George's Current Ramblings and Readlings

The Best New Gardening Books of 2020

November 17th, 2020

   Books make ideal holiday gifts for gardeners since a.) there’s always something new to learn, and b.) there’s never a shortage of new titles.

“Chasing Eden” tells the story of Bucks County’s Hortulus Farm.

   2020 brought us four particularly good reads involving remarkable gardens and the gardeners who created them – and in two cases, special gardens left behind.

   Whether there’s a gardener on your gift list or you’re looking to advance your own dirty knowledge, here’s the lowdown on those four titles and four other new-for-2020 garden books that I’d recommend:

“Chasing Eden: Design Inspiration from the Gardens at Hortulus Farm”

By Jack Staub and Renny Reynolds (Timber Press, $25 hardcover)

   Hortulus Farm is a gem of a landscape featuring 24 trail-connected gardens on a 100-acre, 18^th-century one-time dairy farmstead in Bucks County.

   It was “on the edge of dereliction” when playwright and advertising executive Jack Staub and event-planner extraordinaire Renny Reynolds bought it in 1979 as a get-away from New York City stresses.

   Their book tells how they saw beauty lurking in the “rural detritus” and set about meticulously turning the land into their own private Eden.

   Each chapter of “Chasing Eden” revolves around a different design feature with the authors telling how they dealt with each and then offering thoughts and lists of do’s and don’ts to help readers work toward their own version of Eden.

   Superb photos by Rob Cardillo show the results at Hortulus.

   Sadly, Staub died just two weeks after the book came out in January.

“A Year at Brandywine Cottage” is David Culp’s new book.

“A Year at Brandywine Cottage”

By David L. Culp (Timber Press, $35 hardcover)

   Just west of Hortulus in Chester County, garden speaker and plantsman David Culp has spent the last 30 years creating a peaceful, two-acre get-away next to a Colonial-era cottage in the Brandywine Valley near Downingtown.

   Culp’s book, co-written with one-time Philadelphia Inquirer garden writer Denise Cowie and, like “Chasing Eden,” artfully photographed by Cardillo, is a print tour through the gardens as they change with the seasons.

   At Brandywine Cottage, Culp divides his gardening year into six seasons, not the traditional four. And he aims to get the most out of each.

   “A Year at Brandywine Cottage” uses the seasonal stories as a spring board for tips and insights into how we can all take our gardens to the next level, such as with cool plants worth trying, using your gardens as a resource for cut-flower bouquets, and ideas on mixing edibles in with the flowers.

   If you liked Culp’s popular 2012 book “The Layered Garden,” you’ll like this one, too.

Abnormal Is the New Normal

November 10th, 2020

   So here we are into the second week of November, and the temperatures are still pushing 70 degrees.

2020 was a year that killed plants from too much cold in May and then killed them from too much heat in July.

   Since much of the Harrisburg area just missed that brush with frost the last week of October, the annual flowers and summer vegetables are still chugging along at this historically late point of the season.

   It doesn’t surprise me.

   I also wouldn’t be surprised if the temperatures suddenly nosedived, threatening cold injury to plants that didn’t have a chance to go through their usual and necessary gradual slide into winter dormancy.

   In fact, nothing surprises me with our roller-coaster weather anymore.

   If anything, I’m surprised when we get “normal” weather – whatever that is anymore.

   It seems that abnormal has become the new normal.

   Consistency and modest weather changes are out. Erratic and extreme are in.

   Humans can adapt by retreating into the air-conditioning in summer and cranking up the furnace in winter. But plants are stuck out there to roll with the punches and try to survive extremes that their genetics haven’t prepared them for.

   About all we can do is give our plants the best conditions possible (good soil, water in droughts, adequate nutrition, etc.) – and then figure on replacing the “wimps” that can’t endure.

   Although these changes have been going on for years now, 2020 was a poster child for wacky weather.

Read George’s PennLive column on how the changing climate is affecting gardening

Read George’s PennLive column on 10 ways gardeners can adapt to the changing climate

   Harrisburg-area gardeners and plants endured a hot-cold-hot “sandwich” this season, featuring a very warm winter that fast-forwarded plant growth, then a spring chill that gave us our coldest May day ever, then our hottest summer ever.

Why We Needed Our Gardens More than Ever This Year

November 3rd, 2020

   A surprising twist happened this year on the way to a pandemically doomed gardening season.

Working in the garden seemed more comfort than work this year.

   It actually turned out to be one of the best years ever for plant sales.

   Everybody from seed companies to garden centers to landscapers are reporting banner years – some of them record years.

   It seems that many of us retreated into our yards and took solace in one of the few spots that seemed safe and familiar – our gardens. And we bought a whole lot of plants in the process.

   “Time and time again, we heard people say they were tired of being cooped up, and they wanted to get out and enjoy the outdoors,” said Veto Barziloski, who owns Bennies Nursery in the Wyoming County countryside near Scranton.

   He says fresh air and exercise were only part of the allure, though.

   “Gardening is therapeutic,” Veto says. “I think it’s been a mental and emotional relief for people, too.”

   How true. Gardening is something people turn to whenever the chips are down.

   “If you go back to other times of uncertainty, you generally see an uptick in gardening sales,” says Chris Wallen, a grower at the wholesale Quality Greenhouses near Dillsburg. “This year, it was all over the board. People bought everything.”

   I was talking to David Wilson about this, and he says he’s seen the same thing.

   David has long been the gardener-educating horticulturist for Overdevest Nurseries, which produces the Garden Splendor line of plants. But he grew up and got his career start in Ireland, which back then was frequently rocked by internal terrorism and violence.

   Every time terrorism flared, he says, gardening peaked.

   “When people feel threatened or insecure, they go into the garden more,” Wilson says. “People feel safe in their garden.”

   In the case of COVID-19, people have been reluctant to venture out – and at times have been urged to stay home. The open air and isolation of our own yards seemed like a very good place to be.

Coming Soon: Penn State’s Ambitious New Pollinator and Bird Garden

October 27th, 2020

   A pollinator garden was one of the first gardens built at the fledgling Penn State Arboretum, located at the northern edge of the university’s main campus.

The walks are in as construction continues on Penn State’s new Pollinator and Bird Garden.

   But the new and greatly expanded Pollinator and Bird Garden that’s now under construction is one that Arboretum Director Kim Steiner says will be unlike anything you’ll see anywhere else.

   “Nobody has ever tried to do what we’re going to try to do here, and that is attract every single species of native pollinator in this region,” says Steiner. “And that’s several hundred species of insects.”

   The garden endeavors to do that by recasting the one-time flat and unremarkable site into a new environment that features grade changes, water sources, wetlands, a woodland, a dry meadow, and 90,000 plants of 390 mostly ultra-native species – basically all of the diversity that any Pennsylvania pollinator might want.

   The Pollinator and Bird Garden will cover three acres of the arboretum’s H.O. Smith Botanic Gardens, increasing the size of that display-garden part of the arboretum tract by 60 percent. The original Pollinator Garden is being rolled into it.

   The site has been a beehive of construction activity this month (sorry, couldn’t resist) as crews have been building structures, laying concrete, and moving mountains of dirt.

   The basic framework is now in place, including a large wooden structure that will become a honeybee observation hive.

   Volunteers even planted the first plugs of the 90,000 new plants during the first weekend in September.

   “Bees and butterflies were at work on flowers just 24 hours later, so we can declare the garden an early success!” says Steiner, who’s also a Penn State professor of forest biology.

   Construction will finish this winter with the bulk of planting to happen in spring. And then visitors will get to see what’s been in the planning for a decade and is costing $9 million in private donations to build.

Are We Finally All Yew’d Out?

October 20th, 2020

   Back when so many homes had exposed concrete-block walls, the first order of landscaping business was to plant evergreens the whole way around the foundation.

Nothing but yews of various chopped shapes in this house front.

   The dark-green, hard-to-kill, soft-needled yew bush usually got the assignment.

   Box- and ball-shaped yews are so common around mid- to late-20^th-century Pennsylvania houses that it seems as if building codes must have once mandated them.

   While lots of aging yews still skirt our foundations, I don’t see as many new ones going in.

   For one thing, we have so many other evergreen options these days.

   For another, newer homes often have siding, brick, or ornamental stone walls that go the whole way to the ground, taking away the need to hide anything.

   Or maybe some people just got tired of everybody having yews and are purposely choosing something else for diversity’s sake.

   I wonder, too, if more people aren’t getting the message that yews are toxic.

   While many so-called toxic plants can bring on nausea and similar unpleasant symptoms if you eat them, yews are one of the most truly toxic landscape plants. The foliage and red fruits can kill you – if you can stomach enough of them.