We are thrilled to be open for visitation, adding a much needed sense of "life" back into the garden. Seeing picnics enjoyed in the Maple Grove and hearing children in Weezie's Garden reminds us why we're here. We'd like to shed the spotlight on our Horticulture and Operations team as they were faced with the challenge of prepping the gardens in a short two weeks. Normally they have 2-3 months to develop the beauty we all know and love, however this season wrote a different story and they deserve the biggest round of applause!
While some beds may not be fully planted yet and new annuals aren't abundant in the garden, we ask for patience as time, funding, and supplies can be tight. However we are continuing to improve and grow with each week! Last week our popular Trial Garden was planted and is ready to be one on the most gorgeous experiments in New England. We invite you to frequently visit and document the growth of this garden along side our Horticulture staff.
As we move forward in this new normal remember to reserve your entry ticket before stopping by, this system allows us to keep an eye on the number of guests in the garden to ensure a safer visit for everyone. We're currently open seven days a week from 12p, - 7pm, with the last entry time at 5:30pm.
Our chilly, wet spring is finally behind us. It’s time to put out tender annuals. Whether you are planting geraniums and impatiens or verbena and angelonia, annuals can now safely be put in the ground or in your container gardens.
In the vegetable garden, it’s time to plant tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, melon, summer and winter squash. Use cutworm collars on tomatoes, eggplant and peppers. Cutworms chew off your plants just above ground level but can be deterred by a simple collar of stiff cardboard or a bottomless can pushed one inch or more into the soil around the plant’s stem.
Keep up your weeding. Weeds are your plants enemies, stealing water, nutrients and sunlight. Straw or weighted newspapers placed between rows effectively block most weeds in the vegetable garden; reducing your workload and giving you more time to enjoy the garden.
As the days get longer and hotter, make certain your garden doesn’t dry out. Plants under stress will not provide what you are growing them for. Pine needles, shredded bark, and leaf mold are all attractive beneficial mulches for flowers and vegetables that reduce weeds and preserve water — but no more than two inches of mulch! Too much is as bad as too little.
Side dress the beds of perennials such as rhubarb and asparagus beds after the harvest is finished with composted manure or other substantial fertilizers. These plants are heavy feeders and need to replenish their reserves for next year.
When your rhododendrons (and remember azaleas are rhododendrons) are finished blooming, remove the dead flower heads. The plants will look better and not waste energy producing seeds you don’t want.
Now is the time to prune spring blooming shrubs before they set next year’s flowers. As you prune, use this clean-up process to also set the future shape of the plant. Most shrubs want to sprawl. Your spring pruning will ensure the plant stays in its space.
When your bearded iris finish blooming, it’s time to divide them. Dig up the entire clump of tubers and divide it into two-armed ‘fans’. These will provide a good display next year. Because you have reduced the roots, also cut the foliage back by half. And discard any tubers that show signs of iris borer infestation.
Add native plants to your landscape. Native plants require less maintenance than lawns, mulch tree, shrub and perennials bed. Once established, they require less water, no fertilizers and no pesticides. An additional benefit is they attract native birds, butterflies and admirers.
You can read more of Betty’s horticultural advice on her website, www.BettyOnGardening.com.
The Deadly Mulch Volcano
by Wayne Mezitt
MHS Trustee chairman
Many homeowners are currently restricted from leaving home, and as a consequence, garden centers are seeing an upsurge in people paying more attention to their yards and gardens. The family home is generally considered a most valuable asset, so investing in making it more enjoyable makes a lot of sense, particularly since spending increased time here seems likely. Unfortunately, a lot of homeowners lack horticultural expertise, so projects like these can be unfamiliar endeavors.
Most every garden and landscape utilizes mulch around plants, and rightfully so: mulch helps retain soil moisture, reduces weed germination, helps prevent water runoff/erosion, moderates soil temperature fluctuations, protects plants from lawnmower/string-trimmer injury and of course, it looks attractive. Properly applied, many mulches can last for years, even though some homeowners prefer to refresh each year.
Homeowners can choose from a wide variety of mulch types and colors, depending upon the appearance desired. Whatever mulch is used, it should be 2-3 inches deep, extend to the drip-line of the tree or shrub, and not come in contact with the bark of the plant.
Regrettably, some mulch users seem to believe that “more is better”; all too often we see excessive mulch piled much too deeply and mounded-up around the base of trees and shrubs: this what can be referred to as “the mulch volcano”. See left side photo.
Here’s why this excessive mulching is detrimental:
Bark of trees and shrubs needs to be in contact with the air to stay healthy;
A plant’s buried root crown eliminates proper air exchange;
Excessive mulch can encourage rot and insect/pathogen damage to the covered bark;
Mulch piled against the trunk of a tree/shrub can stimulate undesirable adventitious roots;
Mounded-up mulch dries out quickly and can actually shed water the plant needs;
And using too much mulch is an unnecessarily expense!
If you have a mulch volcano, removing it should be a priority for the health of your tree, and it’s easy to do. Pull-back the excessive mulch until you can see the plant’s root flare—that’s where the top of its root system enters the ground. See right side photo.
Taper-down the mulch to this level gradually, leaving no more than 2-3 inches of mulch under the plant, and the root crown exposed. You can recycle any extra mulch on other planting areas.
And later, when you want to renew your mulch, pull-back the older mulch and add a thinner layer of new mulch to assure the level continues to be maintained at the proper depth.
I rather think that archives exist to keep things safe - but not secret.
Kevin Young (b. 1970)
I miss the Society’s staff, being in the Library, our volunteers, and drop-in visitors. On the positive side, it is a time to catch up on the tasks that have been on the back burner because they needed big chunks of quiet time. I have been working on two projects: one to compile lists of Honorary Medal winners; the other creating an electronic inventory of our Archives.
Featured Collection ―Archives
Our Archives tell the story of the Society and is the original source documentation of the Society’s history. The Library receives paper, artifacts and ephemera from the other departments in the Society, unsorted and uninventoried. It is our job to cull the materials, inventory it, and house and store it for the future. Thanks to our volunteers, the initial culling, shredding and sorting was accomplished. Closing the Library by the pandemic created the perfect opportunity to move onto the next stage of the project: recording and storing records from the last 40 years.
The Archives include governance, legal, property and business records, correspondence and ephemera of the Society. Further refinement and ordering of the items and entering them into a database makes finding the records easy for future researchers. Sounds boring? It isn’t!
Archives can answer questions, provide inspiration and open doors. As I go through the papers, I am seeing the recent history of our Society and the true story emerges—the people, the events and the challenges, documented in real time. I discovered how much Society leaders cared about this 191-year-old institution and how they faced the challenges of the mid-20th and early 21st century.
Society leaders shared a passion for horticulture and learning that united them to face up to the challenges presented. They made difficult decisions and changes that met the contemporary public’s interests and needs while staying true to the Society’s roots and core values of horticultural education.
Today, the Society is seeking new and continued relevance. One lesson we are learning from the pandemic is that that nature and horticulture are important to all of us, both at personal and community levels.
Now as we look forward to increasingly vibrant gardens and programs under our new President, James Hearsum, we face new challenges with the Covid-19 pandemic. The good news is that we are taking steps to reopening. The gardens are open for visitors and looking great!
The Library is currently closed for visits. Meanwhile if you wish to contact the Library send an email to mobrien@masshort.org
We hope to see you soon.
Garden Design Master Class: 100 Lessons from the World's Finest Designers on the Art of the Garden
Edited by Carl Dellatore
Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 2020
Reviewed by Patrice Todisco
I was intimidated by the thought of reading this elegantly designed and somewhat ambitious tome that aspires to be a landmark publication in the field of garden and landscape design. One hundred essays written by some of the most highly regarded garden and landscape designers working today seemed an awful lot to absorb. Would I be up to the task?
And then the reality of the new world order set in, and reading one hundred essays became entirely achievable. Simply read one a day for one hundred days and consider it a meditative practice. Or a quarantine goal. When finished with one, reflect on what I had learned and move on to the next.
Reality being what it is I am not so disciplined, and I have dipped in and out of Garden Design Master Class, reading what appeals to me at any given moment. And for a book of its scale that seems about right. Almost three hundred pages in length, it is structured around six major themes. These include theory, process, elements, style, structure and inspiration. Lately I crave more inspiration than structure, so I head right for that section.
Dellatore, author of The Fabric Design Book, Interior Design Master Class and On Style, writes for popular publications including House & Garden and Martha StewartLiving. In Garden Design Master Class's afterward, he shares that the genesis for curating a collection of essays by acclaimed garden designers evolved from a four-year garden making experience on a twelve-acre former chicken farm in Churchtown, New York. A novice, his attempts at gardening were not entirely successful.
To rectify the situation, Dellatore hired a garden designer to provide clarity and coherence to his gardening efforts. Garden Design Master Class is described as an extension of that action, an attempt to gather the advice he had sorely needed into a repository of best practices for future efforts. It is designed to be a comprehensive guide to the subject that appeals to gardeners regardless of skill level, providing a little something for everyone.
The contributors constitute a pantheon of gardening rock stars and I could not help but wonder how Dellatore decided who would write on what topic. Arne Maynard on "Flowers," Nathan Browning on "Scale and Proportion," Isabel and Julian Bannerman on "Architecture," Dan Pearson on "Informality," Jonny Bruce on "Umbellifers," Edmund Hollander on "Ecologies." In the essay "Travel " Paul Bangay concludes that a great garden is a combination of many practices as well as a place for exploration. One might view Garden Design Master Class as a field guide to one's garden making journey.
Dellatore reached out to James Brayton Hall, president of the Garden Conservancy for insight into his favorite works on garden design and includes several Garden Conservancy members, Open Days garden hosts and regional ambassadors as contributors. He will be a featured speaker at Garden Conservancy fall programs, should they take place, so perhaps that will provide an opportunity to garner further insight into the book's selection and editing processes.
Individual essays vary widely in their approach. The most compelling acknowledge the temporal qualities of gardens and the deeply personal memories of place that contribute to the design process. The secret to gardening, according to Ed Bowen in his essay "Perennials" is to remember "that garden is first and foremost a verb," an ongoing creative process through which people and plants interface and engage rapturously within the construct of time.
"To garden is an act of faith in our future and belief in the extraordinary nature of transformation," according to Topher Delaney wxho creates and writes about sanctuary gardens. In these uncertain times, when our faith in the future is tested daily, one hundred essays about gardens and gardening, accompanied by exquisite full-color photographs provides a welcome respite.
Patrice Todisco writes about parks and gardens at the award-winning blog, Landscape Notes. She welcomes your feedback and suggestions about books to review.
Photo Credits, Top to Bottom:Courtesy Reed Brown Photography, Courtesy Katherine FitzGerald , Courtesy Jason Ingram, Courtesy Victoria Sambunaris, Courtesy Roger Moss, Courtesy Andrew Montgomery
