The Gardens at Elm Bank is hopping with Ribbit the Exhibit! Each sculpture is named, such as Diana the Huntress—modeled after the goddess of the hunt—and Fred & Ethel—a play on Grant Wood’s American Gothic painting. This exhibit features signage with fun facts about frogs, and also encourages visitors to scan the QR code to learn more about local biodiversity. Located throughout the Gardens, some frogs, like The Trio and Emerson make themselves known, while others hide in pockets of the landscapes. Designed by J.A. Cobb, this exhibit is FREE for Massachusetts Horticultural Society members or included with daily admission.
Many thanks to all who joined us last year as we took on the adventure of garden concerts in the middle of a whole new world. Even with very limited group sizes we were blown away at the amount of support and interest we received!
We still have tickets left for our June 9th concert. A mashup of local artists including Jamie Walker from Swinging Steaks, they'll be covering a wide range of genres and eras, from Woodstock, 70's soul, and New Orleans funk, to country rock, 80's pop and contemporary hits.
This popular event is now taking place TWICE a week
Listen in on the storybook adventures narrated by our Garden Educator, Melissa Pace. Bring a blanket or chair and join the squirrels, birds, and other garden creatures as we spread out in the grassy Maple Grove, picnics welcome!
Join us every Monday and Wednesday from 11-11:30 a.m. This drop-in event is Free for MHS Members or included with general admission.
Find an Unknown Plant in the Garden?
We've teamed up with PlantSnap & the APGA to help our garden visitors learn more about the plants they see while visiting.
PlantSnap can currently recognize 90% of all known species of plants and trees, which covers most of the species you will encounter in every country on Earth. Identify plants, flowers, cacti, succulents and mushrooms in seconds with the click of a button on your mobile device.
Just like last year, we opened The Gardens at Elm Bank early (April 1) and extended our hours and garden season. Our visitation numbers continue to increase as guests from all over Massachusetts come for the peace and connectedness of a beautiful garden.
Please make a contribution to our Garden Fund and give us the help we need to continue maintaining and improving our gardens and guests’ experience.
Your gift, regardless of the amount, will make a difference! Thank you.
Boston Outdoor Preschool Network (BOPN) is thrilled to announce the addition of a new full day toddler and preschool class at Mass Hort! Opening in September 2021, the full day class will operate Monday through Friday, 8:30 a.m. - 4:00 p.m., and will serve children ages 15 months through 6 years. Children in the full day class will spend most of their day outside exploring nature and will also have a classroom in the Education building for lunch, rest time, and child-led learning and play. BOPN also offers half-day preschool and summer program at Mass Hort for ages 2.9 through 7 years old. BOPN remains committed to connecting children with meaningful experiences in nature, honoring child-directed learning and play, and deep nature connection. Enrollment is open now.
"Edible gardening doesn’t just put food on the table—it puts a drink in your hand, too. Join Amy Stewart for a talk on designing a cocktail garden that does double duty.
We’ll cover the most worthwhile cocktail-friendly plants to grow: Learn which variety of mint flavors authentic Cuban mojitos, discover patio-sized fruits for punches and smashes, and find out why growing your own celery for a Bloody Mary brunch is totally worthwhile.
We’ll look at examples of beautifully-designed cocktail gardens and outdoor bars, and innovative ideas for extending the season indoors.
You’ll also learn secrets to mixing great drinks and creating your own botanical infusions." June 17, 8pm
"Join garden writer Jessica Damiano on a virtual tour of two of France's most beloved gardens, the gardens of Versailles and Monet’s garden at Giverny, and learn about their storied pasts and botanical presents."
As summer begins, many pesky weeds in our gardens grow and proliferate, often challenging the health and beauty of the plants we want to thrive. Few weeds are more problematic than mugwort. Identified worldwide by various names including chrysanthemum weed, wild or common wormwood, old Uncle Henry, sailor's tobacco, felon herb, naughty man and others, Artemisia vulgaris qualifies as one of the most invasive, pernicious and frustrating weeds for any gardener who wants to sit back and enjoy the fruits of his/her labor.
The common name “mugwort” may have arisen because the foliage of this plant was used in ancient times for flavoring drinks and brewing beer, later replaced by hops. Over the centuries it has been reported to have numerous culinary, and sometimes-miraculous medicinal and mystical properties. But it’s truly a beast in the garden.
Native to much of Europe and Asia, this species has become naturalized most everywhere, now a common resident in so many gardens, landscapes, disturbed/wild areas and roadsides
worldwide. It is readily identified by its aromatic, dark green dissected leaves with silvery-white hairy undersides, rigid red-purplish stems, and its dense, subsurface tangle of vigorous, succulent white roots. Photo courtesy of UMass Amherst
Growing rapidly to 4-5 feet or more high in summer, mugwort can dominate a garden once established. And it doesn’t take long to settle-in, particularly in our well-prepared, nutritious garden soils. Most problematic is its stoloniferous root system which is nearly impossible to eradicate mechanically: hydra-like, when broken from the main root, each remaining root section is capable of producing a new top-shoot that becomes another plant. I’ve seen its coverage spread surprisingly swiftly, and especially in sunny sites left untended, entirely crowding-out less vigorous plants within only a couple seasons.
Following first fall frost the tops perish, but the stiff dead stems stand sturdily until pushed-over mechanically or by weather conditions. Each spring new shoots appear from the roots, growing slowly until warm weather arrives, accelerating and producing a profusion of insignificant-looking flowers starting in July, followed by an abundance of tiny seed that’s liberally dispersed by wind. Some claim that mugwort doesn’t produce viable seed in New England; but seeing such a profusion of new seedlings, even hundreds of feet removed from older plants, my observation is clearly contrary.
Newly-germinated seedlings with their fledgling roots can be readily pulled-out, but removing established mugwort mechanically is tedious and ineffective; their mature, brittle, white roots break easily, and every unnoticed piece left in the ground will proliferate. Mowing is also fruitless because the root system quickly pushes out new shoots to replace severed tops. Smothering recently-mowed-off mugwort by covering the area, with black polyethylene or a thick tarp to exclude sunlight can succeed; but its extensive roots often reach wider than apparent from top growth, and I’ve seen them survive more than a year underground.
Even control with chemical herbicides is challenging, requiring repeated applications and diligent
monitoring. I’ve achieved most effective control by cutting back the tops and applying a brush-killer-type herbicide to new growth when it gets a few inches high, waiting a couple weeks for new emerging stems and leaves to break through the soil, and treating them with again.
Last weekend, my wife announced Saturday would be ‘a good time’; to install support rings around the half-dozen peony plants in our garden. After speaking, she looked at me in a way that told me I should cheerfully volunteer for this particular assignment. I, of course, immediately said I would take care of the project. I believe with all my heart there is never ‘a good time’ to install peony supports, because these devices’ lone purpose is to demonstrate there are certain tasks that are beyond the grasp of mortal man.
Let us start with certain facts. We install peony rings because peony stems have a tendency to break over (or ‘flop’ in the gardening parlance) under four conditions:
Excess wind
Heavy rain
Light, southerly breezes
Morning dew
Why do they flop? The basic problem with peonies is that, like bumblebees, peonies are aerodynamic impossibilities that nevertheless exist. Think about a flower that, when fully open, is the size of a Mamie Eisenhower corsage. Now, place it on a stem designed by Mother Nature to hold the weight of a helium-filled balloon. Next, make that stem grow to the height of a Celtics point
guard. Finally, put several dozens of these flowers on a plant with a base with a circumference that may be as tiny as the waist of a ballerina, or as big around as the Michelin Man.
You approach the task of installing a peony ring with trepidation because there are two types of peony staves – single height and double height – available to fit an infinite number of combinations of peony plant sizes; and two ring sizes. Because single-ring staves have a height of roughly 18 inches, but must be driven six-plus inches into the ground to be stable, the height of the ring will be barely a foot above the ground. Double-height peony staves are three feet high, meaning the top ring will be 30 inches above ground. There are two hoop diameters: 12 inches and 15 inches. Those are your choices unless you possess an American Express Platinum Card with a Jeff-Bezos-size charge limit.
Getting your peony rings out of your garage or basement is also an exercise in futility. No matter how carefully you stored them away last year, all peony hoops will have interlocked with their neighbors, and you will spend the better part of an hour disassembling and re-assembling enough hoops and staves to complete your task. Amazingly, even as they lie in your driveway, some hoops will again manage to intermingle. For inanimate objects, they’re awfully frisky.
The first peony I tackled was of the slim-waisted variety. I selected three, single height staves and a 12-inch diameter ring. I pushed the first of the three staves into the ground. It went in about an inch before hitting a rock. So, I moved the stave a few inches and found it would go in two inches and then promptly bend. No matter where I moved the stave, I found two-inches-and-bed to be the limit of the system design. So, I got out a handy piece of steel rebar and, in ten seconds, pounded it six inches into the soil. I then spent the next five minutes trying to remove the rebar, which had determined this was where it wanted to spend eternity. I settled on a system of driving down and removing the rebar an inch at a time.
Elapsed time to install the first peony ring: 45 minutes.
The second peony was gargantuan. For this one, I determined I would use six double-height staves and join two, 15-inch hoops together. I installed the staves in about ten minutes. Now, all I had to do was thread the conjoined hoops through the eye-of-a-needle size loops without damaging peony stalks or leaves. Twenty minutes later – and with the assistance of a pair of needle-nosed pliers – I had a passable construction.
Excerpt I had missed one stave. The correction took an additional twenty minutes and allowed me to plumb the depths of my bad-words vocabulary to express my frustration.
With a steep learning curve behind me, I completed three more peonies in about 45 minutes.
All of this, of course, will be for naught. The peonies are well-enclosed for the present, but those stems will continue to grow like a teenager. A peony at our former home produced six stalks each four feet long topped with a softball-size bloom. No peony support in existence could safely encase such a beast. I secured each one with a six-foot stake and 60 inches of string – they still flopped.
If you happen to see a gardener – probably male and middle-aged – looking like he has just failed at an important task for his significant other, please take pity on him. And, whatever you do, don’t mention the word, ‘peony’.
Neal Sanders’15th mystery, ‘Murder Brushed with Gold’ has just been published. You can find it and his other books at Amazon.com and in bookstores.
From the Stacks
By Maureen T. O’Brien
Library Manager
The beauty of woodland wildflowers is that they exist at all.
Roger Swain (b. 1949)
Featured Collection ― Native Plants & Wild Flowers
Society members were interested in native plants from its inception: three books featuring native plants were part of our Original Library, two by Dr. Jacob Bigelow, (1786-1879), a Founder of the Society and Mount Auburn Cemetery. Another early book on native plants in our collections is by Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps (1793-1884) of Connecticut: Familiar lectures on Botany: including practical and elementary botany: with generic and specific descriptions of the most common native and foreign plants, and a vocabulary of botanical terms: for the use of higher schools and academies (Hartford, 1831.) You can view it online here.
In the latter part of the 19th century, people began to realize many of our native plants were endangered. Edwin Hale Lincoln, a western Massachusetts photographer passionately photographed these plants. He was so concerned that the plants would disappear that he refused to disclose where he found them for fear scavengers would eradicate the plants. His estate donated has over 1500 glass plate negatives to the Society upon his death. You may view some of these beautiful images here.
Native plants were exhibited early and frequently at the Society. The Society actively promoted Committees on Native and on School Gardens in the 19th and 20th century and by the end of the 19th century they were so popular that the Society used its second floor to accommodate native plants exhibitions.
In the early years of the Society, women played a pivotal role in introducing native plants to the Society and in the founding of the Society for the Protection of Native Plants, now Native Plant Trust. The Society was home to the Trust since its inception until 1968, when it acquired Garden in the Woods.
Cambridge Author Annette LaMond recently published an excellent history of Native Plant Trust in A History Reclaimed: The Society for the Society for the Protection of Native Plants and the Cambridge Plant Club that you can read here.
Image: Cypripedium acaule by Edwin Hale Lincoln, is a native species of flowering plant in the orchid family Orchidaceae. It is commonly referred to as the pink lady's slipper or moccasin flower. In April 1921, the Society had an exhibition of native orchids. Society President Albert Burrage, who had the largest collection of orchids in North America at his Ochidvale Estate in Beverley, Massachusetts, wrote and distributed this pamphlet at the Exhibition.
In the Windows – Books on Wild Flowers
Our Collections are Growing…
Thank you to Kenna Juliani and Anonymous for their in-kind donations of children’s book from Society’s Wish List on Amazon. Also thank you to the New England Herb Society for its donation to our pamphlet Collection.
Come Visit…
The Library is open on Thursdays, from 9 am to 1 pm. We are also open by appointment (email: mobrien@masshort.org) and by chance.
Thank you to all who donated books for the ongoing book sale in the Library. We encourage you to visit the Library to browse our treasures and add to your own horticulture library. A previously used and loved horticultural book, is an environmentally friendly and pennywise gift for your gift giving needs.
We are partnering with the Natick Public Library and have a Little Free Library right outside the Education Building’s front door. There you can access a wide variety of free books to take home, including horticultural magazines and books.
June Garden Book Review: Garden Journeys Near and Far
Reviewed by Patrice Todisco
This has been a beautiful spring. The natural world has re-emerged with a brilliant display of color; the greens seem greener, while the profuse and vibrantly colored blossoms of flowering trees, shrubs, perennials, wildflowers, and bulbs are visually delightful. As the world slowly returns to normal, it’s a time to reflect on the past year and plan for future travels.
Begin with Adventures in Eden: An Intimate Tour of the Private Gardens of Europe (Timber Press, 332 pages, $40.00) by garden designer Carolyn Mullet. As Principal of Carex Tours, Mullet arranges visits to private European gardens, fifty of which she profiles in her first book, Adventures in Eden. An idiosyncratic lot, these are gardens at the vanguard of modern European garden design, representing the work of well-known and highly regarded contemporary practitioners.
Mullet takes great care to tell each garden’s story and shares compelling narratives that intersperse individual histories with descriptive text and first-person accounts by owners, designers, and caretakers. She has a naturalist's eye for detail and places many of the gardens within the larger landscape, providing an understanding of how an individual garden's form and design is a product of a particular place and time.
Adventures in Eden
Statue in bog garden: Dyffryn Fernant Gardens, Wales
Credit: Claire Takacs
As an example, she notes that the Dyffryn Fernant Gardens in southeastern Wales is located a mile from the Irish Sea in the Preseli Uplands, where the stones for Stonehenge were sourced. Its design, which deeply respects this particular spot, is contemporary yet informed by the past and placed “within the spaces offered by the old farm walls, the presence of a wild marsh, and the fact that it was overlooked by uncultivated rocky slopes.”
Beginning with Broughton's Grange and Barn in Oxfordshire by British garden designer Tom Stuart-Smith, whose tulip festooned lower terraced parterre graces the book's cover, the gardens included in Adventures in Eden represent what Mullet describes as a twenty-five-year golden age of gardening. With size and status secondary to passion, plantsmanship and creativity, they represent, as described by Helene Lindgens, co-owner of Son Muda in Mallorca, a “school of life” where one learns patience, tolerance and humility. For in the end “nature will follow its own laws.”
While nature will undoubtedly follow its own laws, working in concert with nature to design gardens that are environmentally sensitive and maximize native species has become the norm. In The Naturally Beautiful Garden: Designs That Engage with Wildlife and Nature (Rizzoli International, $55.00, 239 pages), Kathryn Bradley-Hole former garden editor of Country Life and the author of the column Nature Notes, profiles more than thirty international gardens and landscapes that utilize ecologically friendly approaches to planting and design. These can be added to your travel itinerary
The Naturally Beautiful Garden
The Kassiopia Estate: Kassiopi, Corfu, Greece
Credit: Clive Nichols
The diverse examples included range from twenty-first century public green spaces to privately owned cottage gardens and country estates and represent a range of styles and disciplines. They are arranged thematically with descriptive text introducing each section while
a series of essays on topics such as the importance of trees, supporting wildlife, incorporating seeds and fruit, coping with drought, grasses, meadows and prairie plantings, and the challenges of seaside gardens is included.
Bradley-Hole infuses each garden profile with a balance of historical and practical information augmented by a sidebar containing four or five key facts. Diverse in content, these range from information about the habitat of hawkmoths nurtured at the French garden Les Cyprès to highlights of New York City’s High Line. In the same vein as Mullet, she notes the gardens featured within The Naturally Beautiful Garden represent the work of some of the most highly respected designers working in the field today, including, Tom Stuart-Smith, Jinny Bloom, Isabel and Julian Bannerman and Patrice Taravella.
“One of the best things you can do for your garden is to get out of it, as often as possible to see and learn from other places,” notes Jimi Blake whose Hunting Brook Gardens in Ireland Bradley-Hole profiles. And after a year spent at home most of us are eager to do so. But we have also learned the value of staying in place and observing nature close at hand. Both are celebrated in Spring Cannot Be Cancelled: David Hockney in Normandy (Thames & Hudson, $34.95, 280 pages).
At the age of eighty, the British artist David Hockney decamped to a centuries-old farmhouse in Normandy, France. On four acres of land, inspired by a landscape of limitless beauty, he set up his studio in time to paint the arrival of spring. Spring Cannot Be Cancelled is a chronicle of that experience, the creative process that inspires him and the themes that infuse his work – light, color, space, perception, water and trees.
While not a gardener per se, Hockney is deeply invested in the garden and landscape that inspires his work. Like a long line of artists before him, he finds meaning in knowing a place well, and teaching us, through his art, to see the world in a fresh way. In this transformative period in which we have one foot out the door and the other hesitating at its threshold, Hockney’s sense of continuous wonder at the natural world is a reminder about how to both see and experience our surroundings with the same delight.
Lady Bird Johnson, as quoted in The Naturally Beautiful Garden, said “My heart found its home long ago in the beauty, mystery, order, and disorder of the flowering earth.” So too may yours.
Patrice Todisco writes about parks and gardens at the award-winning blog, Landscape Notes.
June Horticultural Hints
by Betty Sanders
Lifetime Master Gardener
Dry days ahead??? We are already short on rainfall for the season, and the forecasts from climate experts say it could be a hot and possibly dry summer. Use mulch to hold water in the soil and think twice about installing water loving plants this summer.
Peonies, rhodies and other spring bloomers. Once their blooms have died, it is time to prune spring blooming shrubs such as rhododendron, spirea and lilac; and trees such as magnolia and dogwood for size or shape. Doing it now means you will not risk removing next year’s flowers. Even if you do not need to prune, remove all dead flower heads to eliminate a site for diseases and to conserve plant energy which would go into trying to produce seeds.
In the vegetable garden. The soil and air are warm—plant tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, squash, melons and other summer crops now. After you’ve finished planting the summer crops, remember a mulch of heat-treated straw around them will reduce diseases caused by infected soil splashing up on leave as well as preserve moisture around the roots. It will last all season, can’t add weeds and improves the soil as it breaks down.
Early blight is the most common source of disease in growing tomatoes. Endemic in our soil, early blight can cause damping-off, collar rot, stem cankers, leaf yellowing and fruit rot. Two inches of a clean, organic mulch will reduce your soil-borne diseases as well as keeping weeds down and the soil cooler and moister on hot days.
Pinch back the tops of annual herbs to promote bushier growth. Herb flavors are strongest early in the day, so do your harvest then and refrigerate until you are ready to use them.
Lawn care: mowing. Move your mower blade to its highest setting; preferably three inches — a height where the grass will shade out most new weeds. A longer lawn also keeps its roots cooler during hot days when it is more susceptible to disease and insect damage in the summer. If your lawn is cut by a service, specifically ask them to raise the blades on their machines to that height when mowing your lawn.
Lawn care: chemicals. Stop any lawn treatments until the end of summer. Fertilizer promotes vigorous top-growth at a time when the rainfall will be decreasing, and when the increasing heat is telling the grass to slow down. Herbicides (weed-and-feed, broad-leaf herbicides) will damage grass roots in the heat of summer. Pesticides are indiscriminate killers, killing off beneficial insects along with pests. Unless you identify a specific pest. there are far more ‘good guys’ out there that keep the lawn and garden going by eating the bad guys.
Keep your ‘friends’ close. Well, sort of. After birds, you best friends in the garden are garter snakes as well as toads and frogs. Watch out for them. Amphibians and reptiles eat hundreds of insects every day, making them your friends – even though some of us are not comfortable when surprised by one.
It’s swallowwort season. Be especially aware of the growing colonies of invasive weeds such as black swallowwort. It looks like a vine as it grows, then a pretty purple flower appears and finally a pod full of seeds. While the seeds look somewhat like small milkweed pods, they will kill monarch larva that hatch from eggs laid on these plants. Pull the entire plant (it comes out easily) by hand before the
Keep an eye on the area because swallowwort may re-sprout. Do not compost or throw any swallowwort into other areas. Left alone, they will cover everything in your garden.
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