I could use some help. Every year about this time I start thinking about getting new roses for the Rose Garden and every year about this time I go certifiably nutty trying to read between the lines of rose catalog descriptions. My kingdom for a disease resistant rose! Some of you already know that we don’t spray the Rose Garden with any kind of fungicide or pesticide - we clean up dead and disease-y leaves and we handpick beetles (though fingers crossed that the milky spore disease that Dan applied a year and a half ago makes a noticeable difference this year). And we’ve begun to interplant the garden with a mixed up mix of shrubs, perennials and annuals so that there’s other stuff going on midsummer besides black spot and beetles.

Traditionally the Rose Garden was a mixed garden heavy on roses. Word is that the family didn’t spend much time in this garden although they had a beautiful moongate built in 1913 and had tall fences erected (similiar to what surrounded their tennis courts) for the climbers to grow on. And Estelle Clements (Bessie’s live-in companion, friend and helper) mentioned in her journal when her favorite roses were in bloom.

June 10, 1922 Most of the standard roses are in bloom and the ramblers are beginning to come out. Kaiserin Augusta Victoria, Waltham Rambler, Goldfinch, Gardenia are flowering and Thousand Beauties is beginning to come out.

(I love the archives!) But the Rose Garden might have been enjoyed even more by the family’s staff. Situated next to the carriage house and barn (where the family wouldn’t have had much occasion to go), and surrounded in the summer by a thorny fence and stone walls, this private eden would have been the ideal place for a smoke break.

Now it’s our entrance garden - a visitor’s first peek at Blithewold’s 33 acres and we desperately want to make a good impression. –Very difficult to do that with unsprayed roses along midsummer! So we asked one of our favorite (retired) garden designers, Ginny P. to give us her thoughts and I’d like some of yours too. I really want to know if any of you have favorite roses that you don’t treat like roses - do you have any that look good even without weekly hosedown of chemistry? I know you do!… One of the Florabundas (our Thursday Rose Garden volunteers) gave us the most perfect rose last year - and just what I’m looking for more of. ‘Morning Has Broken’ is a beautiful butter yellow non-stopper with a sweet fragrance and best of all - not a spot of fungus amongus all summer! And we had it jammed in with annuals probably stifled and it just never stopped or dropped. We also have the ‘Knock Outs’. They don’t knock my socks off but they do seem to stay healthy. Can you recommend any others before I place my order for a boatload more of ‘Morning ..’?

I checked the All American Rose Selections website for recent winners. Winners are chosen based on a list of characteristics including disease resistance. On the page describing their test gardens I found this: “The rose varities in these trials receive only as much care as your average home gardener would be likely to give. In fact, AARS members recently voted to remove fungicidal spraying from the testing process, to ensure that our AARS Winners are natural top performers.” And I have to admit to being irked. Call me naive but I didn’t realize testers were allowed to spray the roses. Just how exactly can they tell if a rose is disease resistant if they’re spraying it? And when exactly did the fungicide ban go into effect? I couldn’t find that information anywhere on their website and so far no one has gotten back to me. I’ll happily try more AARS winners if I know they won the award fair-n-square. Anybody know the scoop?

Blithewold is R.I.ght here!

Like many other tycoons and coal barons in the late 19th century, the Van Wickles decided Rhode Island, a southern facing scoop of shore between Connecticut and Cape Cod, was where to “summer”. The insanely wealthy came en masse in high summer from the sweltering south to build outrageously palatial “cottages” in the cool sea breezes of the Ocean State. Newport was the famous choice of the rich and fabulous but Augustus Van Wickle chose little industrial Bristol because he was able to purchase 70 beautiful bayside acres with deep water moorage out front for his yachts. The quality and quantity of land was more important to him than the prestigious folderol of summering in Newport - the Van Wickles spent long summers and holidays at Blithewold actually enjoying their property rather than endlessly attending society parties.

Rhode Island is pretty special. It’s the smallest state in the union and has the longest name. Remember “The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations” the next time you play Trivial Pursuit. R.I. was founded on religious freedom, was the first state to declare independence, and the last (of the first 13) to ratify the constitution. The state motto is Hope, our bird is a chicken (Rhode Island Red), the state drink is coffee milk and our official shellfish is the quahog. (Does your state have a drink or a clam?) With a population of just over one million, we’re the size of a small city and everybody knows everybody or is somebody’s cousin. We have a skewed perception of distance and time - no place in the state is more than an hour and a half away from another but to go “off island” is an expedition (we pack a lunch). And we always give directions based on what used to be there (”turn right where the Almacs used to be…”) which tends to frustrate tourists and newcomers. Rhode Islanders garden in about 3 different zones - from 5 to 7a - in a state that could fit inside Yellowstone Park.

Bristol (zone 6) is a town of 22,500 in the East Bay. We are nearly surrounded by salt water - Narragansett Bay on the one hand and Mt. Hope Bay on the other. Bristol is the home of the oldest (longest, loudest, bestest) 4th of July parade in the country and I think Bristol gardens are also particularly outstanding. Bristol has a sizeable Portuguese community, many of whom emigrated from volcano infested Azores and brought a beautiful and utilitarian garden culture with them. A few years ago the Bristol Garden Club helped sponsor a Portuguese Garden tour and I’ve never seen such lovely city gardens - every inch under cultivation with grape arbors, orchards, vegetables and ornamentals in cheek-by-jowl neighborhood backyards.

The climate in R.I. seems particularly conducive to gardening. The weather is constantly changable and we enjoy four lengthy seasons (though spring has a tendency to feel an awful lot like winter up until the moment it feels like summer) that aren’t any longer than they ought to be. Right when we’re truly ready for summer to end, fall falls. And though I was just talking to another professional gardener last night who said she didn’t want winter to be over quite yet (we’re still enjoying our rest), I’m sure in a few weeks it will seem like the most perfect thing to be back outside full-time cutting back and tidying up.

I really love Rhode Island. I moved away when I was 18 and for the next fourteen and a half years the biggest little called to me. “Come back!”, said little rhody. So I did. The Van Wickle McKees loved it too and eventually made Blithewold their year-round residence. Thank you to Jodi at Bloomingwriter for suggesting we all tell our garden’s geography story.

I don’t get out much. It’s actually a little embarrassing. I go to work; I go home and pet the cat. It’s true that I get to see a beautiful garden every day. But it’s probably good for my soul and imagination to get out and see other places now and again too. And when I do get out, like I did this weekend, I think “why don’t I do this more often???” The bus to Smith College in Northampton, MA left Blithewold at 9:30 Saturday morning and by noon we were transported far further than the hundred or so miles up the Mass pike.

The Lyman Conservatory greenhouses were a feast - though we weren’t allowed to touch and certainly weren’t allowed to taste! (I did have trouble keeping my hands off the plants and had to slap my own wrist several times.) Each house had a completely different “feel” - from a global temperate zone with plants segregated by continent to the palm tropics to a ferny understory to the desert - all of which made me wish I hadn’t worn my usual 42 winter layers. I might never make it around the world in one go but this felt like a start. I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves - if I managed to get a plant’s name, I’ve included it in the caption. My only regret on the trip (aside from wardrobe disfunction) was that I didn’t linger longer to write down names - nearly everything was beautifully labeled.

Outside, the campus was a treasure too and almost had me wistfully wishing I could be a dewy eyed undergrad again just to stride the curving campus paths like they were made for me. I got over the wistfullness when I remembered exams and allnighters. Our tour guide said that they frequently spot stressed out students in the “aroma room” - a house full of scented herbs. I think I should have taken better advantage of hort. therapy opportunities at my school - I’d have been happier for it, I’m sure. Anyone out there go to Smith or have happy memories of a beautiful college campus? Anyone seek solace in their campus greenhouse?

Let’s start at the very beginning
A very good place to start

Now that you are all enjoying a Rodgers and Hammerstein earworm like me, I can tell you spring has officially sprung at Blithewold. There’s something that happens in the 3rd week of February - have you noticed a change? We mark it in our calendars every year. The sun is a certain smidge higher in the sky so when it’s out - even if there’s a frigid wind like there’s been this week, the greenhouse toasts right up. The birds have noticed the change too and I’ve noticed them - just this week. There’s a guy outside the potting shed right now singing and chattering away all about how cool he is. (I agree that he’s a studmuffin but he does go on and on…)

And - drum roll please - it’s spring because we started sowing seeds! I think gardeners know the answer to the chicken/egg conundrum - what comes first, the plants or the seeds? - it’s the seeds, obviously -duh! Gail and Lilah (who - three cheers! - will be our intern this summer) did a bench full of 17 varieties of sweet peas. We don’t knick or soak our sweet pea seeds because we’re not in a rush for them to germinate. We sow 2 seeds per peat pot in damp potting soil (Metro mix 360 with coir) and we water them in and keep them in one of the cool greenhouses (night temps around 50 degrees F). Knock wood, most germinate within a couple of weeks - the red varieties are sometimes slower . No matter when sweet peas get their start, they’ll bloom around the same time because they’re day length dependent.

Dick (vegetable garden volunteer extraordinaire) also came in to go through his seeds and he couldn’t wait a moment more to start leeks, onions, strawberries and artichokes. Did you know artichokes need a period of vernalization - temperatures in the mid 30’s to 50’s in order to produce tasty flowers late summer?

During the flurry of seeding activity, Julie (Blithewold’s director of horticulture) and Tara (the princess) came to prune the 40 year old Calamondin Orange. Every year around this time, Julie gives the tree her trained eye and a trim and every three years or so she root prunes as well. It has gotten to the size and age now that we really should root prune more often. It didn’t just pop out of the pot like we thought it might and we had to ask the Men to work their muscle magic. (They used a saw. I gotta get me one of those.)

Julie cut away not quite a third of the roots altogether (a third is the general rule of greenthumb). She cut away from the top edge, scored triangle chunks out of the sides and sliced through the dead feeders that had been up against the pot. She trimmed a good 5 inches off the bottom as well. Early spring is the time for root pruning because that’s when the plants are programmed to put on new growth. For some plants, root pruning in the fall can induce permanent dormancy (call it death).

Anyone else out there who couldn’t wait another minute to start some seeds or do spring chores?

This is it. This is when it all begins. It’s President’s Day. It’s time to sow the sweet peas! And that means the great rush and push of spring begins this week. I’m taking just a moment at home this holiday to mark the seasonal shift with a small awards ceremony. Then I plan to curl back up with my pestering cashmere cat, a restorative cup of tea and a book.

Caroline at Earth Friendly Gardening awarded this blog an E for Excellent and I’d like to pass it back to her and to a few others. First I’d like to say Thank You to everyone who has been reading and joining the conversation here. Your comments have led me and others to your own E for Excellent blogs. The intention with the award is to single out my favorites but I want to spin it a bit back to you. To start the ball rolling, I’ll send an award to Robin at Bumblebee. I haven’t been a faithful reader but her comment on my last post led me to Bumblebee again this morning. I found this post -and others- recommending that you get out to public gardens and flower shows and bring home whatever useful ideas you find there. I loved reading that because it’s a reminder that Blithewold and all other public gardens are a resource just for you. We need you to visit and are really only gratified if you like what you see enough to try it at home. (Deciding to become a member is gratifying for us too - and keeps us in plants and ideas.) Has anyone else out there written about visiting - and being inspired by - a public garden? Please send the link(s) and take an E for Excellent home with you! (Layanee, Jodi, Pam, and Digital Flower, I know you have many posts about public garden visits - please send your favorites and consider yourselves Excellent.)

Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone! A day early for Garden Blogger’s Bloom Day, here are blooms galore (mostly from the greenhouse). Every day I work around plants that I want. I go around sometimes saying, “I want you. and you. and yes, you too … and you … and …” - I think you should tell your Valentines that you want them (every day) - even if they know they’re already yours!

Click on pictures for a larger view with caption or hover over for caption alone. Is the new font size better for everyone? (I’m not squinting nearly so much) Also, if you’ve been having trouble reading these posts using IE, that’s working better now too. Thank you, Scott (and thank you, Wiseacre for very constructive criticism - it’s always welcome here)!

Gardens are not always just about plants. As a matter of fact, I think the plants are a bit beside the point. A lovely garden is lovely because someone made it so. Just like how a meal cooked “with love” actually tastes more flavorful (it’s a proven fact), a garden planted and tended with love is a thousand times more beautiful than any other. You know it’s true when you’re in it. There’s a certain something that’s hard to identify. It’s almost as if it’s sighing or telling jokes or smiling shyly. Loved gardens have personality.

Last week one of the Rockettes died. As wrenching as it is to lose her, we have to remember that Pat is not actually lost to us because she left us Blithewold. Just like everyone who has tended this place since its beginning and everyone who tends it still, she planted a bit of herself in the gardens. I know she loved it here. And the gardens are spectacular because of it.

The Rock Garden especially was Pat’s although she gave a willing hand in every garden on the property even on her “days off”. I can so easily conjure a picture of her walking with a slight tilt, hatless down the lane to the Rock Garden, weeder in hand chatting (telling proud grandmother stories) with friends who must miss her madly now. And in the garden I see her on all fours knowing just what to do. Completely down to earth in more ways than one. I can’t claim to have known her at all well but I would want her grandchildren to know that I adored her and felt a connection to her even if it was mostly this place. I won’t forget her energy even when she was tired and her perennially positive vibe (even in stinky weather and finally poor health) and her chuckle. She’s left us a beautiful Blithewold but there’s a hole in the garden.

In 1926 Blithewold’s 50 year old Toon tree (Cedrela sinensis aka Toona sisensis) bloomed for the first time (and was thought to be the first one to bloom in this country). William McKee, Bessie Van Wickle McKee’s second husband, brought the flowers to the Arnold Arboretum in Boston for identification which incited plant hunter Ernest Henry Wilson and botanist Alfred Rehder to travel to Bristol to see what other amazing things the McKee’s might have on their property. Wilson and Rehder discovered a plantman’s paradise. In a letter to her daughter, Bessie wrote, “They were frankly amazed to find so lovely and interesting a place here - and kept saying, ‘Why you have a second arboretum here, we never dreamed there was a place like this.’”

Blithewold was horticulturally rich even before the Van Wickle McKees bought the property. The Gardners who owned “Ferry Hill” in the 1800’s probably planted the original Toon and other exotic trees - many of which are still living today. We know Mr. Gardner designed a meticulously kept English style garden with award winning fruit trees and flower and vegetable beds (where the Enclosed Garden is now), and he grew this area’s first orchids in his greenhouses. Clearly he and the Van Wickle McKees were plant junkies just like you (if you’re a gardener) and me.

Plants have been traveling the world with people like us since the dawn of time and non-natives have been usurping space on the land and in our hearts for pretty much ever. How many of us would hurl whole paychecks at Dan Hinkley for just a few choice finds? For a long time though it was probably only naturalists who knew to be alarmed at how the landscape was changing. Now we’re all more aware. Bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculatus) imported for its festive decorative berries is smothering everything in its path (at least in our part of the world) and invisible hitchhikers like Japanese beetle and Hemlock woolly adelgid came in with nursery stock and have proceeded to decimate whole landscapes. (Did you know that Japanese beetles eat 400 plant species? - Look around an infested garden and you’d guess it was that many.) But we addicts still want-desire-need exotic plants in our gardens and we swear we’ll keep an eye on them and we’ll never ever never let another exotic invasive escape cultivation!

It’s not just the view that’s changed - exotics are taxing the whole system. I’ve been reading Bringing Nature Home - How Native Plants Sustain Wildlife in Our Gardens by Douglas Tallamy and am feeling so conflicted now about what to plant in my own garden that I am certifiably toons. Just ask Gail. I knew there were arguments for using natives in the landscape - we all talk about using the right plant in the right location and what’s better (less maintenance and fuss) than the plant that would have grown there in the first place? But Tallamy makes a convincing argument for planting natives from a bug’s and bird’s and butterfly/moth’s eye view. Our native creepy crawlies have specifically adapted over the millenia to eat specific plants. Sometimes an exotic plant has an edible leaf chemistry but a lot of times, not. Some people might think “but I don’t want bugs eating my garden because then I’ll have to use pesticides for goodness sake!” and this is Tallamy’s retort: “Somehow along the way we have come to expect perfection in our gardens: the plastic quality of artificial flowers is now seen as normal and healthy. It is neither. Instead, it is a clear sign of a garden so contrived that it is no longer a living community, so unbalanced that any life form other than the desired plants is viewed as an enemy and quickly eliminated. … a sterile garden is one teetering on the brink of destruction.” Nature’s own checks and balances kick in when natives are planted - preditors follow the prey. (If you build it they will come.)

I think Tallamy is (and I am) preaching to the choir. We true gardeners know there’s a balance to life and we want our gardens to be with nature, not against it. My head spins because I still feel justified as a gardener/horticulturist working in one of this country’s only coastal arboreta to try new plants as they become available (plus I want them). But I think we’ve got a bounden duty to plant and teach with our natives as well. (And in my own garden I’ll be going toons but probably not growing them.)

Sometimes that’s not a bad thing. (I’m not talking about Superbowl Sunday chili binges and consolation snacks for sad Patriots’ fans.) Deliciously spring-like temperatures and the weekend’s warming sun have started plumping up the buds - some fit to burst.

This willow in the nursery (labeled Salix ‘Mt. Aso’) couldn’t wait another moment to bust out its fiberoptic glow plugs and the witch hazel (Hamemelis x intermedia ‘Diane’) has begun uncreaking its crimps like an arthritic yogi.

Buds on the Cornelian Cherry (Cornus mas) are fairly rotund and the Star Magnolia’s (Magnolia stellata) are fat fuzzy slippers which hopefully will not be tempted to unwrap too soon in the yo-yo weather. The hellebores (Helleborus foetidus) have finally un-caped their plump buds right on schedule.

What has put on fat in your garden? Whenever the weather’s not too rotten, take a close look. This is a great time to test your winter i.d. skills (if you learn to identify trees and shrubs in the winter, you can i.d. them anytime - who needs leaves?!) and if you’re out there watching the buds and ticking off the days to spring bloom, you won’t miss the show. (Winter and spring bloomers tend to not be big self-promoters. You have to seek them out.)

If you want a spring tease, cut a few branches of early spring bloomers and place them in water. About a month ago I cut some Forsythia and Flowering Quince (Chaenomeles speciosa) and kept them in one of the cool greenhouses. The Forsythia opened over the weekend and the Quince will probably be only another sunny day behind. When you first cut the branches and put them in a vase, make sure to make a verticle cut through the base of the stem to expose more pithy surface area to the water. To speed bloom, give them fresh warm water everyday and keep them in a warm, sunny location. To slow them down, give them only cold water and keep them in a cool room. Depending on how close the buds are to breaking when you pick and how warm they are kept, forcing can take anywhere from a week to (in my case) a month.