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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.
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.
Charles Day is the Ruth Rea Howell Horticultural Interpreter at Wave Hill.
It’s a nice spring day and you are strolling in Wave Hill’s Shade Border or the Wild Garden and you see some leafy plants with lovely violet-blue flowers. Nearby there’s a sign, reproduced here.
“Great!” you say to yourself, “but what does it all mean?” Well, in the 18th Century, Carl Linnaeus developed the binomial system for all species and….(Editor’s Warning! The following may contain depictions of botanical Latin; those who are easily offended should look away now)….Actually, dear Editor, this is going to be simple, and should not cause offense! Taking it line by line we have:
Mertensia virginica
This is the botanical name (normally in italics). It is in two part. The first part is the genus name, the second the specific (species) name. The genus name has a capitalized first letter; the specific name does not. There are perhaps several species within a genus, and each would have Mertensia as the first name. The specific name virginica indicates a single species and, incidentally, it is from “Virginia” (in fact, much of North America). Another species, Mertensia sibirica, may also be found in the Wild Garden–despite its origin in….well, you know where.
(Virginia Bluebells)
This is the common name. Every language has its own plant names. (That is one of the main reasons for having botanical names.) Even within one language, however, a plant may have many common names–and the same common name might be shared by several different species. In the English-speaking world, for example, there are many different plants called “bluebells”. Others still may have spurious “common names” that have been dreamt up by plant nursery salesmen. At Wave Hill, we try to choose well-recognized common names and avoid any that might confuse. Some of the rarer plants may have no common names at all.
Boraginaceae
The botanical family name is useful information for gardeners and botanists. These usually end in -aceae. No prizes for guessing that this is a member of the borage family. Other family members, besides borage, include Brunnera (Siberian bugloss/great forget-me-not) and Pulmonaria (lungwort). Family membership is denoted by similarities in flower structure.
Native to
This indicates region of origin. All species originated somewhere. Some may have a very wide natural distribution, such as a whole continent (like North America for Mertensia virginica), whereas others may have originated in a very limited region.
In addition…
A third name may appear alongside the botanical name. If this is not italicized and is in quotation marks (e.g. Geranium pratense ‘Brookside’) it means that the plant is a “cultivar” or cultivated variety. Because cultivars originate in gardens and nurseries, the region of origin applies only to the species and not the cultivar. If the third name is italicized and follows some cryptic contractions, such as “var.”, “f.” or “subsp.”, it is a naturally occurring variant within a species. Hybrids are often denoted by an “x” (e.g. Ipomoea x multifida) or, sometimes, simply by the genus name coupled with a cultivar name (e.g. Galanthus ‘Sam Arnott’). The absence of a species name suggests that the cultivar is a hybrid between species within the same genus.
That covers the most of the information likely to be found on a plant label. There are inter-generic hybrids, botanical synonyms and grex populations to consider….but these can wait for another time.
For the while, let’s just get out into the garden and enjoy the spring.
Spring is back. For gardeners and plant lovers it is one of the most exciting times of the year that brings their beloved perennial plants back to life after a long winter sleep.
Among these plants is the epitome of American wildflowers known as Trillium grandiflorum (large-flowered trillium). The name “Trillium” refers to the plant structure: three petals, three sepals and three leaves (which are technically bracts).
Trillium grandiflorum
In the beds on the north side of the Shade Border, pure white flowers of Trillium grandiflorum start to bloom in late April, gradually fading to pink after a month-long display. Trillium grandiflorum seeds require double dormancy−it takes two years for seeds to germinate. Even under optimal conditions they take seven to ten years to reach flowering size. As a result, the vast majority of plants sold in commercial nurseries are believed to be collected from the wild. Such heavy collecting, combined with other pressures such as habitat destruction, may effectively endanger this plant in some areas. In the Shade Border, other notable Trillium species include red flowering Trillium sessile (toadshade) and yellow flowering T. luteum (yellow trillium).
Red-flowering Trillium sessile
In early spring, another American native, Podophyllum peltatum (mayapple), is also in abundance in the Shade Border. Despite the common name “mayapple”, it is the flower that appears in early May not the fruit, which appears in the summer. Mayapple’s anemone-shaped flowers are usually hidden under its umbrella shaped leaves. Its fully ripened, egg-shaped and fleshy fruit is edible; other parts of the plant, however, including rhizomes, leaves and seeds, are poisonous. The root and plant contain Podophyllin, currently being studied for its ability to fight cancer, and other healing properties.
This post was authored by Harnek Singh, a Wave Hill Gardener. Harnek tends the Shade Border, Monocot and Aquatic Gardens.
