George's Current Ramblings and Readlings

Full and Fuller

May 31st, 2022

   I’ve seen a big shift these last few years in what gardeners view as the “best,” or at least the “desired,” way to garden.

Naturalistic gardens like this back-yard one in York County are trendy lately.

   The trend is strongly toward a natural look in which lots of different plants intermingle and grow in laissez-faire masses – similar to how plants grow in the wild.

   That’s in contrast to the more formal, tended look that’s been the landscape norm for decades. In that style, order reigns supreme, and every plant has its space… with a neat carpet of mulch underneath and between.

   Whether you call it a meadow or a cottage garden or a naturalistic landscape, the loosely regulated, action-packed look has the common thread of a tremendously full planting.

   Bare soil doesn’t show its face in these gardens – at least not during the growing season.

   Traditional spacing guidelines are out the window, replaced by packing as much in as possible and letting self-seeding fill in the rest.

   So much is going on in these gardens that they’re season-long riots of color and texture.

   Several factors are converging to fuel this “new naturalism,” as author Kelly Norris calls it.

   One is the message about helping pollinators. Concerned about the plight of bees and butterflies, many gardeners are acting on the petition of popular authors like Dr. Doug Tallamy, Rick Darke, Thomas Rainer, Claudia West, Piet Oudolf, Larry Weaner and others to plant not just for cosmetics but with an eye on benefiting ecosystems and the wildlife in it.

   Related to that is the boom in native plants, which is being fed by concerns of invasive plants bumping out native species that local wildlife needs to survive.

   And a third factor is that people are tired of spraying, trimming, mulching, and mowing big lawns. They see the loose approach as less work and welcome the idea of yards that are better able to care for themselves.

   These tightly-packed, naturalistic gardens deliver on a variety of fronts.

   For sure, they’re much more diverse than the traditional landscape of yew bushes, azaleas, a few daylilies, and a pear tree or two.

Five Lessons from the Flower Garden Master

May 24th, 2022

   Flower color is one of nature’s most joyous gifts to people.

Monet’s 2-acre front-yard garden looks like “an explosion at a paint factory,” as one writer described it.

   Even non-gardeners appreciate it, while many a gardener strives to load the yard with a nonstop parade of flower power from the season’s first hellebores to the last Montauk daisy petal of fall.

   That’s not easy.

   More color means more plants, more effort, and especially a lot of skill to orchestrate it all.

   No one was better at that than the French master painter Claude Monet, who was arguably one of the world’s best flower gardeners in addition to being one of its best-ever artists.

   Monet created a magnificent 2-acre flower garden across the front of his modest home in Giverny, a countryside village about an hour drive west of Paris. He built it mainly as a model for his paintings.

   Some 130 years after Monet begin painting, his Giverny garden is still turning out massive color. It’s the most exuberant flower garden I’ve ever seen, and it fires on all cylinders all season long.

   One writer observed that the garden reads like an “explosion at a paint factory.”

   I first saw Monet’s garden six years ago in September, when dahlias, sunflowers, nasturtiums, mums, cosmos, zinnias, and numerous other summer annuals dominated the landscape.

   I saw it again a few weeks ago on a group tour I hosted with Lowee’s Group Tours. Despite being filled with all different plants, it was still full and colorful even though it was so early in the gardening season.

   This time, the wall-to-wall color was coming from the end of the tulip bloom, from cool-season annuals such as pansies and wallflowers, from May-blooming perennials such as salvia, irises, and woodland phlox, and from the beginning of rose bloom.

   Following Monet’s long ago lead, today’s staff masterfully color-coordinates each vignette and constantly plants, deadheads, and replants to achieve that difficult goal of color everywhere all season long.

   It’s a living textbook in how to mix and match plants.

   Maybe we can’t recreate Monet’s 2 acres of blooming glory, but we can glean a few lessons on how to improve our yards’ color show.

   Five of them that struck me…

Plants and Our Future

May 17th, 2022

   If the Dutch Floriade 2022 is correct, plants in the future will do way more than make our yards pretty or supply us with fresh salads.

The 2022 Floriade shows many ways our cities can be greener. The striped Viewing Tower in the background is made out of recycled concrete sewer pipes, while the elm trees are floating in the lake in repurposed buoys.

   Tomorrow’s plants could fuel our cars, insulate our roofs and walls, and serve as building blocks for everything from cheese to bridges.

   The theme of this year’s once-every-10-year Floriade expo is “Growing Green Cities.” Exhibitors are using that theme to show how plants can solve most of the dilemmas that populating the earth has caused.

   Specifically, the message is that plants make excellent sustainable, renewable, clean, and healthy alternatives to our tradition of burning fossil fuels to manufacture our voluminous daily stuff out of plastic, foam, and other synthetics.

   Besides the expo’s international and display gardens, many of the exhibits show ways plants already are paving our future with creative new uses.

See a photo gallery of 2022 Floriade pictures

   One bridge shows how walkway cables can be made out of flax fibers and plant-based resins instead of metal or polymers.

   The show’s nature pavilion has floors and walls made out of corn fibers, rice straw, seaweed, oyster shells, and even coffee grounds instead of conventional wallboard and synthetic tile.

   A mushroom-shaped pavilion that feels like it’s made out of foam or fiberglass is actually made out of rice straw, potato starch, and cattails, held together by a sort of fungal glue.

   And what seems to be leather furniture is actually covered with a fabric made out of tomato stems.

   It seems that with a little re-engineering and thinking outside the box, just about everything at the Home Depot of the future could come from materials that now go in our compost bins or landfills.

Three Bulb Lessons from Keukenhof

May 10th, 2022

   The lackluster color we see (or don’t see at all) in so many yards up to this point in the growing season is largely because we’re under-bulbed.

The Netherlands’ Keukenhof garden gets a lot of color impact by planting bulbs in big masses.

   Spring blooming bulbs like tulips, daffodils, and hyacinths are the leading way to color our spring landscapes, but the majority of yards I see are totally bulbless.

   Public gardens like Hershey Gardens and Longwood and especially The Netherlands’ Keukenhof garden show us what’s possible with spring bulbs.

   I got to see Keukenhof’s 79 acres of bulbs in full glory last month – twice – as part of a pair of European tours I hosted through Lowee’s group tours and Collette vacations.

See a photo gallery of 25 pictures from the 2022 Keukenhof gardens display

  While we can’t come close to what Keukenhof does with its 7 million bulbs, the garden does offer us three key lessons on how we can at least beef up our own bulb acumen.

   Here they are:

   Plant more… and cluster them. A pack of 10 tulips lined up single-file across the house front doesn’t add up to much impact.

Prime Time to Garden-Gawk

May 3rd, 2022

   Any day is a good day to be in a garden so far as I’m concerned, but for “normal” people, there’s no better time than the next few weeks.

The meadow garden at one of my favorite public gardens, Chanticleer.

   May’s weather is usually warm but not yet into hot, and so much of the plant world here has decided that late spring is the ideal time to unfurl, flower, and perfume.

   In other words, there’s a lot to see, and it’s a comfortable time to be out there seeing it.

   No wonder the Chester County-based American Public Gardens Association decided to make the second week of May the time frame for its annual “Go Public Gardens Days” celebration.

   This year, the initiative runs May 6 through 15. Many public gardens use the occasion to run special events or offer special admissions, so it’s worth poking around at places you’ve been thinking about seeing.

   One example is in our own backyard where Hershey Gardens is offering half-priced admission this Friday, May 6, for Go Public Gardens day. Vouchers are available on the Gardens website. (Moms also get in free this Saturday and Sunday in honor of Mother’s Day. Dads get in free June 19 for Father’s Day.)

   APGA makes it easy to find gardens by publishing a map of its members on its website. It’ll show you what’s within 150 miles of your home or let you search out and link to gardens anywhere in the U.S. if you like to include garden visits in your vacation plans.

    You can also find out about Go Public Gardens Days events by going to @PublicGardens on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn or by going to @AmericanPublicGardens on Instagram.

   Another good resource for planning trips to gardens within day-trip range of Harrisburg is America’s Garden Capital, an umbrella group for 38 public gardens in the Philadelphia region. That cluster represents the most gardens in any one region in America.

Stoneleigh in Villanova is one of the region’s newest public gardens.

   The group offers a free America’s Garden Capital Passport that includes descriptions and contact information on the 38 gardens, which includes such well known ones as Longwood, Chanticleer, Morris Arboretum, and Winterthur but also smaller gems such as Philadelphia’s Shofuso Japanese garden, Temple’s Ambler Arboretum, Jenkins Arboretum, and Stoneleigh.

   If you need some help zeroing in on the best of the best gardens worth seeing, I wrote an e-book last year called “50 American Public Gardens You Really Ought to See.” It’s a $7.95 download on my Buy Helpful Info page.

   The 62-page e-book features one-page profiles of my 50 favorite U.S. public gardens – in order. It includes overviews and highlights of each garden, location and contact information, two photos of each garden, and a “George’s Take” on what stands out most to me at each place.

   If you like to visit gardens with fellow garden-gawkers, Lowee’s Group Tours and I run trips every year to great gardens all over the U.S. and even overseas. Some are one-day coach tours; others are multi-day garden-themed vacations.

   The list for the rest of 2022 is on my George’s Talks and Trips page.

   One other thing I should mention is the American Horticultural Society’s Reciprocal Admissions Program. This is an amazing bargain in which participating gardens let you in free if you’re a member of any one of them or a member of AHS.

   And this is anytime, not just during Go Public Gardens Days.