Ramblings in Gardening

A View from Federal Twist - Ramblings of a "New American" Gardener is the blog of the New York gardener James Golden written about his own garden and, as the title shows, about his ramblings in other gardens. All the pictures below are of him.

I found his blog by way of someone who came from there to mine. I visited it, and I was absolutely amazed that someone on the other end of the world composed the garden of my dreams.

Although it is not easy for him either. He has to cope with a heavy, wet clay, and he can dedicate time to his own garden only in the weekends.

Our taste is so similar that the second link in his blog is my favorite Canadian nursery specialized in grasses and willows, the Bluestem Nurserey. But this is not the only one among my favorites that I have found at him.

This picture of James recalls my great ideal, the garden of Beth Chatto. (You are invited to visit the page composed with the pictures of the Beth Chatto Gardens on our homepage Hortus Carmeli.)

And as you can predict on the basis of the pictures, I also found on his page the gardener from whom I learned the most besides Beth Chatto, Piet Oudolf. (Check his page by all means! And then, for a further visit, check the page of a Dutch nursery with a lot of beautiful pictures of him. And as his books are absolutely unavailable at us in Hungary, here you are the Timber Press – just now I see that this is also one of James Golden’s keywords – where you can order them. I have no experience with them, I bought my own copies in Britain.)

One of James’ August posts is for example about a work by Piet Oudolf in the Battery Gardens that I have already saved as a link. It was very interesting to see the same through the eyes of James.

And as one can suspect from the large amount of grasses, Noel Kingsbury is also a recurrent guest in James Golden’s blog. I learned a lot from his book written together with Piet Oudolf (Gardening with Grasses, Frances Lincoln 1998). I can recommend it to everybody who wants to do something with grasses. And the world is small: the foreword was written by Beth Chatto. They chose their motto from Ernst Pagel. He is a fantastic German gardener from the former German Democratic Republic. He has no homepage, but you can buy his plants at Gaissmayer. He himself refers to another wonderful German gardener, Karl Foerster, whose plants are also on sale at Gaissmayer. Beth Chatto considers Foerster as her master, while Piet Oudolf simply calls him my hero.

And another gardener from whom I have learned a lot about the meaning of freedom in the garden: Dan Pearson. He is also known to the Hungarian public through his book A modern kertművészet (The art of modern gardens) (Park Könyvkiadó 1999). And a famous name, John Brookes. He was the first English gardener known to me, and now as I already know more about gardening, I see how excellent he is, too.

And finally back to the Old World. On the blog of James Golden there is also a German garden, the Hermanshoff that I knew from the journal of the English Royal Horticultural Society, the Garden. Exactly that blend of sensitivity and thoroughnes that I love so much in German culture.

In the blog Neues von Lindenhof that I found in the last autumn, on October 16, 2007 there was a detailed report with many pictures about Hermanshoff. The blog of Lis is also worth to follow. I love her own garden, too, but she also regularly gives account of various gardens and gardening events. And – just to round the world off – the Gaissmayer nursery, who sell the plants of Ernst Pagel and Karl Foerster, the masters of Beth Chatto, Piet Oudolf and James Golden, regularly participates at these events.

Our Lady of the Assumption

Today we celebrate the Assumption of the Virgin Mary.

A short walk in the garden on this beautiful day, before the rain arrives.

A quite young Acer palmatum 'Garnet'.

Agastache rupestris, a licorice mint with an apricot colored flower. In contrast to other mints, it does not belong to Z7 but to Z5, thus it is certainly frost-resistant at us, too.

On the left side a brook thistle (Cirsium rivulare), in the middle a Gaura linderheimeri, while the grass in the background is a Pennisetum alopecuroides 'Hameln'.

Between the hostas there is a small bamboo that does not spread its rhizomes: Fargesia murieliae 'Bimbo'.

At the foot of the birches a Persicaria amplexicaulis 'Rosea'. A very brave plant. It does not spread its rhizomes and seeds, you do not have to cut its dried flowers, it blooms continuously from July until the frost, and it is extremely hardy. Unfortunately you only find it beautiful in a close sight, so after a long inner struggle I decided to change it for its red flowered sport in the autumn.

Helenia and roses. I don’t know why, but the Helenium is not in mood at us, similarly to the Phlox, although they live their renaissance in Western Europe. And with a good reason. If someone is interested, there is a wonderful German page with a bunch of Helenium and Phlox photos: helenium-pholx.de.

A fabulous Monarda, called Gewitterwolke. Unfortunately this picture does not do justice to its beautiful purple color. Now I’m considering to divide the big one I have in the peasant garden, and to plant it in the middle of the big perennial garden, too. It is on sale at Staudengärtnerei Gaissmayer.

Grasses in bloom

One of my favorites: Pennisetum alopecuroides 'Hameln'. At us it grows 120/150 cm, twice as large as the you usually find in the catalogs of the nurseries. An absolute surviving champion. And, in contrast to the basic type, it is completely winter-hardy at us. After the autumn bloom I usually cut it back, because it strongly propagates with seeds.

Miscanthus sinensis 'Kleine Silberspinne'. According to the Praskac it will grow 80 cm, but in the reality at least 120 cm. I purchased it there in a 9×9 pot, and it grow this high in 4-5 years.

Miscanthus sinensis 'Neue Hybriden'. I bought it in the Szigeti Nursery at least 5-6 years ago. It survives everything and it is so beautiful. It is worth to know that most Miscanthus are very resistant, they live on almost every kind of soil and even with relatively few watering. On good soil and with much watering they are of course more beautiful. And finally it received such a place.

Miscanthus sinensis 'Ferner Osten'. I purchased it in 2001 or 2002 in Vienna, in a nursery in the outskirts of the town. It was a beautiful large specimen. In the rain I came in with it to the Naschmarkt – five minutes before closing still there was everything – and from there to the Westbahnhof. I will never forget it.

Finally, a Pennisetum alopecuroides 'Hameln'. On the above image it grows on sand, while on the second on an alluvial deposit. In my view it is beautiful on both places.

Panorama

Bouquet, July 25, 2008

More precisely, this is not a “proper bouquet”. I only hastily composed it of various samples of the big perennial garden, so that I might take it with me to the nearby town of Vác and check which hibiscus matches them.

In fact, the Rappai Nursery – the biggest exotic nursery of Hungary – has a stand in the three days Vác Festival on the bank of the Danube. If you want to see their beautiful plants, you do not have to go to Zomba in souther Hungary – it is enough to go as far as Vác.

Butterfly or what...

This little miraculous creature with orange spots on its wings was attracted to the garden by the Phlox. It looks like a butterfly, but I’m not sure it is.

In fact, on its forehead it has a very elegant, curved sucker that is almost as long as the animal itself. It looks very much like a small tropical bird. I am really happy of its visit. The Phlox season just begins, so I hope I will often see it.

A morning – an evening

Due to the several tall trees, the rising and setting sun throws its light in beams of ray over the garden. Thus amost every plant has its own moment, when the light falls exactly on it. Like in a play where every actor stars for some minutes.

The large perennial garden

The upper central part of our garden is a large perennial garden. Here originally there were peach trees and grass. However, the trees could not stand the sandy soil, the humidity and the decrease of the sunlight taken up more and more by the quickly growing large hazel tree, so they died out one after the other. And the grass was so weak that we had to completely resew it four times in ten years.

Finally in 2006 I had enough of this agony, and we decided to replant this part of the garden. With a terrible heartache, we cut out those peach trees covered by complete shadow. I wanted to replace the grass with flowering ground-covering plants.

However, I was longing so much for some wonderful perennials that I decided to include them anyway. And one beautiful flower brings the other with it, and one nice combination the other one.

Finally, beauty won. I converted the complete territory into one large perennial garden. Ground-covering plants remained part of the conception, as I am experimenting both here and in the rest of the garden with low ground-covering plants that would oppress weeds, but would comfortably live together with perennials.

The Japanese tea garden 2

In the morning I often take my first tea here. In front of it and behind it, to the east and to the west there are high trees, thus before foliation and after the fall of the leaves it is a sunny place, but in the summer it is shadowy and fresh almost all the day.

To the left I see the forest.

Here I can still catch a glimpse of the rising sun among the crowns of the trees.

In front of us there is also the forest and our part-shadow garden.

Daylilies seen from near.

And from even nearer (Hemerocallis 'Victorian Fantasy'.)

To the right, in the middle, another part-shadow parcel. In the middle of the picture, one of my favorites: Persicaria microcephala 'Red Dragon'.

To the right the part-shadow garden continues.

The young catalpa seen in the previous picture, now nearer to us. Its flowers are very fragrant.

Sunday morning

Verticillium wilt

This Japanese maple unfortunately has already died. The same happened to three other ones as well. I did not understand why, for we did all our best. We planted it in the right soil, in part-shadow, and watered it abundantly.

By this spring almost all our magnolias were damaged, too. They started to display signs of sickness in the second part of last summer. They looked as if they got some kind of mycosis, or as if they suffered of some deficiency. They suddenly displayed symptoms of chlorosis and a very spectacular degradation. We watered them much more than usual and sprayed them with all kinds of plant-protecting agents, but in vain.

I was desperately searching the internet for a specialist who could help us. I found one, an assistant professor of the chair of pathology of the Budapest university of horticulture, and she was willing to come out. She immediately told that the soil is certainly bad, that we do not water them and do not care them enough, and so on. I tried to convince her that the reality is quite the contrary, but she did not seem to be interested in reality. Incidentally she also mentioned that there exists a kind of mycosis, but it never attacks magnolia.

I browsed through the web again. I started to systematically search for the diseases of magnolia. Soon it turned out that in fact there is a fungus living in the soil that also attacks magnolia. The symptoms corresponded to those displayed by our plants. It is called Verticillium wilt, and indeed there is no effective protecting agent against it. Nevertheless, there is a small chance that the plant itself will win it. The only thing one can do is to give strength to the plant by foliar fertilizing. (As I understood, our magnolia had already overcome this infection some years ago when I started to apply on it a foliar fertilizer called Wuxal.)

Not only magnolia, but other kinds of plants are sensitive to it as well. Wherever this fungus once occurred in the garden, you should better not plant them.

Plants threatened by verticillium wilt:

ash, azalea, Japanese barberry, Corean box, American (wild) chestnut, catalpa, cherry and other stone-fruits, currant, gooseberry, some sorts of cornel, elder, elm, honeysuckle, syringa, some sorts of lime, maple, magnolia, some sorts of oak, plum, some sorts of rose, some sorts of sorb, sumac, spirea, fustet, haw.

All the plants in the above list that we had in our garden, either displayed symptoms of deficiency, or died, in spite of all our care and efforts.

There are, however, some sorts that are resistant to verticillium wilt:

apple, Western arbor vitae, beech, birch, some sorts of cornel, Scotch fir, ginkgo, Western swape, thornapple, honeylocust, juniper, redwood, mulberry, some sorts of oak, some sorts of lime, pear, poplar, some sorts of sorb, spruce, chestnut, willow.

Some web pages for more information about verticillium wilt:

- Online gardener
- Univerisity of Minnesota
- Elm care
- RHS

Bouquet, June 13, 2008

From the left to the right: A purple-leaved basil, a purple-leaved fennel (Foeniculum vulgare 'Purpureum'), a catmint (Nepeta × fassenii 'Six Hills Giant'). The red one is a Penstemon barbatus 'Coccineus', both to the left and to the right. Some Hostas. The large one is a marsh spurge (Euphorbia palustris), the smaller ones wood spurges (Euphorbia amygdaloides 'Purpurea'). Near to it, the Heuchera received of my mother-in-law. One wine-red Dahlia. Hydrangea arborescens 'Annabella'. The purple leaf almost visible behind it is a Persicaria 'Red Dragon'. One fern I received of my neighbor, so I do not know its name, but it is the most beautiful fern I have ever seen. The tousled one in the background is a Heuchera americana.