You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Wild Garden’ category.
Assistant Director of Public Programs Laurel Rimmer highlights what’s new in the gardens this week.
It’s hard to keep up with what’s in bloom in the Palm House this time of year—by the time we draft a bloom list, the display has already changed. It’s enough for the harried garden interpreter to throw out pencil and clipboard in distress. Gardener Susannah Strazzera is in charge of the display in the Palm House, bringing out new plants from our growing areas in back and tweaking the arrangement of the plants currently on view. Each corner of the greenhouse has a theme, with colors and textures in both flowers and foliage carefully considered, and pots staged in levels to show them to their best advantage.
This week, our large (and deliciously fragrant) variegated lemon is dressed up with colorful pots of Moraea ochroleuca, one of the many South African natives featured in this greenhouse in late winter and early spring.
The northeast corner is vibrant with the fiery colors of Clivia miniata and Mimulus aurantiacus, shown to perfection against large-leaved Acanthus mollis ‘New Zealand Gold’.
While many of these blooms are fleeting, a graceful Cyrtanthus species on the window sill produces tubular flowers for months.
Out on the grounds, it’s easy to get distracted by the dizzying display of flowering trees and shrubs, but be sure to look down to see some fascinating flora at ground level.
Check out the pair of shots below. On the left, an Asian ginger Asarum maximum ‘Green Panda’ flaunts its fascinating brownish-purple flowers in the Shade Border; the same species, shown below right, is in full bloom in the T. H. Everett Alpine House.
Our old shadbush (Amelanchier canadensis) is showing its delicate white flowers in the Wild Garden; look down at its feet to see the claw-like stems of Arisaema ringens emerging from the ground, show below in the last shot here. Check back in a month or so to see this robust jack-in-the-pulpit in bloom.
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.
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.
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.
