Hollow Garden

Impatiens capsicum

Despite the autumn equinox, it’s always summer to me as long as the hummingbirds are here. They continue to delight each afternoon as I watch them from the glider porch zooming like the Jetsons through the jewelweed (Impatiens capsicum). A mockingbird has taken up residence in the forsythia tangle and begins his trill about the same time. He also sings to Johnny early in the morning when he sits on the rocking chair porch, but I’m not up then.

Beautyberries, both native (Callicarpa americana)

Callicarpa americana

and Japanese (C. japonica)

Callicarpa japonica ‘Amethyst’

are in their amethyst glory, stiffly upright branches bejeweled at the leaf axes in the former; arching wands of luscious berries weighed to the ground in the latter. The birds do not eat them now, but wait til winter when they’re wizened and provide needful nutrition.

The spicebush (Lindera benzoan) berries are disappearing, however, though I can’t tell who’s eating them. Spicebush is a lovely native, sparkling lemon-yellow leaves with red berries this time of year and in early spring blooming with pale yellow fuzz balls. It is a food source for the larva of the Spicebush swallowtail and indeed the Disney-like yellow, blue and black spotted butterflies flit about all through the hollow in these hot late season days. They, too, visit the jewelweed.

Ripening figs from the ‘Chicago Hardy’ in the back corner say summer’s not gone either and each time I pluck one and pop it into my mouth, I think, Aristotle must have done this. We live in paradise and are grateful.

Zsa-Zsa sleeps in Jewelweed

I could only dream of having this swath of flowers here in the hollow. The deer would decimate them. Right now I am valiantly defending a small patch of jewel weed and some zinnias around my front porch with sporadic sprays of Deer Away. So it was with vicarious enjoyment this afternoon that I visited the native wildflower beds I designed for the Rockfish Valley Foundation in Nellysford back in 2020. Lush summer rains have been good for growth.

I chose the purple Coneflowers and Monardas, the lavender fistulosa and the red didyma ‘Jacob Kline’, the latter doing well in shade, for their aggressive spreading natures and they have filled the space admirably. The site is underneath a walnut canopy with juglone in the soil and these natives are heartily resistant to the toxin.

Spruce Creek which runs through the property in Nellysford seems to have held its banks – as always when I visit, families with their children were playing along the creek and around the “mud kitchen” by the circular path – but here in the hollow we’ve become a true floodplain and the waters have enveloped us several times this summer, always thankfully receding short of the house. But we live by the water and we have seen it change this year. Climate change has tipped over on us.

Above is the overflow from White Mountain Road snaking its way toward us as it drains the hollow. It feeds off the back corner of the house into the creek rushing its way towards the Chesapeake Bay. Hurricane season approaches and the sky is full of water. We hang on in the hollow.

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.