Plant of the Week
Photo of Azaleas at The Masters from The Wall Street Journal
If you haven’t grown too weary of all the silly golf puns I used in Episode 62, then you deserve a Green Jacket, but the Azalea is really a deserving Plant of the Week. Although this past week was the first time I had ever seen those beautiful blooms sport ICE on them (what was all that about, Mother Nature??) the azalea is usually a bright and merry herald of the real spring.
If you live up north, Azalea blooms on TV + Jim Nantz = The Masters, but no matter where you live, if your azaleas are in bloom, you have a fighting chance of no more mittens this season. But it’s not a sure thing.
Pink on pink above the purple-y pink pulmonaria
Pinxster, the native I intend to propagate the heck out of. Rhododendron periclymenoides
Page Dickey
Page is a garden designer, author, and lecturer. Besides her many books, she has contributed to House and Garden, Architectural Digest, Horticulture, Fine Garden and Garden Design magazines.
Page’s Church House Cutting Garden
Page’s Duck Hill garden ready for Garden Conservancy Open Days in 2013. There was a lot of clipping and shearing to do here, but it was beautiful.
Back in the late 80’s, when I started my gardening journey, Page had already established her masterpiece, Duck Hill , in Westchester County, NY. Her enclosed garden rooms, neatly clipped hedges, roses and gravel paths defined gardening for me then, and her Duck Hill Journal was my answer to YouTube. As a new gardener, I didn’t know what to do in the garden and I certainly didn’t know what was coming next. By reading (poring over) my increasingly dog-earred copy of Page’s Duck Hill Journal, I could see the possibilities for my own nearby Greenwich, CT garden.
Both Page’s Duck Hill and my Greenwich gardens are gone now, (and please note the completely different level of grief we should have for one garden versus the other), but that’s gardening.
The fun of it is that you are never finished with your garden, especially if you start a new one!
Page’s Church House property is vast and wild compared to Duck Hill, and her goals in her new place reflect a different era and landscape.
Geum in Page’s cutting garden.
Instead of establishing her horticultural will on all of her many acres, she has chosen to exercise jurisprudence in her wild places, eradicating invasives and encouraging natives.
Page’s dog Sadie romping in her meadow.
But as you can see from photos of Church House that I chose from her Instagram account, she still values lines and gravel in the beds she has created near the house.
Although Page and I discussed the merits of gardeners exploring their own taste and interests in their spaces, there is something comforting about reading or knowing a gardener who looks at aspects about gardening the way you do.
When I started gardening, Page’s style at Duck Hill was my ideal. Now, decades later, I feel that my evolution as a gardener has serendipitously followed hers, even though I haven’t kept up with her journey until recently. I hope to do just that by reading all the books I had missed between her first one and her latest one, Uprooted.
Coffee Time!
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For Blue Ridge Prism workshop information, click on the photo
Garden Things Discussed on the Pod This Week…
Do you have to dead head flowering bulbs?
When do you prune Hydrangea macrophylla, or big leaf Hydrangea?
What time of year should you mulch?
The petals were about done, and I just snapped off the seed head of this tulip. No seeds for YOU!
Do you have to dead head flowering bulbs?
No, in a word. But do remember that baby making instincts are very strong in all creatures, so if you don’t remove a flowering bulb’s ability to set seed, it will put its procreative energies toward that end. But if you can remove the seed head, more energy goes to your bulb.
When do you prune Hydrangea macrophylla, or big leaf Hydrangea?
#$%@!! I cut what I think is dead, and then see the green cambrium layer, although it’s faint, which makes me see red. Hydrangeas are SO slow this spring!
This is a topic that people pay me to lecture on, so you would think I would know, but this spring has me bamboozled. Simply because I am not fond of looking at sticks in the spring or summer garden, I always remove branches of my Mop Head Hydrangeas that show no promise. But I keep getting fooled this spring! I make a cut and find that I have cut off life, and heavens, possibly even a flower bud?
They’re are just very pokey this year, and I simply need to be more patient. They will soon reveal themselves to be either foliage or dead sticks (I haven’t much chance at flowers with those late frosts) and the answer is I just need to wait.
What time of year should you mulch?
Well, I would say the only time that is bad to mulch is fall, as Mother Nature does it for you then. Remember that leaves are wonderful, plentiful, and free mulch.
Neat conventional mulch recedes into the wild of leaves.in this woodland bed.
But if you are fond of the neat look or the double shredded hardwood bark, and I sure am in some spots, late winter and early spring are prime time for mulching.
That being said, if you wait until later spring or summer when most of your plants have broken dormancy, you can use less mulch, which is nice on the pocketbook and the lower back.
Top Mulching Tip for wilder beds:
I mulch the edge of some of my woodland beds (leaving the middle with the leaf mulch look) because it’s a ‘cue to care’ and makes it clear that this is a (wild-ish) garden bed and someone gardens here.
Next week…
I interview a Landscape Architect, Cathy Corlett on interpretive gardens, trauma informed garden design and rain gardens.