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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.
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.
