Hollow Garden

It’s peony time in the hollow. Our cool moist spring has given a prolonged bloom time unlike previous years when the heat brought everything out at once.

This deep cerise double is a division from an old planting at the Blenheim Estate in Albemarle County. It smells like a rose. We’d had them on the driveway for years, at the edge of the forsythia tangle, but we transplanted them last fall to a more prominent place as we develop this part of the border.

They say the best time to transplant peonies is late summer or early fall when they have gone dormant, though they’re such a tough plant I suspect they could survive most anything. Only one good bloom this season, as they put their energy into growing their roots. I hope next spring will see more.

Phoebes have built their nest over a light fixture in the alcove next to the front porch. They tried numerous times to build in their old place on the other side, where they’ve been rearing clutches for generations, but Antonio, our painter, kept tearing down the nest because he didn’t understand we wanted him to leave it.

After we finally got it translated, they had chosen the new site. From the glider, I have a front row seat and watch them (Is it always the female who sits? I see them both.) swoop back and forth from the garden chairs to the magnolia to the nest.

I wait anxiously to see the nestlings hatch, then fledge. The hope of spring, the terrible dangers, the beauty.

River Oats

I wake up to the woodpecker at dawn, thrumming somewhere outside my bedroom window and listen to the mourning doves calling up in the pines as the afternoon comes on, the glider arms cool against my skin as I rock back and forth on the front porch. The sparrows eat the grass seed we sowed on the path by the forsythia patch, a crow has claimed the compost heap as his own and Zsa-Zsa makes her way down to the little marshy bluebell bed each evening and sits waiting for something to cross her path.

Forced forsythia branches have lit up the back room for over a month and ‘Diane’ twigs ornament the kitchen chest, her pink ribbony blooms faded to mauve in the indoor light. Witchhazels and grasses are at their best backlit by the setting sun, but I can’t do without bringing woody things inside in the winter. I’m waiting for what I think is a white oak twig to reveal itself to me in a vase on the library table. Little mouse-ear leafs will tell the tale.

My outdoor task this week is to finish cutting back the native river oats (Chasmanthium latifolium), also called northern sea oats, and placing the seedy stems along the eroded creek banks, staving them in with old stiff Verbasina stalks so they will have a chance to take hold. I long to see them blowing over the creek.

Now is the best time to transplant Snowdrops (Galanthus sp.), best done in clumps; always allow them to reseed as their little nodding caps turn into green beads. We grow G. elwesii, the Giant Snowdrop, an heirloom Greek variety. Snowdrops love to naturalize and resist deer and rodents. An early source of nectar for bees, along with the honeysuckle bush, Lonicera fragrantissima, covered for months now in creamy popcorn-like blooms that fill the air with their Fruit Loopy perfume.

Spring has sprung in the hollow.

Male Alder catkins

Took a walk this afternoon before the storm comes in tomorrow. Snow then ice predicted. I often think of the people who lived here in the 19th century and before – native Americans must have settled along the creek long before white people – who did not have the radar to tell them when storms would come.

Tonight the sky is perfectly clear. How could anyone know a storm is coming? Jupiter is rising now around 6 p.m., the new moon and Venus sparkling just over the crest of the ecliptic and on their way down to set behind Joanna’s hills. Little red Mars will rise later over the east meadow.

We are blessed with dark skies and peace and quiet in the hollow, true luxuries in this crowded world. The surrounding hills make an oculus of the sky and we look up into the purity of the Milky Way stretched across black velvet from east to west, Cassiopeia rising to the north above the potting shed and Orion reaching his arms up above his belt behind the hill to the south. We have a lower horizon in winter with the contours of the hills now apparent through the bare trees.

Often on my walks I am struck by the silence, sometimes not a sound to be heard, when there is not even the thrum of a distant jet. Yet we have our winter sounds. In the meadow, the creek runs high, with two little “falls” rushing behind the cherry bench, like water pouring into a bathtub. The birds peep themselves to sleep in the forsythia tangle. We all settle in for the cold, cold night.

The east meadow is in full milkweed glory.

We have a lovely patch of the native common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca) spreading up from the creek through the grasses and forbs that make up the meadow. In all my years, this is the best season yet. They have recovered from a disfiguring fungal or insect problem I never bothered to identify (because I wasn’t going to do anything about it) that afflicted them for the past few years and are now clean as the Garden of Eden. Whatever the cycle was, it has completed itself.

It’s heaven to walk among the fragrant drooping pods of blossoms. Earlier in the season, they were covered in orange fritillaries, now it’s bumblebees and other little fliers that swarm when we walk through the path along the creek. Yesterday when we walked in the twilight they rose in a gentle cloud around our heads before settling back down in our wake.

Drought has caught up with us. Days after days of beautiful sky-blue but no rain in sight and the ground is getting hard as iron. All the pots we’ve amassed up at the potting shed give it an Italian air, but it’s a lot of work to keep everything watered. It reminds me of my old days of estate gardening.

The single-flowered Geranium inquinans, one of Jefferson’s favorites, are in bloom in the turquoise pots. Hummingbirds go back and forth between their true scarlet flowers to the orange-pink native honeysuckle trumpets (Lonicera sempervirens) on the vine I’m training up on the potting shed lattice.

Goldfinches have been perching atop the new Monarda fistulosa ‘Claire Grace’, a cultivar with pretty pink-lavender flowers rather than the dark burgundy of the straight species. Saw a hummingbird moth visiting this morning. A front porch border full of flowers is a never-ending show in summer with Nicotiana ‘Fragrant Cloud’ feeding the pollinators through the night.

Spring sprays confetti through the hollow. Whitebud (Cercis canadensis alba), Redbuds, Spicebush spangle the woods and the dogwoods are just plumping out. We are blessed with one of the most beautiful and prolonged springs either of us can remember. Abundant rainfall, cool temperatures keep it all refreshed. The beneficence of the Earth.

The air is full of butterflies, spicebush swallowtails mostly, which lay their eggs on the native Lindera benzoan that lines the creek. Daffodil season still hasn’t spent itself, starting off in February with the cheery little ‘Tete-a-Tetes’.

There are a variety of colors and shapes beyond the iconic trumpet yellow ‘King Alfred’ types; both early bloomers, ‘Ice Follies’ has a rich white substance that makes a soothing companion. ‘Salome’, a mid to late small cup, has white petals with a delicate rosy pink cup; heavily fragrant ‘Geranium’, a late blooming tazetta, sports bright orange cups; ‘Ambergate’ and ‘Sabine Hay’, late mid-season, go bold with copper petals and bright red cups. Each year I get out my trusty Daffodils for American Gardens by Brent and Becky Heath of famed Daffodil Mart down in Gloucester and re-identify our collection.

Hoop Petticoat/Narcissus bulbocodium

The Summer Snowflake, Leucojum, is in its glory, taking up great swaths of the porch border, a vigorous, deer-proof bulb that can take a moist situation in sun or shade. Lovely for cutting, its pure white green tipped bells droop gracefully from dark green lush foliage. I love to put them in a large glass bowl.

Summer Snowflake/Leucojum aestivum

There is terrible trouble in the world, the Earth afire with hatred, death and disease among family and friends, yet we linger here a while longer in our enchanted hollow, a fool’s paradise perhaps, but our own.

Voltaire’ advice endures and none of us would be the worse for tending our garden.

We’re blooming inside and out in February here in the hollow thanks to Alder (Alnus), Amaryllis and Snowdrops (Galanthus).

Inside, the late ‘Christmas Gift’ Amaryllis, a holiday present from a friend, has graced our table for a month or so. Cleverly staked with willow twigs that rooted and leafed out in a tender spring green, this magnificent bulb produces one of the most beautiful of the Hippeastrum we’ve ever seen.

The large pure white flowers and creamy buds remind us of an Easter Lily. Once it began flowering, it’s been kept dry and thrives in our sunniest south window. Although I generally compost the old ones and start new each winter season, I might go to the trouble of trying to keep this one going by fertilizing its green leaves all summer and letting it go dormant in a dark closet in the fall.

The black alder (Alnus glutinosa) is one of the outside earliest blooms, our harbinger of spring, dangling its golden catkins powdery with pollen to fertilize tiny purple female buds, a perfect example of a monoecious plant that produces imperfect male and female flowers on the same plant. Although native to Europe, western Asia and northern Africa, the alder is long naturalized in the United States often occurs along our little waterways, as it does here by our creek. There are striking cultivars like ‘Lancianata’ and ‘Aurea’ for the collector who has a wet spot to display them.

The genus Galanthus  has many varieties, from the giant snowdrop (G. elwesii) to the double, G. nivalis Flore Pleno. It loves to be transplanted in bloom, in clusters and takes a moister site than most bulbs. They are lovely poking their heads above the snow and make charming bud vases.

Happy Late Winter from the hollow!

Lights on Witchhazel ‘Diane’ (Hamamelis x intermedia) welcome the new year to the hollow.

My celebration of 4+ inches of rain last October was premature. Though we’ve had a few inches over the last week or so, creeping up on us on parched paws, drought still stalks our foothills. Here in the hollow we ride the line between severe drought to our west on the Waynesboro side and moderate towards Charlottesville.

Yet the creek continues to rush over its little fall down by the cherry bench and all seems well on the surface. I’ve often felt our little paradise down here is a secret haven somehow suspended from the woes that are consuming the planet, a portal into a parallel world the way it should be.

Early winter has brought sightings of the great blue heron, a pair of hawks, woodpeckers, bluejays and the ever-present crows who roost in the pines above the drive. I occasionally spy the mockingbird and cardinal in the forsythia tangle and across the road in a devil’s mix of privet, bittersweet and honeysuckle that inhabits the roadside ditch. Watercress is greening up there, too, and just today I saw fresh leaflets floating in the east meadow creek, washed down from last year’s sowing.

Paperwhites and Amaryllis keep us company indoors along with forcing branches of witchhazel and honeysuckle (Lonicera fragrantissima). I have long remembered the class project in elementary school where we brought woody twigs to unfold inside. I can still see the jars and bottles on the dining room table at eye level, that wonderful perspective childhood grants us.

Altogether, we had about 4 1/2 inches of rain in September, mostly in little spits of .3″ with one good soaker. October  has started off with another scant .3″ and I am waiting hopefully for an autumn cycle of regular rainfall. The creek has just begun to trickle again and I can hear it faintly from the cherry bench, but the ground is still like iron.

Maples, Nyssas, dogwoods and sourwood are turning lovely muted colors – the birds have stripped the spicebush berries – and I feel like a fly stuck in amber out here in paradise while the world seems to burn all around me with war and natural disasters. Perhaps I watch too much TV and should get out in the garden more.

My current to-do list:

*Clean up last of annuals in front porch and back deck beds, lay down winter mulch.

*Finish trimming wild hairs on forsythia.

*Cut the last two old lilacs down to ground level. The first one has sprouted nicely from the base.

*Weed poison ivy from sourwood and cleft rock. Now is the season that all the random walnuts and poison ivy seedlings are popping up. Good time to walk the grounds with a sharp spade and trowel.

*Deep water this year’s new woody plantings of witch hazel Ryan’s ‘Jelena’, American Beautyberries (Callicarpa americana) and Fran Boninti’s Styrax obassia, the Asian fragrant snowbell.

The Geranium inquinans from old Monticello cuttings (a single flowered scarlet) is showing its autumn colors with the cooler night temps. Have never regretted our glazed turquoise Vietnamese pots.

The drone of bees among the Jewelweed is louder as summer wanes.

Here on the glider porch, their hum and buzz blends with the background of grasshoppers and other small cheepers that sing throughout the day. It is the only sound except for the muted hum of the fan from inside – a perfect late summer chorus.

It began with a solitary bee making his way from blossom to blossom and now I count half a dozen along with a large bumble bee, black and yellow swallowtail butterflies, a small wasp or two and a greenish slender-bodied fly, not to mention the hummingbird (who sounds like a large bee itself) who visits throughout the day. Everyone is busily trying to eat as much as possible before the end of summer and the beginning of their journeys south or into the ground.

The self-seeded border of Jewelweed (Impatiens capensis) that I ponder has been a happy accident. A native along our creek, a lover of shade and moisture, it crept into the front porch border and has not been browsed by the deer. Apart from its utility to pollinators, it’s quite lovely as a summer screen as long as it doesn’t bake in afternoon sun.

Pale long-stalked blue-green leaves flutter in the slightest breeze and provide a lush backdrop for the multitude of tiny turk’s cap blossoms speckled tangerine and brown. This 4′ tall panorama is just a few feet  from where I sit on the glider and to watch the play of insects among the forest of flower stalks is a delight. Before frost kills them, they will form tiny green seed pods that explode on contact, fun to show the kids.

If you’d like to collect seed from a wild patch when pods are just getting plump and ready to explode, bend their heads into a baggie before cutting the stalks so they fall in. Then scatter these on top of the ground right away in a moist shady spot. Look for them to sprout next summer after the soil warms up. Don’t amend the soil. They want native acid clay loam.

If you don’t have any at home keep a look out for these lovely natives on your trail walks, especially along streams and ditches and wetlands.

The east meadow is entering its ugly phase with the Verbesina stalks turning black, but there’s still enough yellow and green left to quibble with Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay” ~ Nature’s first green is gold/Her hardest hue to hold.

Here in the hollow, we beg to differ.

Queen Anne’s Lace, the wild carrot naturalized from our European days, spangles the sunny end of the meadow, up from the damper bottomland that nurtures Deer’s Tongue  and Yellow Ironweed. Along with the native switch grass, their textures weave a matrix Piet Oudolf would be proud of.

The Ironweed  is just beginning to bloom and always reminds me of the Sukevine of Cold Comfort Farm that enveloped its denizens in its lusty embrace. When it showed up years ago in the hollow, I thought it was an invasive and to my shame killed a native Joe Pye while trying to eradicate it. A lesson in ignorance I will never forget. The Joe Pye never came back, but the Ironweed marches on.

The meadow develops as the environment changes, from “natural” causes as well as the hand of man. Sometimes I think man’s hand is a blight everywhere. Even so, the meadow is a lovely thing to live with. It does not stay the same.

John has mowed a good strolling path (6-8′ wide) that takes us under the canopy of the wild cherry (Prunus sp.), past the dolphin bench, on towards the Sassafrass grove, along the creek which runs so softly now during the drought that has suddenly set upon us. It’s a mere trickle now and bound to get worse as

a heat dome  is forecast for next week with the ground already dry as a bone. Thankfully, the spring up the little hollow across the creek to the north that we depend on for our household water continues to fill the cistern to overflowing.

Across the land as rivers run dry, forests burn and lakes and ponds fill with algae and bacteria, we are grateful for our water and the little paradise we live in. Sometimes I feel that we’re living in an enchanted garden with the world going to hell around us.

The zinnias are stalwart in the heat, feeding swallowtails, fritillaries, hummingbirds, bumblebees, dragonflies and goldfinches. I’ve overcome my initial disdain for the bedding cultivar ‘Magellen’ which I got stuck with this spring instead of the old cutting varieties ‘Oklahoma’ and ‘State Fair’ I was looking for. ‘Magellan’ does not have the grace or subtle colors (do not mix the pinks and oranges!) of the older varieties and has short stubby stems, but

when I see the giant landing pads the they offer the pollinators, I bow to the obvious.

Happily, a bit of ‘State Fair’ did show up in a bare spot I seeded earlier in summer with seed collected from last year, bringing a splash of Barbie pink to the grasses at the edge of the meadow. Will continue to collect and sow.

No better proof of their deer-resistance as Long Ear and her herd graze through each evening.