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Assistant Director of Public Programs Laurel Rimmer highlights what’s new in the gardens this week.
It’s chartreuse week! In the spring, acid green seems to go with everything. In the Wild Garden, shade-loving golden wood millet (Millium effusum ‘Aureum’) emerging beneath our old shadbush (Amelanchier canadensis).
Pulmonaria ‘Mrs. Moon’ adds a touch of pink and blue with her first flowers of the season.
A few feet away, well established colonies of Fritillaria verticillata attract attention with their pendulous green bells and unusual curled leaf tips, well portrayed in this pair of pictures.
Self-sown Helleborus foetidus, the bear’s foot hellebore, favors the edges of the gravel path. Flowers are effective for many weeks in spring. They have also given the plant the unfortunate name of “stinking hellebore”, not for the floral fragrance but for the malodorous scent produced when the stem is crushed.
Euphorbias are blooming early in the Dry Garden thanks to this unusually warm weather. Euphorbia chariacus subsp. wulfenii is putting on a splendid show this year.
Euphorbia myrsinities prefers dry, gritty soil; here it has happily seeded itself into the foundation walls of the old greenhouse that surround the Herb and Dry Gardens.
Iris pallida ‘Aureo-Variegata’ in the Flower Garden.
Marilyn Young is the Horticulture Assistant at Wave Hill.
Elegant, dependable and fairly easy to grow, salvias can be found at Wave Hill lighting up the gardens well into autumn. Salvia is the common name for the entire Salvia genus, while its Latin name derives from the word salvare, to heal or save, and refers to the medicinal and healing properties of some species. There are hardy perennial salvias in our gardens, but it is the tender sages we replant each year that reward many times over the extra effort they require. These frost-intolerant salvias hail from warmer regions of the new world. Their native haunts range from California to Texas and south through Mexico and Central and South America. Here at Wave Hill they offer a rewarding and diverse array of flowers, foliage and habits. With lessons learned from the variety of salvias grown at Wave Hill, I count on these tender perennials to save my own garden from late summer doldrums.
Salvia uliginos, captured beautifully by photographer Dan Willner, makes for a splendid late summer show in the Flower Garden, and the bees enjoy it, too!
The delicate blossoms attract butterflies, bees and often hummingbirds, adding not only color but also movement and vitality to the gardens. The two-lipped tubular flowers emerge from colorful calyces or whorls of sepals borne on stems that sway in the late summer breezes. The flower colors range from striking sapphire blues to deep reds, pale purples, magenta pinks and coral oranges. Rare in salvias is the bright yellow of the forsythia sage (Salvia madrensis), dramatically paired with the staghorn sumac in Wave Hill’s Wild Garden for autumn splendor. Some salvias have highly ornamental bracts that persist long after the flowers are finished, extending the display for weeks on end. Tender salvias can be subtle or daring companions. Fine examples can be found in the Flower Garden, where Salvia ‘Indigo Spires’, with its rich purple flowers and calyces cavorts with the hostas at the entrance. Across the path, Salvia uliginosa’s sky-blue flowers wave in the breezes, and muted lavender shades of S. Waverly’ complement the pink flowers of the Anemone hupehensis. Several smaller salvias also make great container plants.
At Wave Hill, tender salvia are either grown from cuttings taken in the fall before very cool weather slows their vigor, or ordered from specialty nurseries each spring. They are now more readily available as their assets have become widely recognized. Full sun and well-drained soil encourage happy, undemanding and quickly growing plants. Now that summer has finally turned hot and sunny, they are thriving. For a full roster of this varied genus, see The New Book of Salvias by Betsy Clebsch. Take a tip from the Wave Hill gardeners next year and be sure to tuck a salvia −or many!− into your garden to assure that it dances and sings with color until frost.
Courtney White is Director of Education & Public Programs at Wave Hill.
July 30th, 2009
Today, I walked through the Flower Garden and was most excited to see a Hummingbird Moth–UP CLOSE! The moth’s velvet-looking, sparkling chartreuse, crimson and brown abdomen stood out. I was amazed how it mimicked the ruby-throated hummingbird. Its wings fluttered just as fast as a fan on full speed. Look out for them in the butterfly bushes with many other winged wonders.
Marilyn Young is the Horticulture Assistant at Wave Hill.
We love Lotus, even when it is not blooming. A Canary Island native, this tender perennial in a classic terracotta urn has trailing stems of delicate, silvery blue leaflets. When it blooms, as it is now, Wave Hill gardener Nancy Talley tells me visitors stop in their tracks. Nancy’s bailiwick, by the way, includes the Palm House in the Marco Polo Stufano Conservatory, the Conifer Slope below Wave Hill House and the plantings around Glyndor House and Wave Hill House.
The flame-colored, sweet pea-shaped flowers set this calm and elegant container ablaze like a plant on fire. Right now it can be seen just inside the doorway to the Palm House. Later it may be moved out to the Flower Garden, or perhaps on the platform behind the Potting Shed. These wonderful portraits were taken by Wave Hill Gardener Susannah Strazzera.
Marilyn Young is the Horticulture Assistant at Wave Hill.
Fragrance has been called the voice of inanimate things, and like music, a fragrant garden can touch the emotions deeply.
The revered British gardener and author William Robinson advised (in his 1883 book The English Flower Garden) that one “who makes a garden should have a heart for plants that have the gift of sweetness as well as beauty of form or colour.”
At Wave Hill, Robinson’s wisdom has been well considered. From the cold-season scents of witchhazel and wintersweet to the freshness of magnolias and spring bulbs, the gardens resonate with special and welcome fragrances. May and June are heady with the scents of lilacs, lily-of-the-valley, wisteria, peonies, roses, pinks and honeysuckle.
The aromas in the “Touch & Smell Garden,” as Wave Hill Gardener Susannah Strazzera fondly calls the Herb Garden, grow increasingly tangible with the varied fragrances found in their leaves. Photographer Mick Hales wonderfully captures the equally fragrant Dry Garden next door, in this lovely portrait.
In the summer, the Herb Garden emits a delicious bouquet of lavender, lemon verbena, thyme, basil and pineapple sage. The Dry Garden is also full of scented plants, including salvias, artemisias and santolinas, all thriving in the summer heat. At the lower entrance to the Shade Border, Magnolia grandiflora, an evergreen tree also grown as a wall shrub on Glyndor House, has large white blooms that gently perfume the summer breezes.
Scent, technically the oxidation of essential oils, can be elusive. It can come wafting across the air, seductively as a night bloomer, or more directly when you burrow you face in a blossom. A plant’s Latin name can tip you off as to how it smells. For example, the spicy Ribes odoratum, fruity Daphne odora and sweet Lonicera fragrantissma offer delightful pleasures, but beware of the “evil” odors lurking in plants with foetidus or hircine in their name. Serissa foetida, for instance, is a stinky topiary that has been on summer display in the Flower Garden. “Nose-twisters” is the name given by Louise Beebe Wilder, in her wonderful and informative book The Fragrant Path, to flowers with a peppery note to their sweetness. Taken from Nasturtiums, an old Latin word derived from the words narsus (the nose) and tortus (twisted), “Nose-twisters” can be invigorating and refreshing, as Wilder found with the odors of marigold, calendula, chrysanthemum and tansy.
Whether pleasant or pungent, fragrant plants are a wonderful way to make a garden more enjoyable and because smell is so intimately linked with memory, ones experience of aromatic plants is often unforgettable.
Don’t miss the sweet peas growing in large pots placed at the entrance to the Palm House.
