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Marilyn Young is the Horticulture Assistant at Wave Hill.
With the ideal of a garden as a year-round pleasure, it may be easy to delight in summer, but gardeners may be less certain how to sustain interest and color from fall through winter. There are lessons in the Wave Hill landscape to remedy this. All about the gardens and grounds, summer flowers give way to seed-bearing fruits as the warmest season falls away to autumn. Colorful berries are part of the regenerative process of nature and a good way to enliven the garden as winter comes. Feeding the birds, who contribute by digesting the protective shell and then doing a wonderful job scattering seed, provides an added treat.
Begin the berried treasure course in Wave Hill’s parking lot with the Pyracantha ‘Lo Boy’, commonly known as firethorn. Its thorny stems and brilliant orange berries persist almost all winter. In the shrub border by the entrance are two examples of a favorite berried shrub: the winterberry Ilex verticillata. The cultivar ‘Christmas Cheer’ was planted almost 30 years ago, and is paired with the similar ‘Winter Red’. The leafless branches of these deciduous hollies, covered with red berries, make a striking display in a snowy landscape. Three additional cultivars of the winterberry are planted in a colorful array in the semi-circular shrub border before Glyndor House. On the southeast corner of this house, the commanding presence of a pair of tall evergreen Ilex opaca are glorious as their berries ripen to a bright red against the shiny, green leaves.
Staffperson Betsy Ginn took both shots here at Wave Hill this winter. These lustrous yellow beads are Ilex opaca ‘Princeton Gold’. Look for them along the walkway between Wave Hill’s Perkins Visitor Center and the T.H. Everett Alpine House.
Now make your way north past the Perkins Visitor Center. Tucked in around this brick building are several Callicarpa dichotoma and C. bodinieri cultivars. Commonly called beautyberry, their delicate amethyst berries line the branches like clusters of small jewels. Planting several shrubs together in a small group is recommended to ensure cross-pollination and plentiful fruit. Also located here are favorites of Director of Horticulture Scott Canning: a trio of Viburnum nudum ‘Winterthur’ graces the Perkins Visitor Center; in the fall, their lustrous leaves turn red-purple, and their lingering fruits ripening to a dark blue hue.
Across the way to the left is the Viburnum bed. The border is usually alive with twittering birds sheltered and sustained by this stately group of shrubs. Viburnums are attractive in flower, in fruit and in autumn, when the leaves light up with fall colors. The red berries of Viburnum setigerum and V. dilatatum provide a veritable bird buffet.
Rosemary Verey, having seen the red berries of the Idesia polycarpa tree here and other places, notes in her volume The Garden in Winter that “bunches of berries were spectacular against a clear-blue winter sky.” These beauties can be found between our Aquatic Garden and the Shade Border.
Peppered about the Perkins Visitor Center, the Wild Garden, the Shade Border beyond the Aquatic Garden and the Herbert and Hyonja Abrons Woodland are several varieties of hollies, as well as viburnums, spice bushes and shadbushes. One place to search out berried shrubs is the area below Glyndor House—the Elliptical Garden and its adjacent slope with plantings of bayberries (Myrica pennsylvanica), winterberries and the Prunus maritima, commonly known as the beach plum.
This afternoon after a light snow, I took a walk up to the pergola that surrounds the Aquatic Garden, now closed for the season. The path heads around and then down a long corridor lined with several Euonymus japonicus ‘Chollipo’, festive with their variegated creamy yellow and green leaves and lovely little orange berries. This evergreen-lined walkway leads to a grand, red-berried Ilex x aquipernyi next to a pair of our older Idesia polycarpa, trees full of bright fruits the birds don’t seem to like.
There are many more shrubs and trees bearing berries throughout the grounds at Wave Hill, too numerous to mention them all here. Once you start seeking berried plants you will find them often. You may begin to enjoy this part of nature’s process even more than their flowering moment, and welcome some berried treasures into your own garden.
Bibliography for Suggested Reading:
Clarke, Ethne. Autumn Gardens. San Francisco: Soma Books (an imprint of Bay Books & Tapes). 1999.
Kingdon-Ward, F. Berried Treasure. Subtitled Shrubs for Autumn and Winter Colour in Your Garden. London: Ward, Lock & Co., Limited. 1954
Verey, Rosemary. The Garden in Winter. Boston & Toronto: Little, Brown and Company. 1988.
Wilder, Louise Beebe. The Garden in Color. New York: The Macmillan Company. 1937.
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.
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.
Waiting throughout the long months of cold in their fuzzy, protective coverings, called “perules,” the multitude of magnolia flower buds go beyond winter interest, shimmering in the slant of the season’s light, to convey a sense of winter empathy. When I spot a glimmer of pink or white pushing through a splitting perule, I know that the first real breath of spring is at hand. The “precocious” blooming magnolias, those that flower prior to the trees leafing out, exude a fragrant freshness into the air, cheering the senses and brightening the weary winter landscape.
First to bloom, in early April, are the group of Magnolia stellata and a stellata hybrid M. x lobneri ‘Leonard Messel’ on the entrance lawn, along with the sweetly scented M. x lobneri ‘Merrill’ by the entrance. The star magnolias are hardy, but these early bloomers all risk frost damage to their fragrant clouds of blossoms. South along the driveway, the M. denudata peaks about three weeks later. With its ivory blossoms lighting up the entire tree, one understands why Buddhists in China have planted it outside their temples for ages. Some branches bend graciously toward the ground, presenting chalice-shaped blooms for imbibing their heavenly fragrance.
At the entrance to the Herbert & Hyonja Abrons Woodland are several magnolias, including Magnolia x ‘Elizabeth’ bearing creamy yellow, sweetly scented flowers. A cross between M. acuminata and M. denudata, this cultivar was developed by the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and was the big breakthrough in breeding yellow-flowered magnolias. A special new yellow cultivar, bred by BBG and honoring a former president there, Magnolia x ‘Judy Zuk,’ has recently been planted by the walkway entry of Wave Hill.
Another category of magnolias, those that flower in the full foliage of late spring or summer, includes natives both deciduous and evergreen. In front of Glyndor House, two sweet bays (M. virginiana) with small lemon-scented flowers grow beside the tall southern magnolia, aptly named Magnolia grandiflora. English poet and writer Vita Sackville-West described its large flowers as “great white pigeons settling among the dark leaves.”
A special late bloomer, Magnolia sieboldii, is given pride of place by the brick entry path. With its delicate, pendulous and redolent flowers, this small candelabra-shaped tree merits a closer look. The fragrant June blooms of M. macrophylla are quite the opposite in size with flowers up to a foot wide. But fair warning about the neighboring M. tripetala: it is the stinker in the group. From winter buds to summer blooms, the genus Magnolia has striking and subtle gifts to offer the spring pageant.
Marilyn Young is Horticultural Assistant at Wave Hill.
This photo of Magnolia x soulangiana 'Lennei' was taken by Wave Hill Gardener Carolyn Kennedy
And here is a photo of Magnolia denudata taken by Wave Hill Marketing & Communications Associate Betsy Ginn
When the northern winter seems too long, satisfy your longing for spring with the numerous early-flowering shrubs at Wave Hill. Among the most beautiful are the winter hazels, Corylopsis. The pale yellow, lightly fragrant flowers of the winter hazels hang from bare branches in delicate racemes. In the Shade Border, Corylopsis glabrescens surrounded by Galanthus, snowdrops, provides a cheerful harbinger of spring. Corylopsis pauciflora, C. sinensis and the hybrid C. x ‘Winterthur’ welcome you at the Front Gate. Close by, the white flowering quince Chaenomeles japonica ‘Jet Trail’ enlivens the entrance path. Two heavenly scented early bloomers are Chimonanthus praecox, wintersweet, nestled against the brick wall just outside the entrance to Glyndor House, and Lonicera fragrantissima, winter honeysuckle, planted at the east end of the Shade Border.
Snowdrops, in the Shade Border
Pairing these shrubs with the earliest blooming bulbs and perennials enhances the heartening display. Chionodoxa sardensis, naturalized and ubiquitous at Wave Hill, makes up for its diminutive size with plentiful flowers of a stunning shade of blue. Aptly named glory-of-the-snow, they launch the spring parade. They are striking paired with the chartreuse of Cornus mas, the March-blooming Cornelian cherry. Hellebores are also hopeful signs of spring. The unusual purple-black Helleborus atrorubens blooms at the entrance to the Flower Garden; other species and hybrids can be viewed on the hillside above the walkway behind the Potting Shed. Don’t miss the creamy-yellow hybrid hellebores behind the bench just east of the Flower Garden fence. Nearby, Spiraea prunifolia and S. thunbergii light up with white sprays of spring flowers.
To plan your own “I can’t wait for Spring” garden site, watch for places where the sun melts the snow first. When you find a sheltered, sunny site, mix a shrub or two with clumps of early-blooming bulbs and perennials. Though some of these shrubs may not win a beauty contest outside of this time, they reward the winter visitor with their encouragingly early, fragrant flowers. In the Potting Shed, the appearance of their blooms is proclaimed amongst the winter weary gardeners; these plants are well worth seeking out for a spot in your own garden.
Marilyn Young is Horticultural Assistant at Wave Hill.
