Plant friends are the best. Plant friends listen to you carry on about your garden and plants, they give you extra plants from their garden, they share their secrets, and they tell you your garden is beautiful – even when it looks more like a semi-organized patch of weeds. When I moved to Newburgh in 2018, my first plant friends were my neighbors Martine and Kurt. For the woodland garden they purchased 85 astilbe and 3 Abraham Lincoln lilacs, as a gift. Since that first gift, they have given me many more plants. To say I have a number of plant friends is an understatement. My neighbors Janet and Jerry have given me white bleeding heart and iris, Kelly and Josh gave me hostas, Jeff gave me ajuga, Lilli and Gary have given me iris, echinacea, and daffodils, Kai and Alexey gave me a number of plants – including epimedium, Mark gave me a Japanese edible ginger, Marc gave me toad lilies, Mary Elin gave me seeds, David and Brian gave me some incredible blue hostas, and finally, John and Tim have given me so many plants I could not begin to list them.
A few days ago, Tim and I took a trip to the Northern Dutchess Botanical Garden. This is outside of Rhinebeck, NY. The drive to the nursery is on back roads and seemly was taking us nowhere. We passed what appeared to be an occupied house in terrible dilapidated condition with an overgrown yard. I commented to Tim that in my mind I heard the banjos from Deliverance playing upon first sight of the house. Just when we thought the navigation system was taking us to the wrong place, we saw a sign for the garden. It is a well-stocked plant nursery, with a good variety of plants and reasonable prices.
Planting in my yard is always a challenge. With nearly six acres, creating an impact requires a lot of plants. My first plant purchases were expensive and sadly were short lived. Instagram and Facebook are full of images to replicate. How easy I thought it would be to recreate certain looks. I spent a lot of money buying lavender plants and rose bushes to plant around the stone picnic area. I bought a dozen climbing rose bushes to plant on the white fence, marking the old horse area. I bought these all online while I was working in Sao Paulo, Brazil; timing delivery to my being home for a week. The perfect planting scheme of purple and pink for the picnic area and lovely trusses of roses on the white fence were not to be. Nothing survived. They were costly lessons, that I have heeded, but have not necessarily been able to avoid. In the autumn of 2021, I selected plants I knew would grow well locally. They grew nicely in the spring rains of 2022, only to die tragically from drought in July and August.
When I see lavish floral displays on social media, my first thought is they either have gardeners or they can water. My yard is too big to water. Try as I might, it is impossible in a drought to get enough water to remote parts of the yard.
Water is not my only challenge, deer, ground hogs and skunks constitute an entirely different set of problems. When I go to a nursery, I usually look for plants that tolerate shade, are drought tolerant and deer resistant (of course, the deer in my yard do not always get the memo and nibble at most things).
Undaunted, I splurged at the Northern Dutchess Botanical Garden. I purchased a wide variety of plants. They are indiscernible in the landscape, as I only bought one of each. My hope, if the plants survive, is that they will spread, or having survived, I will be inclined to buy more. Here are my new plant experiments.
Lisianthus – Echo Blue Danube. This is the only annual I purchased. I am hopeful if will self-seed and come back again next year. Self-seeding means nature is my plant friend. Each spring, I usually by annuals to fill the urns flanking the entrance to the woodland garden. Because of my trip to London, I decided to not buy any until I returned. What a delight it was to find the petunias from last year had self-seeded and I did not need to buy any.
This is bergenia cordifolia. I have planted it in an area with dark leafed astilbe and blue hostas. The hostas are the blue hostas from David and Brian. The area is not protected from deer. David assured me deer readily ate his other hosta varieties, while leaving the blue hostas alone. My fingers are crossed that I will have the same experience. This bergenia should have pink flowers.
This elderberry has a bright yellow-green serrated leaves. This variety should grow to 3-5 feet tall and have white flowers followed by berries for the birds.
This adiantium pedatum or maidenhair fern I planted in the deer protected area in the woodland garden. I have planted a variety of ferns in this area along with many hostas. This particular fern variety is the American maidenhair fern.
The common name for these is spurge. I have often seen them growing in English gardens and have admired the way in which the plants spread to form big clumps.
This Hakonechloa Maera All Gold is a garden staple in oriental gardens. Hakone grass is often used as a textural accent. I have long admired this grass and hope it will thrive without a lot of attention in the woodland garden.
I first noticed this plant at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and have seen this used more and more as a ground cover plant. Ceratostigma Plumbaginoides or commonly known as plumbago. I like the blue flowers and low growing habit of this plant.
Phlox divaricata – Blue Moon is a new and unfamiliar plant to me. It is a woodland phlox that is low growing and should be covered with blue flowers in spring.
This is my mystery plant. I inadvertently selected one without a tag. By the time I got home, I had forgotten the name. I know it is a low growing ground cover. I planted it in the peony garden. Perhaps one of you recognize it?
We have had so much rain over the past few weeks, with another torrent this morning. Given such wet soil, I am optimistic about my new plants.
In other gardening news, this past Wednesday was the start of the Historic Iris Preservation Society iris sale. The online sale started promptly at noon. I was fully prepared. I had the link ready to click and I had my selection. At exactly noon I activated the link and placed my order – time elapsed 60 seconds. My first selection was already gone, but I did score my back up selection. Imagine, something with this level of popularity – iris rhizomes. I later found out they had sold 75% of their iris collections within the first 6 hours. Clearly, I am not the only plant obsessed person. The collection I ordered has six unique old irises.
Where would I be without my plant friends? They bring me joy; they bring me plants and they bring me friendship. The plants from my friends have proven to be the plants that have done the best in my garden. This is probably because they are used to the local climate and not raised in greenhouses elsewhere. Logic aside, I believe the reason they thrive is because they come from loving homes and are given as gifts in the truest sense of friendship.
We too live on an acreage where every tree, shrub and perennial needs to pull it’s weight year round. One trick I learned to keep deer and friends from sampling any new plant or woody is to immediately make it distasteful. We use Plantskyd which is absorbed into the plant tissues and lasts ~ 3months but there are others. The deer will still taste the plant a few times but if it tastes bad they never bother it again. Garden friends are the best and any plants from them certainly hold special meaning in the garden.
Thank you. I am not familiar with Plantskyd. I will try this. 3 months is a long time, longer than some of the sprays I have tried in the past. I appreciate the recommendation!
It makes me chuckle when I read of the problems you’re having with the “critters” that share the property with you and don’t always agree to leave your plantings where you want them to be. I battled them for almost 50 years and learned to “share” and fence in areas when I was stubborn. I had a lovely vegetable garden for years that we fenced. Perhaps not terribly attractive but provided us with fresh herbs, tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini etc.(that my children learned to dislike because they overly produced as I tried to prepare them in a million different ways) and always something new that I attempted each year. Aways a challenge and always rewarding.
Thank you Deborah. My vegetable garden was successful this year, in spite of the rain. A few things didn’t do well, cucumbers and zucchini oddly being the two things that didn’t produce at all.