Amy Pollien » alpines

Still green

admin — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 00:10:41 +0000

Today I worked on the perennial/alpine/small stuff garden on the north side of the house. This section of our yard is over the septic field, so I chose non-edibles with small, uncomplicated root systems for that location. I flunked the “root” test by planting a ground sand cherry here almost a decade ago and by the time I got wise to its evil, septic-tank-clogging ways the trunk caliper was 4″ and its root system was immense. Digging it out was a nightmare.

After that I thought I was being very conservative with my plant choices for this garden: daylilies, heaths and heathers, varieties of sedum and geraniums, candytuft and anise hyssop. Today while cutting stalks and mulching for the winter I noticed that the Sweet Cecily (Myrrhis odorata) had spread to a dozen new plants – it’s easy to see this time of year because it’s still green and ferny after the frost. I dug some out to transplant and surprise! A very impressive root system.

Cecily, or Sweet Cecily, is a member of the family Apiaceae and the only species of the genus Myrrhis. There is a North American relative, but my plant is the variety native to Central Europe. The leaves stay green and fresh almost all year round and the whole plant is highly fragrant of annis. The unripe seeds can be offered as an after-dinner mint, the dried leaves make an excellent mothproofing sachet, the root – along with dill and caraway, is used to flavor akvavit. It would probably make a nicely flavored vodka, too, if it wasn’t growing over the septic tank.

I’ve transplanted six “daughter” plants around the yard, and next year I may try flavoring vodka for Christmas lunch, when the Swedes say the herb “helps the lutefisk swim down to the stomach”. Skål!

List

admin — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 03:20:05 +0000

Today, one of my co-workers asked me what I grow in my garden. We got silly after a few minutes of listing vegetables, flowers, herbs, berries, and on and on. I told her I’d try to do the entire list tonight, so here goes. I’ve only included the variety if it’s important, or spectacular enough to be the only kind I grow.

Broccoli, broccoli rabe, green beans, yellow and soup beans, pole beans, snow peas, pod peas and soup peas, sweet peas, perennial sweet peas, sweet grass, Genovese basil, sacred basil, thyme, sage, peppermint, spearmint, pennyroyal, milk thistle, and oregano.

Carrots, parsnips, onions, shallots, leeks (lots of leeks), turnips, rutabaga, Bull’s Blood Beets, potatoes, tomatoes (Paul Robeson, Peacevine, and Juliet), acorn squash, New England Pie Pumpkins, cantaloupe, muskmelons, Silver Queen Sweet Corn, cucumbers, radishes, spinach, letttuce (Tom Thumb, Bronze Mignonette, Majestic Red, Pablo), mesclun, broad-leaved sorrel, maruba santoh, tatsoi, piracicaba, savoy cabbage, kale.

Alyssum, cosmos, Mexican sunflowers, zinnias, dyer’s broom, coreopsis, heliopsis, batchelor’s buttons, stock, roses (Morden Sunset, Mdm. Isaac Pierre, William Lobb and Hansa), Siberian iris, Japanese buckwheat, Queen of the Meadow, hops, Blue Angel hosta, iberis, daylilies (Dear Dad, Ice Palace, Desert Sun), asiatic lilies (Stargazer, Strawberry Shortcake), elecampne, Chinese forget-me-not, flowering quince, angelica, alpine strawberries, Seafoam strawberries and Jewel, mallow, begonia, ground sand cherry, grapes (Beta, Somerset), blackberries, purple and red raspberries, blueberries (Patriot, Earliblue, several others, wild highbush and lowbush varieties), hydrangea, zucchini, hullless barley, cranberries and lingonberries.

Pinks, pears (Clapp and Seckle), plums, pie cherries, apples (Westfield Seek-no-Further, Golden Russet, Russian Crab, Liberty, Blue Permain), crabapples, elderberry, sorghum, flowering quince, flowering tobacco, snowberry, monarda, heath, heather, sea lavender, herbal lavender, calendula, azalea, peach, Dutch iris, echinopsis, aster, daisy, coral bells, geranium, calendula, cactus, seedum, sedge, feverfew, mullien, digitalis, Joe Pye weed, and columbine.

To be continued. . .

Columbine season

admin — Sat, 22 May 2010 02:05:23 +0000

Aquilegia, the Columbine (Latin from columba, “dove”) is in full bloom. This spring we’ve had enough rain that flowers are appearing in the margin of the gravel driveway and in the walkways where last year’s seed hitched a ride on the soles of my shoes.

This year the plants are over four feet tall. They are remarkably generous and tolerant of neglect, and the deer don’t seem to bother them. I had dark red blossoming plants from my parents (A. atrata) and a few of the bright blue A. caerulea that is the state flower of Colorado to start with, but over the last 10 years I’ve accumulated every shade of purple, pale pinks and creams and a few that are nearly black. I don’t think about them much at all, except that lovely interval in May when they bloom above healthy, lush green crowns of foliage and then retreat again before they can become boring – the botanical version of a house guest with perfect manners.

A weed is just a plant in the wrong place.

admin — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 02:45:02 +0000

And the wrong place for your Ground Sand Cherry is the leach field of your septic tank. When I got the Sand Cherry from Fedco, it was not all that impressive. A mere slip of a plant with red, shiny bark, tiny dark green leaves and (eventually) white single-petaled blossoms, it seemed at home in the alpine garden. It is a truly prostrate plant, rising only 2″ or so in sinuous waves and sending out rootlets everywhere it is in contact with the ground. For the first few years the siting seemed very appropriate and it added a needed structure to the clumps of heather and low growing seedum varieties around it.

Ten years later, it is a proper tree 15′ in diameter branch spread with a 4″ caliper to the main branches and a distinct resemblance to a daylight Cuthulu. The above-ground profile of a tree is matched by its root system, so this is not the sort of thing you want atop your leach field. Yesterday I dug it up and moved it to a sandy hillside where I can stand back and watch what it does for its next trick. Photo below is of the new site:

I’m not even concerned about the broken branches. I covered them with soil, they’ll root, and I’ll just end up with more Sand Cherry. And that’s fine – the bees love the blossoms, it is completely pest free, the deer don’t bother it and the peculiar growth habit is visually interesting all year long. It can grow to be 30′ for all I care. Now that’s it’s not crowding out the septic field. The remaining plants look a little sparse for now, but will fill in this summer.

Antisthenes says…

admin — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 02:13:04 +0000

… that in a certain faraway land the cold is so intense that words freeze as soon as they are uttered, and after some time then thaw and become audible, so that words spoken in winter go unheard until the next summer. ~Plutarch, Moralia

The forecast is for temperatures in the single digits over the weekend. We knew it was coming – we’ve had a very mild season so far and we knew it wouldn’t last. But now the snow that fell in fluffy drifts last week and blew everywhere like dust has been rained on a frozen, sculpted into odd patterns and compacted into concrete. This weekend we will be that faraway land where winter is silent and sounds thaw in spring. I need a reminder of what is under that featureless layer of white, all over the garden.

Campenula growing between seedum and dianthus in the alpine bed.

Astilbe and gunnera growing in the lower garden, near the swamp.

Elecampne growing on the stairs, over a tree peony.

Garden geology

admin — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 02:40:50 +0000

I have rocks scattered around the garden for the most banal of reasons – I need them to step on.Yesterday afternoon I was out in the alpines, cutting down stalks and seedheads, and noticed the rocks as a structural element once again. They are lovely peeping out between lush branches of myrhh or half covered with campanula, but they really come into their own when the fickle vegetation subsides under a frost.

They also mitigate our harsh climate, parceling out the change from 10 degrees to 40 over the course of a January afternoon into smaller, gentler increments.

Some of the rocks are spectacular specimens all on their own. . .

. . . and some are simply a sturdy, not unattractive place to put your foot while weeding.

I found this beautiful pale upright while digging a carrot bed. It has taken a few years of wind and weather to expose its true colors.

And this one, again, is just a stepping stone. Can you imagine my wooden clogs on that seedum carpet? No, you cannot.

Heath and heather require top-notch drainage. In this climate it’s not even the cold that kills these plants, it is wet roots and layers of clay. I dig a fairly deep hole (2′ for a 4″ pot) and fill it with large rocks and sand before planting a member of this family in a peaty hollow at the surface. My oldest plants have survived 15 winters here and thrived.

This rock isn’t really visible in the summer, hedged in by daylilies and Bouncing Bet. In this season it’s sculpture.

Winter is coming – the best time of year for collecting more rocks. I can hardly wait!

Garden retrospective

admin — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 03:03:46 +0000

I’m moving files to our new media server tonight and sampling folders from every season – every incidental piece of subject matter. There are houses, rural roads, weird trees, thousands of plants, frogs, fungi, and boats of all types, whatever caught my eye. What a difference a digital camera makes – I was never this spendthrift with film.

So we start in February. 2009 saw tremendous snow accumulations, especially for this area, normally too close to the ocean for 5′ of base.

Eventually the snow melts and the alpine garden blooms, low and sturdy, in a multitude of textures and variations of the color green.

Eventually July comes around and digitalis and Maltese Cross grow tall in the garden by the boat building.

Tonight it’s 50 degrees and raining as we head toward the huge local holiday observance of All Hallows Eve, but I have documented evidence that the garden was once lovely, soft and green.

Inadvertent Gardening

admin — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 02:48:45 +0000

Generally, the best plant combinations in my garden are unplanned. Not the plants, but the size, texture and color of the picture they make together, which is something I don’t see until they have grown together in a way that one day, has become exciting and attracted my attention.

The harsh climate here has encouraged me to grow vigorous plants. Specimens which the Thompson and Morgan catalogue coyly terms “enthusiastic” or even “reliable”, which is code for rampant and immortal, have at least a chance of surviving here. Autumn blooming clematis must be faithfully deadheaded in Connecticut lest the seed heads explode and cover the entire garden with next year’s vines, but here it dies back completely every year to grow to about 15′ and the seeds find no foothold on the stony ground in the early frost. I can grow honeysuckle, grapes, mullien and woad without fear that one day I won’t be able to leave the house for the biomass blocking the door. Where I grew up, on the Connecticut River, one had to cut the vegetation back from the mailbox with shears or risk the box being overgrown with morning glories and poppies over the course of an afternoon. Or maybe it just seemed that way to me at seven, with a pair of shears.

In this Maine garden, plants seem to incorporate each other nicely, showing each other off to good advantage.

Spring alpine post

admin — Tue, 05 May 2009 01:28:20 +0000

Heather, rock cress, emerging day lilies and the bright note of Siberian draba in a shaft of sunlight making a promising beginning for the season. In August this garden is a mass of foliage, but right now each color and texture sits in a frame of wood chips and gravel. This is probably my most successful garden and I could spend all my time here, convincing all these plant forms to live together and share territory. Humans tend to see vegetation as benign, but Napoleon had nothing on a healthy stand of rock cress.

Tonight at 7:30, near dark with a waxing gibbous moon hazed over by high clouds, a pack of coyotes went off across Somes Sound. They must have been chasing something because the singing continued as the sound dropped off in the distance. The neighbor’s dogs yipped and all us mammals cocked an ear to judge if the pack was coming closer or fading away. It’s a big island, good to know there is enough space for a small pack of scavengers.

First meal from this year’s garden

admin — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 00:26:16 +0000

The sorrel is up in enough quantity to make dinner.

Common Sorrel or Garden Sorrel (Rumex acetosa) Sorrel has been in cultivation for centuries. It has a strong lemon taste (some people think it tastes like kiwi) due to a high concentration of oxalic acid. I picked about 2 cups of leaves (packed), sauteed chopped onions and garlic chives (also up in the garden) in butter, made a roux with a little flour, added chicken stock and white wine and added the chopped sorrel. Serve on buttered toast points.

Not much else is in bloom and the trees are just barely budded. Today the thermometer hit 70 and the leaves appeared to swell as I watched. The heather and squill in the alpine garden are full of orchard mason and bumblebees.