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Containing a Garden
Plants & Gardens News | Volume 22, Number 2 | Summer 2007
by Patricia Jonas
It recently occurred to me that I have been gardening on my Manhattan roof for nearly 18 years—longer than I have gardened anywhere in the ground. Last year, my garden had to be torn apart to replace the roof. I dismantled three raised beds and parted with some ten-year-old trees and shrubs, including a buttercup winter hazel (Corylopsis pauciflora) that I missed terribly this March, when lanterns of fragrant primrose-yellow flowers would have hung on its leafless branches. It used to light up a corner of the most sheltered bed, which also contained panda-faced wild ginger (Asarum maximum). I held on to the ginger, which, though marginally hardy in these parts, somehow survived this past winter's extreme temperature fluctuations, even in its new, much smaller container. I also kept a five-year-old Baptisia alba because it had lived longer in its sunny bed than other Baptisias I had tried in containers. When I dug it up to transplant it, the roots were thrilling: nearly three feet long and covered with nitrogen-fixing nodules. It too has survived, sending up its distinctive purple shoots in a large but considerably less roomy pot.
Those experiences encompass the heart of my advice to container gardeners: Be flexible; experiment with plants that appeal to you and whose cultural needs you can supply; and let the size of your containers set the limits, not "suitable for containers" labels. (Of course, with trees and shrubs you will want to avoid forest giants, but that still leaves hundreds of excellent choices.) And finally: Express your taste.
Books at a Glance
Pots in the Garden: Expert Design and Planting Techniques, by Ray Rogers. Photographs by Richard Hartlage. Timber Press. 2007. $29.95. Hardcover.
Beautiful at All Seasons: Southern Gardening and Beyond with Elizabeth Lawrence, edited by Ann L. Armstrong and Lindie Wilson. Duke University Press. 2007. $24.95. Hardcover.
East Wind Melts the Ice: A Memoir Through the Seasons, by Liza Dalby. University of California Press. 2007. $24.95. Hardcover.
The Artful Use of Pots
It's that recommendation that Ray Rogers explores most comprehensively in Pots in the Garden: Expert Design and Planting Techniques (Timber Press). For those not accustomed to viewing their gardens as art, this is a step-by step introduction to fundamental theories of design: color, line and repetition, form and mass, space and placement, texture, focal points, and the appeal of emptiness. Though Rogers nearly goes off the rails when he introduces symbolism or describes the design value of an element without noting that it is also good horticultural practice (like topdressing alpines), this is otherwise a deft and lucid guide to ways of seeing the garden. Richard Hartlage's photographs beautifully illustrate Rogers's points and reflect an exceptionally collaborative relationship between author and photographer. Why most of the gardens, particularly the public gardens, in which the photographs were made are not identified is a mystery. What art book would fail to identify the museums that hold the art it describes? I recognized Wave Hill and Chanticleer and think readers should have been encouraged to visit and experience these and other gardens themselves.
The rest of the book deals usefully enough with practical matters—choosing a pot (there are gorgeous ones in this book), container mixes, watering, fertilizers, and the like—and offers a selection of plant groups for containers. Rogers cautions that "container plants must be managed more attentively" than the same plants in the open garden (although he also, somewhat contradictorily, claims that containers "can be easily maintained in a short amount of time") and that "it is not as easy living life in a pot as it is in the ground." True, but if it is also true, as Rogers states, that "in most areas, hardy perennials need some sort of protection to keep them alive over winter" and "with reasonable care, a tree or shrub will survive for several years in a pot," then my container garden is a horticultural miracle (I assure you, it isn't). Gardens are not miracles; they are "a world of work," as the inspiring but practical-minded garden writer Elizabeth Lawrence wrote in her first column for the Charlotte Observer.
A Seasoned Gardener
Elizabeth Lawrence moved from Raleigh to Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1948 and began the garden that Allen Lacy described as "a model for American gardens in the century to come. It was small, but it was bursting with a great diversity of plants carefully chosen for interest in more than a single season." When Lindie Wilson bought Lawrence's house in 1986, the garden had been badly neglected by a previous owner, and it seemed unlikely that it could be restored. But when the Amur adonis (Adonis amurensis) bloomed, followed by the little bulbs of winter and spring, Wilson understood that she would be gardening for more than her own pleasure. Lawrence's books became Wilson's guides. In 1990, Lawrence's friend Bill Neal published 142 of her columns as Through the Garden Gate (also the name of the column she wrote for 14 years). These columns contained so many clues to the mysteries of the garden of which Wilson had become steward that Wilson and Ann Armstrong sought out the rest of Lawrence's 720 columns. Beautiful at All Seasons (Duke University Press) is the welcome result.
For the several generations of readers who have been inspired by Lawrence since her first book was published 65 years ago, this collection is a reminder of what a great writer and adventurous gardener she was. It will send you to your bookshelves or local library for her classics, A Southern Garden, Gardens in Winter, and The Little Bulbs, as well as the posthumous collections Gardening for Love and Through the Garden Gate. Lawrence was a lively, conversational, and intensely intelligent writer. She distilled for readers her practical experiences growing thousands of extraordinary plants; her endless hours of historical, horticultural, and botanical research about them; and her more than 40 years of correspondence with other gardeners who grew these plants sometimes better than she did (Lawrence and her vast network of gardeners were more generous and modest than competitive). Each column is a perfect short story. (I loved, for example, her confession of stealing into Padua's 16th century botanic garden on a day it was closed and wandering around alone and undiscovered for a long time.)
The editors' affection for Lawrence is manifest in all aspects of Beautiful at All Seasons, from Wilson and Armstrong's discerning selection and organization of 132 of her remaining columns to the cover photograph of Lawrence's famous garden gate today with its persisting border of Phyllostachys aurea ("Dearly as I love this bamboo," she writes, "it is more trouble than anything else in the garden"). Lawrence's sensitivity to seasons is reflected in the editors' title, and while only the first section is arranged chronologically, all of the columns are dated. As usual, I wish that a copy editor had paid more attention to botanical nomenclature, particularly those names added by the editors meant to clarify or update Lawrence's vernacular or botanical names. There are some egregious errors, like "Rhodendrum" instead of Rhododendron in the index and elsewhere, but even errors Lawrence herself surely would not have suffered do not diminish the pleasure of reading this enchanting collection.
Slowing the Year
There is no culture more exquisitely sensitive to seasons than that of Japan. The Japanese divide the seasons more finely, observe them more closely, and celebrate them more boisterously, than anyone else. In her remarkable East Wind Melts the Ice: A Memoir Through the Seasons (California Press), Liza Dalby effortlessly glides between cultures and eras and offers a simultaneously ancient and refreshingly new model for a year's personal journal. Using Chinese and Japanese almanacs that divide the year into 72 periods, she teases apart and brilliantly improvises on the imagery that represents each mini-season. Displaying her dazzling scholarship modestly, like properly chosen layers of kimono, Dalby combines personal memories of Japan with seasonal observations of her Northern California home that resonate deeply.
Every year around February, I resolve to start a new garden journal or, more to the point, I resolve to record regularly my experiences in the garden, not just when I am not too busy with gardening chores. How perfect, then, that Dalby's journal opens not with January 1, but the period between February 5 and 9, which the ancient Chinese named "East Wind Melts the Ice" and in the old calendars marked the beginning of spring.
Patricia Jonas is a horticulturist and writer and director of Library Services at Brooklyn Botanic Garden. She is a regular contributor to Plants & Gardens News.