Brent and Becky
April 30th, 2013
Southeastern Virginia doesn’t strike me as a likely hot spot (irony intended) for spring bulbs.
Brent and Becky’s Chesapeake Bay Friendly Gardens.
Crape myrtles and camellias seem a lot more fitting for the steamy summers near Williamsburg than tulips and daffodils.
Holland it’s not.
Yet Gloucester County is known as the “daffodil capital of America.” It stages a popular Daffodil Festival early each April and is home to America’s premier bulb company – Brent and Becky’s Bulbs.
I’ve known Brent and Becky Heath for years through the Garden Writers Association. I’ve ordered from their catalog (one of Dave’s Garden Watchdog’s top five bulb companies), grown their bulbs and read their books (“Tulips for North American Gardens” and “Daffodils for North American Gardens”).
But up until 2 weeks ago, I’d never been to their place.
It’s actually good I waited because the Heaths’ latest adventure is a Bulb Shoppe and Gardens – a new springtime destination that’s a sort of living bulb catalog.
The Shoppe part is a bulbster’s garden center, filled this time of year with a wall full of summer bulbs, corms and tubers as well as benches full of spring-blooming, potted tulips, daffodils, hyacinths, etc. for those who didn’t/couldn’t plant last fall. (Watch my video on how and when to plant spring bulbs.)
What drew me more than anything (as usual) is the new 8 acres of gardens all around the Bulb Shoppe.
Out front is the Catalogue Garden, which features raised row after raised row of just about everything in the current spring catalog.
The Catalogue Garden out front.
It’s even planted in the order each variety appears in the catalog. Visitors can walk through with catalog in hand to see how some of their prospective choices look in real life.
“We change it out twice a year,” says Becky. When the spring bloomers finish, out they come and in goes summer fare such as lilies, dahlias, callas, crocosmia, caladiums and the little purple triplet lilies (Triteleia laxa) and fragrant Polianthes tuberose that ended up in my shopping bag.
The rest of the gardens are out back in what’s collectively called the Chesapeake Bay Friendly Gardens. (The Heaths avoid almost all chemicals both in the gardens and their 20 acres of production fields.)
Each garden has a different theme, and the plants aren’t just bulbs.
Among them: a Knot Garden of herbs, boxwoods and violas; a Drain Field Meadow that’s a native perennial garden (interplanted with daffodils for spring color) in the property’s septic drainage field; a Bird and Butterfly Garden; a Purity Garden of white-blooming plants, and a Children’s Garden that’s loaded in spring with wall-to-wall daffodils.
The Rock Garden.
My favorite is the Rock Garden, which is curious since this part of Virginia doesn’t really have rocks that amount to anything.
The B&B version of a rock garden is a manmade mound that has a cascading stream down the middle with three different waterfalls and a pond at the bottom. Both sides are planted with dwarf conifers, creeping sedum, thyme, candytuft, cotoneaster and, of course, dwarf daffodils of perfect rock-garden height.
The Heaths were into recycling long before it became chic, and that personality shows up in a “pot garden” of commodes repurposed as flower containers and an old boat loaded with tulips and surrounded by a sea of grape hyacinths.
“This is a very young garden,” says Becky. “We started laying it out in 2006.”
She says part of the reason for the Bulb Shoppe and Gardens was to keep people from walking into their warehouse and getting run over by a forklift.
But it also adds an education and idea element.
Says Becky: “We always wanted to turn the farm into a teaching garden, to make it into some place that would give people new ideas. On the farm, you see an entire field. It was too much. Here you see gardens that you can do at home. That’s the whole reason behind this garden, to give people ideas… and pleasure, I hope.”
The Bulb Shoppe and Gardens is located at 7900 Daffodil Lane, which is about a mile from the couple’s original farm that dates back to when Brent’s grandfather, Charles Heath, first began growing daffs around 1900.
The recycled boat of bulbs.
Gloucester’s daff history goes back well before even that to some of its earliest 17th-century settlers who brought these durable, cheery bulbs over from England.
Brent grew up on the farm, developed Narcissus in his genes and became the business’s third-generation owner. Son, Jay, is now general manager and interested in making it generation four.
That must be genes at work, too, because Becky says Jay was the one who originally hated the idea of making a career out of bulbs the most of their four kids.
The soil at the new place was a big challenge because it isn’t the sandy loam like on the original farm.
It was farmed for the previous 30 years (corn, wheat and soybeans) and is extremely compacted.
“It’s not clay, it’s porcelain,” says Becky.
That’s why everything is growing in raised beds enriched with compost and topped with wood chips.
It’s a lesson for anyone trying to grow bulbs in lousy, clay and/or compacted soils. Get them up where they can breathe, and all bulbs will do so much better.
Gloucester’s winters are cold enough that spring bulbs get sufficient chill time, and the summers aren’t a big deal because that’s when tulips, daffodils and such are dormant. They actually prefer it hot and dry in summer.
Interesting place… and well worth seeing, especially in spring.
I’m impressed enough that I’m planning to put together a bus trip there next April – combined with a visit to the Colonial gardens at Williamsburg and one of my top dozen public gardens of all time – Richmond’s Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden.
I’ll let you know if/when it’s a definite. In the meantime, I’ve got some triplet lilies to plant.