win. But my garden always feeds me, and I love working in it.

You can email questions to Henry at henry.homeyer@comcast.net. But be patient! Henry is outdoors most of the time during this season.

How to prepare for a garden party

In these times, garden parties are few and far between. But if you practice social distancing (tea at 10 feet) and wear masks as needed, you can still share your garden with others. And despite all the hoopla about how people are gardening more, we all still have weeds. But don’t let that daunt you. Here are some tips for making the garden look great, weeds and all — and sharing it with others.

Lyme, New Hampshire, has an informal group of gardeners who associate in a “not-quite-a-garden-club.” No dues, no meetings except for a mid-winter potluck. Someone manages a listserve with good info, links to articles, questions, offers of free plants and more.

Each summer members take turns hosting a weekly “Pardon My Garden” event. All members are invited to pop by a garden, tour around, share libations and snacks, pull weeds, offer suggestions. These are wonderful. But this year some are hesitant to attend, or to host. Here are a few ways brave souls have reduced risks:

(1) Instead of having a garden open for two hours in the evening, some are saying, “come anytime between 1 and 7 p.m.” That makes the population density at any time lower.

(2) Attendees are invited to bring their own glasses, if they want to enjoy a drink. Or hosts serve drinks in single-serving cans or bottles. At one even, box wine was served – no need to touch a cork or bottle. For snacks there were little zipper bags full of nuts, presumably prepared wearing gloves and a mask.

(3) Everyone is very respectful of interpersonal space. Hard not to hug friends after weeks of isolation, but we all just have to wave.

June is the best time in my garden. I have a primrose garden in the shade of old apple trees with many hundreds of candelabra or Japanese primroses in full bloom. So I want to share this with friends, and recently invited two other couples to join Cindy and me for a tour and a chat.

So how did I get the garden ready? First, I mowed the lawn the day before the event. I also have a nice battery-powered string trimmer that I used to tidy up those corners and edges the mower doesn’t get. A nice lawn sets a good first impression.

My partner, Cindy, loves cutting sharp edges around flower beds. She uses an edging tool that looks like a half moon on a long handle to shape nice curves to beds. She also uses a tool that you could make: 30 feet of strong mason’s twine wrapped around two nice wooden pegs with points. She pushes a peg into the ground, unwinds some string, and pulls the string tight from the other end. She then pops the second peg into the ground. That gives her a perfectly straight edge if she needs one. Great in the vegetable garden.

Next, I look for tall weeds, things that tower over our tidy flowers. Got a clump of tall timothy grass that came, via seed, from last year’s mulch hay? Dig it out. And any weed that is blooming should be pulled before it goes to seed and creates more work later on. Don’t worry about weeds in beds with nothing blooming — no one will pay attention.

Look for empty spaces. After getting the most obvious weeds, there will be spaces. You can cover these with mulch, if you wish. Or you can divide a large clump of perennials and put a few in the space. Of course, you can also go to the garden center and spend your Covid-19 relief check on new plants, too. Annuals are easy fillers, and many bloom all summer.

Plants in pots are good fillers, too. I have a large blue and white Chinese vase with papyrus growing in it. It has been wintering over in the house for several years and is a big, handsome plant. I am not above moving it from the deck to the garden to fill in somewhere, or to add interest to a place with no blossoms.

So far, most things aren’t tall enough to flop, but peonies are about to bloom for me, and a hard rain will knock many of them to the ground unless they are surrounded by peony cages or tied up with stakes. Best to support them now, before they flop. The same goes for delphinium, those lovely tall flowers that are famous for flopping and breaking in a hard rain. Like weeding, staking takes time and patience, but it makes for a much better experience over all.

Lastly, clean up the front of beds. Weed, and if you like mulch, add some. I mulched the first four feet of my huge primrose garden, and a friend thought I’d done the whole thing!

Some feel that gardening is a solitary venture. Not me. Yes, working alone, or with Cindy, is fun. But sharing the garden with others is even better. And when I do invite people over, I generally have some “spare” plants potted up to send home with my guests. And the great thing is I know when I visit their gardens I will go home with something I love.