The Gamble Garden

While on a business trip to Palo Alto, California, I had a few moments to myself (a very few!), so I made a visit to the Elizabeth F. Gamble Garden. What a lovely place! I must have picked the perfect day for a visit, because it was sunny, everything was in bloom, and they were even having an open house and plant sale! (Although I couldn’t buy any plants, as I was on my way to the airport for a cross-country journey back to NY).

How lovely to see spring so much further ahead than it is here. A few gorgeous pics:

View from Waverley Avenue

stunning calla lily

Delphiniums. I love delphiniums!

I love the way the flecks of orange in the irises pick up the orange of the poppies.

Formal garden with palm tree

The wisteria garden was in full bloom.

A whimsical bunny to please the children (or the child in all of us).

Lest we get too enthralled by the sheer perfection of this garden, a little munching creature brought it all back to earth

What a lovely place to stop on my way to the airport. Lots of fresh air, beautiful flowers, and warm sun before hours spent like a sardine on a plane.

Gardening season begins…sort of

Glorious day! The sun was shining warmly, bright blue skies, so what’s a girl to do but drag take her sons with her to the garden center to see what’s what! I know, I know, it’s early yet, but my whole gardening persona was formed in Texas, where the gardening season begins in February and if you don’t have everything planted by April, well, you might as well not bother.

But this isn’t Texas.

Since I don’t know one garden center from another up here, I decided it’s time for a little reconnaissance. We checked out Stillman’s Greenhouse and Garden Center, and I was so pleased to see the greenhouses full and open and lots of lovely green bits growing. I had a chat with one of their staff members, who gave me the rundown on their schedule for hardening off the plants in the greenhouse. Seems I’m waaaaaay too early for what I want to plant. I was shocked to learn that the average date of the last frost around here is May 20th. Good golly, in Texas I’d be weakened by the heat and hugging the air conditioner by then!

But I couldn’t let such a beautiful day go by without getting my hands dirty. So, I got out the garden hose and a few tools and laid out the edging of the new perennial garden I want to plant out front. First, the Undergardener shows his stuff.

He was so pleased to have lots and lots of space for digging. I’m pleased that he’ll help me turn the soil!

I decided to go for gentle curves in the front, rather than anything terribly dramatic. I want the drama to come from the color and texture of the plantings. So, here is a snapshot of the basic line of the front.

Fortunately for me, there is very little turf to lift. As you can see, most of the new bed is just dirt, because it is where the old shrubbery was. Ah, but there’s the rub. Very little turf to lift—but oh-so-many roots to dig up and work around. Ugh.

Well, it’s not as though I can plant anything really soon. Might as well get out my shovel (and my pick-axe!)

I’ll never get used to it.

Spring? So says the calendar. But Mother Nature is having the last laugh (or would that be Old Man Winter I hear cackling?)

Who needs garden design software…?

Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention. Despite hours of trolling the internet, I haven’t found any satisfactory garden design software out there for me and my trusty Mac. I’m hopeless with pencil and paper—I’ve changed my mind so many times that my eraser is wearing holes in my sketches. So, I’ve had to create another solution using my tools at hand—the internet and Photoshop.

I must preface this by saying that I am a relative neophyte at Photoshop. I can do only the most basic things—draw lines, drag-and-drop, etc. But what I’ve been able to do is draw a basic plan of my front garden as the background. Then I’ve taken images of desirable garden lovelies (perennials mostly) from the internet, then saved them to scale. Now, I can drag and drop images of flowers into my plan—and play around with colors and shapes in a way that my pencil-and-paper attempts couldn’t do.

It’s helping me develop a good balance of color and shape, but it does have its limitations. This system gives me a two-dimensional plan, so I can tell how much land each plant will take up, but the plan doesn’t reveal the relative heights of various plants. So, I’m having to go back and refer to my cheat-sheets to know exactly how high each plant should get. (Of course, I’m following the most basic of garden plans—tall plants at the back, shorter plants up front, with the occasional Allium giganteum or the like to shake things up a bit.)

The proof will be in the pudding, of course. This will be the third garden that I’ve planned, and to date, I’ve never been much good at following my own plans. My tendency has been to take the plan to the garden center, get frustrated by the fact that perhaps not everything on my list is in stock at that particular time, then get sucked in by the “oooh factor”—as in, “Ooooh! Look at this!” or “Ooooh, I have to have that!” Needless to say, my gardens of the past have always been a hodgepodge—part plan and part serendipity.

Also, I’ve also discovered a real discrepancy between what the “experts” say a plant will do and what it actually does in my garden. How many times have I planted a “back-of-the-border” plant in the back, only to have it disappear behind an unruly and aggressive neighbor?

So, I’m not holding my breath that my plan will be anything like the reality. But it’s going to be fun to see what happens!

Green invader

I nearly jumped out of my shoes this afternoon when I was in the front yard getting accurate measurements for my garden plan. There is nothing out there—a lot of mud, a patchy bit of brown grass, a few stumps from the overgrown shrubbery my husband cut down last fall. But while I was measuring, I saw an odd bit of green poking up through the ground. What is this odd bit of color that’s disturbing the pristine brown mudpit? Surely, it’s not…could it be?…no, it couldn’t be!….

It’s….a….tulip!!!

Spring is here! Hurrah!

Garden designing…or not

I’ll be the first to admit it. I’m not a designer. I’m sooooo not a designer.

I’ve got two blank-slate gardens, one in front, and one in back. I’ve done the requisite first step and made a sketch of the property with all of the permanent fixtures marked.Then I started sketching in some very basic ideas. Here’s the front of the house:

I love English cottage gardens, so I envision the beds being packed with cottage-garden plants. I’d like a flowering climber on either side of the front door (clematis, especially), with densely-planted flowers all along the front underneath the bay window and other front window.

Where I run into trouble, however, is figuring out exactly which plants I’d like to grow. The problem is that I don’t yet know any of the local garden centers. We moved here last September, just in time to watch our neighbors’ gardens begin to fade for the season. I wasn’t here in prime planting time to see if the local garden centers carry the same-old, same-old favorites, or if they have something a little more unusual. Yes, I want to plant rudbeckia. Yes, I want to plant echinacea. A rosa rugosa, too. But will they carry anything a bit different?

So, I think a large part of my design work will have to be done a bit…creatively. I think I’ll need to establish my basic principles—overall color scheme, height requirements, square footage to be planted with any given height plant, etc. And then I’ll have to just go and see what they have. It’s so frustrating—I want to have a picture of the garden in my mind NOW, not wait until April or May to see what I can lay my hands on….

The back garden is going to be a long-term, many-years kind of project. Here’s a photo of my sketch, which is probably too small to read anything.

At the left edge is the back wall of our house and the driveway. We have a big pine tree with a small hot tub underneath, which my husband wants to enclose with an ever-changing firewood wall. (If he’s willing to stack it all, he’s free to be as creative as he’d like with it!) There is an old, disconnected, built-in gas barbeque just to the right of that—we’ll be taking that out in the spring. That whole side of the garden—from the house at left to the shed on the right—is in shade much of the day. The other half is quite sunny.

So, my thoughts are to keep a grassy play area for the kids in the lower left with a vegetable/fruit bed in the lower right. (We will be installing a fence along the boundary of the lower edge of this picture, and will be planting raspberries and grapes.)

In the shady area, I would like a whimsical woodland garden for the kids. I’m not sure how this will develop, but I was very inspired by the garden of Eddie Foisy that was featured in Better Homes and Gardens magazine Garden Ideas and Outdoor Living. His garden has stone castles that he built, and his careful selection of plants makes he garden simply magical. I was thinking about some kind of woodland fairy garden in the area near the hot tub, with a sunny fairy garden closer to the shed in the sunny area. Or maybe a model village, inspired by Bekonscot…

More on this as my ideas develop further.

i NEED this in my garden

Corkscrew hazel. Also known as Harry Lauder’s Walking Stick. More properly known as Corylus avellana ‘contorta,’ though I have such a hard time remembering the Latin names for any plants I love. This is such a delightful, whimsical plant, I absolutely must find a great spot in the garden for it.

(Note: this photo is from the Scottish Rock Garden Club’s website, which is at http://www.srgc.org.uk)

I would like to plan a little corner of the back garden to be a whimsical garden, a place where fairies might live and a kid’s imagination could run wild. If we were a little warmer, I’d have a Gunnera manicata in a heartbeat, but zone 5b is just too far away from its happy place for me to consider. (That is, at least at this stage of my life. When the kids are grown and gone and I have lots and lots of time and energy to spend on plants instead of kids, then I’ll get a plant needing that kind of intense babying…)

What other whimsical plants are out there that would catch a child’s fancy in a whimsy garden?

Desperate for decent design software

One of the blessings of having no established landscape is being able to design the garden from scratch. But that’s also a bit of a curse. I’ve had my gardening reference books out, my sketch pads, my diagrams of the front garden and back garden, but I’m feeling a little overwhelmed. Too many variables to keep track of—height at maturity, color, blooming season, light requirements, soil requirements, water requirements….

I need help.

I’m stubborn enough to want to design this garden myself, so that rules out working with a professional garden designer. (Budget is another reason to rule that out, too!) What I’d like to find is some decent garden design software.

I’ve looked around and haven’t found anything for the Mac (at least, nothing that is reasonably priced and not intended for professionals). So I’ve been looking for software available on line, and here’s what I’ve found.

BBC Virtual Garden

This software is very easy to use, but it has some serious limitations. It was so easy to draw an outline of the quirky space of my front yard, complete with sidewalk, retaining wall, and bay window. All you have to do is click dots on the grid and you get the shape of your own garden.

What I really love about this software is that when you’ve finished designing your garden, you can get a 3D view of your creation. You can pan left and right, look up and down, get closer and move farther away. For a visual person like me, this 3D capability gives me a better idea of how the plants I’ve chosen will work together.

But there are two major drawbacks. First, because this software is designed for British gardening conditions, there are no USDA hardiness zones or AHS heat zones. That information is critical for me, because this part of upstate New York gets quite a bit colder than Britain in winter, and quite a bit hotter in summer. Years ago I made the mistake of trying to grow Britain-friendly plants in my central Texas garden. Everything was gorgeous until late April, when the thermostat headed up into the 90s and the plants began their rapid decline toward death. Yes, I learned that lesson the hard way.

The other serious drawback to this BBC software is that the plant selection is minimal. There are a number of classic cottage garden plants, but the selection is very small, so your options are very few. Still, I just love that 3D capability, even if it’s limited.

Better Homes and Gardens Plan-a-Garden

The plant varieties in the BHG software are much more plentiful than in the BBC software, and because this product is intended for American gardens, it does provide information about zones. But this software is clunkier to use. Setting up the initial garden space is a real chore, because you have to configure every line of the perimeter separately. For example, for my bay window I had to create three separate lines (the side windows and center window), selecting not only the length of each line, but also a color and material. (The software assumes that perimeters are fences, walls, etc., so there is no option for selecting “nasty 1950s asbestos siding.”)

It’s very easy to drag and drop the plants you want in their intended spaces, to move them around, and to change their sizes. But all you can see on the plan are general green-and-flower-color blobs which give you no sense of the interaction of height, flower size and shape, foliage shapes and colors. And when you go to print it out, you only get shapes with initials of the plant names in each shape. You have to search the software to find a key so you have any idea what you’ve created.

Conclusion

As you can see, I’m not 100% pleased with either product. I’d love to combine the ease of garden layout and the 3D capability of the BBC software with the plant selection and American content of the BHG software.

Anyone out there have any suggestions for me?

In the zone

Have you ever tried to read the USDA Hardiness Zone Map? (Of course you have, you’re a gardener!). Well, it’s great when you live someplace like Texas, which has great giant swathes of the same color. Easy to know what zone you’re in there. But get up to the Northeast, and it gets pretty tricky.  The lines are close together, there are lots of little pockets of different colors, and all you have to do is drive a mile and you’re in another zone.

It wasn’t too bad when I was gardening in Boston. My garden there was solidly in the zone 6a. But here in upstate New York, it’s a whole different ballgame.

The national map is darn near useless for me. I even looked at the county-by-county New York State map that Cornell has on its gardening page. But my county has two colors and I live right on the border between them. I still couldn’t tell.

When all else fails, ask an expert.

One quick email sent off to my county cooperative extension got me my answer! Because of the specific location of our house (and the extension agent actually knew where it was), the expert told me that we’re in zone 5b, almost a 6–but warned me that being in the valley could mean some later frosts, so be careful…

I’m glad to hear this news! It means that all the gardening knowledge about plants that I’d built up in the Boston years won’t go to waste.

5b!  Woo hoo!!

Back garden, before

The back garden starts off as more of a blank canvas than the front. As you can see, it’s basically a square of turf (not great turf, at that), with a few random scrubby plants along the periphery.

Next to the shed is a young maple tree, and our next-door neighbors have a mature maple that overhangs the garden, providing shade on the north side of the space. In the center of the yard is an abandoned rose garden.

Hmmm. A few scrubby old rose plants. Plunked into the middle of the garden. Lovely, right? Well, the soil in this little rectangle is actually in good shape, so I’m using it as my temporary strawberry bed. I brought about a dozen strawberry plants with us from our old garden in suburban Boston, so I planted them here so they’d have a good home for the winter. But this will all change once I have my Great Gardening Master Plan in place…