We in Southern New Hampshire are looking towards temperatures in the 50s for most of the next week after 50s in this one. This will banish the last snow pockets and dry up the mud. The robins will come to the front lawn and the song sparrows will return to their favorite rhododendron.
And the nurserymen will live in fear.
In his poem “Goodby and Keep Cold”, the poet says goodbye to his young orchard for the winter and turns his hand and his saw to firewood. His last words to his apple trees are to remind them not to fear the coming cold.
“Fear fifty above more than fifty below”, he tells them.
For once our apples and pears and peaches begin to bud, and if this happens in March, there are fearsome odds against getting to June without a freeze.
Wise but sad words from one of America’s greatest poets, a man who farmed the gritty granite soils of New Hampshire , a countryman who knew what hardships came from this difficult climate.
Years ago, when I lived in Nashville, I belonged to the Middle Tennessee Perennial Plant Society, and I remember best a garden designer named Duncan Caldecott who finished his talk with a reminder I have never forgotten.
“If someone visits your garden and makes fun of you for planting lowly common orange daylilies, you tell them ‘It’s MY garden’.”
Horticultural Ideology is a terrible weed to let into your garden. Let no one tell you what to do in your garden or what you must plant. It is your garden and if you want a peony and iris border you should have it. If you truly want a front lawn of common milkweed, it is a free country. Plant it. Do not let the Plant Puritans who care only for utility and nothing for beauty shame you into plants you do not want just so you and they can feel virtuous and smug. Remember that gardens are for people too, as well as for your pleasure.
The photo above is of marigolds mingling with Downy Goldenrod in the Goffstown Historical Society garden.
In the years I lived in the South I saw heartbreaking mass destruction as Nashville swallowed up fields of butterfly weed and replaced them with oil change shops and the smell of chicken wings. I have seen the vast fields of soybeans and cotton in the Mississippi Delta punctuated by Cargill signs and insect traps and monster farm machines. The few wild places left were the National Wildlife Refuges and the floodplains on the Mississippi River side of the levees.
I am a Volunteer, an unpaid, unlicensed worker, who like millions before me on every continent and in every age finds a mission they feel they must undertake because they value their precious time as worth more than money. Someone or something needs them.
Some of us are heroic. We are the Cajun Navy, rescuing the stranded and desperate from their hurricane flooded homes. Some of us are the compassionate. I remember the late Dr George Burris, of Middle Tennessee. Not only a gentleman farmer, but a heart surgeon who collected surgical instruments re-sterilized them and took them to Africa for his medical charity missions.
Some of us are quiet in our work. We are the elderly woman in a Kroger parking lot, filling her car with day old bakery goods donated to the local foodbank where she will soon deliver them.
We are the Scout Masters who came to The Goffstown Historical Society . Under their eyes, the scouts, both boys and girls, repainted the historical schoolhouse from money they collected from donations . They repaired the aging front porch The Scout masters cut down a thorn tree, climbed onto the roof of the Wait Station to remove a dead ash limb, and taught the young people in their charge that community is important, that citizenship is important ,that giving back is worth more than money. They showed their scouts what responsible adults can be so that one day these boys and girls might emulate them.
We are the thrift shop ladies and the Community Pantry ladies, the people who foster unwanted cats and dogs awaiting adoption. We are the unpaid poll workers at our Town Hall on election days. We are the gentleman who brings his Corgi once a week to a local nursing home and walks the halls to greet the residents grateful for such kindness. No act is too small.
How much more could we accomplish if there were more of us!
After 20 years, the USDA has confirmed what I have suspected for the last year or so. Southern New Hampshire is now Zone 6a with pockets of 6b. I now live one hardiness zone from Middle Tennessee, where I lived for almost 40 years.
Last Saturday I, and Marian, another Goffstown Historical Society volunteer, went over in 50 degree weather to put away our ceramic planters for the winter.
And where was winter? A good question since we found dandelions blooming in the lawn-
The weather ahead till the year turns is days in the 40s and the 50s, doubtless abetted by the warm western winds of the weather phenomenon “El Nino”, the “Christ Child”.
What will we able to grow now? The hardier Crape Myrtles from the National Arboretum?
Hardier camellias? Will we be able to deeply cover our cannas with mulch after planting them in a sun trap against the stone foundation on the south side of our house? I would be happy if I see the Hardy Begonia grandis come up this spring along the granite posts in my courtyard.
Meanwhile, in the wildflower border I call the “Sandbox” flocks of juncos are knocking seed heads off the withered goldenrods and the prairie golden asters I grow there. This border looks a mess, but is a free birdfeeder. I no longer have a conventional feeder since my landlords banned peanuts and sunflower seeds after a vagabond family of Norway rats tried to move in. I do not think the rats walked here from Goffstown. I think they hitched in one of the myriad delivery trucks that swarm even these rural roads like a swarm of beetles.
*** The phot above is of my sister this past October at the Heritage Gardens on Cape Cod.
I regret not posting more this past summer. I used Facebook for photos and short commentary, but found it limiting for my purposes. Facebook is fine as a bulletin board, but for serious writing on gardens it is deficient. Some things only a blog can do.
Above is the fall border of asters at the Goffstown Historical Society this autumn. On my next post when I am not writing so late at night I will add more of the scenes from July to October.
Since the garden is now sleeping ,I think I will write on some other topics through the winter, including cooking and reading, my two off season passions.
This was photographed today just before our now daily rain started. Once these steps led to a small courtyard behind the Historical Society building. The courtyard has now gone under a smothering blanket of barberries, weeds, and creepers. The steps were cleared of weeds, and white wood asters, heart leaved asters, and the blue stemmed goldenrod were left in place.
The steps have a mysteriousness to them. They have the look of a lost garden in Italy-
The two planters were designed by Marian from Rochester NH, a volunteer at the Gardens.
Years ago at a Perennial Plant Society meeting in Nashville one of the high end local designers gave a talk, and the most memorable thing he said was ” If someone makes fun of you for having orange daylilies in your garden your response to this should be ‘It’s MY garden’. “
This is true. And if you want four hundred bearded irises, dozens of peonies, and daylilies alone you should plant what you want. Your garden is private space.
The old orange daylily is one the spirits of the New England , whether it has gone feral at a woodland verge, planted along white picket fences, or wandering along the back roads like the vagabond it is. I love it.
Yet in the flower beds at the Goffstown Historical Society there are few daylilies. Not planting them en mass was deliberate, for while daylilies are supreme in American gardens and seen everywhere and home gardeners collect them and gas stations plant them in islands , I will paraphrase the late Henry Mitchell and say that I believe that daylilies are like ultimatums and should be used sparingly. And I have planted accordingly.
Where grooming is next to Godliness in a garden, daylilies are daily work. Their leaves yellow, their blossoms must be deadheaded , and if they have been planted in squads in the middle or rear of a public garden someone has to wade into the garden to clean them, imperiling all else that grows.
They also believe in Manifest Destiny. Their clumps know no boundaries and soon the garden is theirs while their clumps drag along vetch and grass and rumex with them.
The daylily in the photo above is “Jolene Nichole”. She is planted in our Sunset garden bed. She would be perfect if her flower was in proportion to her size, which is dwarf, but her color is so fine she keeps her place. I also have clumps of a brick colored variety in both porch beds. It was the only plant in the garden when I renovated it other than some forgotten white irises. The iris are gone, but I kept the lily. I also added the heirloom yellow daylily I posted about recently.
I confess that I have been tempted by the daylily catalogues. By the cantaloupe and salmon colors. By the frilly daylilies the color of orange sherbet-.
I do not indulge because I can see these anywhere. I see them as I see private gardens and as I look at the photos posted on garden club web pages posted by infatuated owners.
Though the daylily is now in undisputed ruler of American gardens, I wish that my fellow gardeners could look beyond daylilies into the beauty of asters, goldenrods, persicarias, patrina, and the hardy old time chrysanthemums. To give some space to heirloom cannas, to Kiss-me -over -the garden gate and the old timey garden Balsams.
How impoverished are our gardens when we see only the expected.
The above is a photo of the Swamp milkweeds in the new Modified Meadow “Robert Frost Tuft of Flowers garden”. The planting surrounds rusted iron antique farm machines.
The freest plantings in the Goffstown gardens are the Sunset color gardens along the main porch of the museum and the Wait Station garden on the property line.
There are no rules there, no ideologies, no plant politics. No color is forbidden. I do not care if a plant comes from New Boston’s fields or Mexico’s Sierra Madre. I hold with Gertrude Jekyll, who did not care if a flower was tender or hardy as long as it is handsome and and “puts on a brave show when a brave show is wanted”. The feral orange daylilies bloom on the verges of the garden, for I have no quarrel with them. There are the new persicarias from European gardens and the balsams and petunias from the old days. Colors mingle and though certain jolting colors suddenly appear, it is in general, a peaceable kingdom.
Louise Beebe Wilder wrote that too many rules and too much timidity about color leads to a “wearisome suavity”. To my mind peonies and iris and Shasta daisies are the expected “Dream Garden”, not the Dream garden of the mysterious, and the fanciful and the unexpected. Give me the shrub fuschias and sherbet colored cannas. Let me never fear the colors of red or yellow or the speedy spread of our native hardy ageratum.
Gardening On Granite 