Each Little World

The Driveway Border

Hot sunny weather, followed by a little rain and the acquisition of new camera lenses sent Mark on a walking tour of our garden. Here's the long driveway border (about 60' long x 10' wide / 18.3m x 3.05m). Originally I called it the "Hendrix border" because my idea was to create a purple haze. There are still a number of plants from that plan like dark red 'Claude Shride' martagon lilies, red barberries, the 'Forest Pansy' redbud and dark Heucheras and Heucherellas. But the addition of a Dawn Redwood (Metasequoia glyptostroboides 'Gold Rush') shifted the balance toward ochre, yellow and chartreuse. This spring we finally took out our 'Royal Purple' smoke bush to give the redwood the room it needs.

Epimedium rubrum (above) is filling in nicely along the front of the border along with a broad-leaved yellow sedge (Carex siderosta 'Lemon Zest'). This is the area with the Claude Shride martagons, also Heucherella 'Sweet Tea" and two ferns: Athyrium hybrida 'Ghost' and Dryopteris felix-mas 'Linearis Polydactyla'.

The large ceramic pot holds a dwarf waterlily. The bare space behind it is the home of the former smokebush. We will replace it with a 'Green Mountain' boxwood that is currently in a planter on the deck.

The standard tree in the angle of the zigzag stone wall is my "lollipop lilac." 

This sloping stone path is the wheelbarrow route to the back garden. You can also see some of the peeled trunks from the Arbor Vitae that Mark removed 14 years ago when we began the garden. We are still using them in a number of projects, including as a support for a red clematis that is visible (the support, not the clematis) in the 4th image.

Post post

Some garden projects take days or weeks, or even years, to accomplish. But every now and then an idea comes to fruition while you wait. Or rather, Mark solves a garden problem while I watch and wait. Case in point: some kind of support for the 'Guernsey Cream' Clematis to climb. This is actually an old wood fence post with an acorn finial on top. We bought three of them and used them as abstract sculptures for a long time. But it seemed perfect for the clematis.

 

However, the climber was already up and growing fast when we came up with this idea. We needed a quick solution; no time or room to dig a big hole and pour a cement foundation. Instead Mark drilled inside the post and inserted a metal rod that was long enough to shove a couple of feet of it in the ground, leaving the bottom of the wood post just above the soil. A thirty minute project from start to finish.

 

We left the old apple prunings in place as the Clematis had already twined itself around them and anything else in sight. We discovered that this wood column will be perfect — next year. This year, it was already too late when we put it in place. The Clematis had set lots of fat buds but they were all down at ground level where it grew rapidly before it had anything to climb up. Luckily the flowers are so big and dramatic that you don't really need to bend down to see them.

 

And once the flowers have finished blooming, we'll figure out how to permanently support the post, so it can support the Clematis when it's in full growth mode. Alas, I'm guessing it will take more than thirty minutes to solve that problem — and do it without harming the Clematis roots.

Intergalactic gardening

Though I've come to appreciate the presence of dried grasses and seedheads in the garden, I've rarely planted anything with that effect in mind. And yet, I find two plants in particular — Clematis 'Guernsey Cream' and Carex grayii — most interesting in their later stages. 

Gray's sedge (Carex grayii) is only one of a baker's dozen of sedges that I grow; but it's the one that always elicits comments and questions. It seed pods look like medieval maces: a sphere covered with pointed protrusions. 

Whether green and growing or dried and brown and poking out of the snow, it looks like a plant from another planet. But it's quite happy in my Zone 4-5 garden, growing at the foot of a Witch Hazel (Hamamelis vernalis) and a huge Silver Maple tree in very dry shade.

On the other side of the house, is my other favorite seed pod from outer space: Clematis 'Guernsey Cream.' I had a chance to meet Raymond J. Evison, the breeder of this plant who has introduced over 100 clematis species cultivars during his lifetime, which gives it a certain cachet. 'Guernsey Cream' is actually one of only two Clematis that I grow. But it is the most prolific and the most visible as it is planted right off our deck.  

This year, it exploded with a record number of flowers, which then morphed into a mass of seedheads that are so graphic and metallic they hardly look real. But unlike the Carex grayii, the Clematis seedheads continue to change; eventually those metallic coils give way to soft fuzz, equally endearing and strange.