Gardens in Fall

Empress of China dogwood

It's garden season around here, Fall being the time, a bit frenzied as the cooler weather sets in, when shrubs and trees find their stations in new ground.  The winter will close them over so that they will settle in root first, making themselves at home, taking up whatever nutrients they can before the effort of spring leafing and flowering.

There's a lot of plant-trading going on in our neighborhood as people re-envision or prune back, pulling out overgrowth and gifting to other yards. A neighbor coming across the street carrying clumps of grasses or hefty hellebores is a familiar sight.  Or you just might find an anonymous offering in your yard.

Clump from neighbors

It's also open-Garden season, where flocks of us lesser mortals descend on the ripe autumn yields of those with exceptionally beautifully landscaped estates, admiring and hoping inspiration takes root. 

Montrose, for instance, opens its Hillsborough gates only once a year for one day to general visitors (though you can arrange guided tours at certain other times), so this year I made sure my calendar was cleared for the event.  Nancy Goodwin, who with her husband, bought the once colonial plot four decades ago and transformed it into soft rolling hills of grass and matched plantings around a lovely old white house with beautifully wrought iron fencing.  She was there in her gardener's weeds, chatting with folks in her soft charming way.  

The garden has become a foundation now, so to help support it, entry has a small fee and there is a plant sale, this one well attended.  Children ran about, gardeners sniffed and selected, others out for a day trip, roamed the paths and lawns.  I came home with several new small plants to try and a fig tree for Joseph's yard which had four small figs, one already half ripe, clinging.  He has the sun for it; I don't, alas...maybe he'll share the fruits next year.

The other day, my neighbors Cathy and Steve, always up for a gardening adventure, drove out with me to Tom Krenitsky's privately maintained magnolia farm in the country.  For nearly 30 years, Tom has been propagating and growing not only magnolias but all manner of trees and shrubs, some quite rare, others hybridized into new and sturdier creations.  His many trips abroad in his career days came with chances to find rare and unusual specimens to bring home.  Several arboreta from here to the National in Washington have been the grateful recipients of his work, and he of theirs.

I'd met him some months ago through our mutual friend Jim Elder, who seems a magnet to draw all kinds of interesting people, and Tom, after hearing my sad story of the trees I'd lost this summer, offered me a few of his magnolias as substitutes.  "They'll do fine in the holes you made for the old trees," he told me with the confidence of one who clearly has no clue what an bungling amateur I am.  "Come out and I'll pick some for you from the nursery."   Since his kind offer could include another invitation to his gardens, I was doubly grateful.

I'd visited Tom's 84 acres once before, so I knew how stunning they were.  Not manicured or clipped, but kept a naturally lush landscape, they wind around the waters of ponds and streams, huge lichened rocks shouldering the landscape, trees of all shapes and dressings looming over all.  Tom places and plants and tends with care, but he allows his growing things a sensible independence: "What grows, grows, what doesn't, doesn't."  

Here and there among the greens Tom has inserted architectural remnants, to give focal points to the plantings.  Columns apace along the paths, winged grotesques, a Buddha which overlooks the bamboo grove...there is Romance about the place...the 19th century ideal that Wordworth and his sister Dorothy throve on. I couldn't wait to see Cathy and Steve taking all that in, for they are, among our own much smaller neighborhood plots, the prize architectural gardeners, building by hand terraces and berms to harness our rocky, resistent ground and planting (and replanting) to make manifest the garden dreams in Cathy's mind.

Cathy and Steve, front garden (so far)

So we rode out to meet Tom at his entrance, where stone lions greet, and rode behind him along the windy trail to his sheds.  After a few tries, he found a running cart for Cathy and Steve, and took us on tour, giving names, histories and recollections to what we saw.  

There is so much to see.  One visit is never enough.  As we rumbled along the rutted paths, I remembered some of the wild sites, but found new ones to impress.  We walked, too, through the long walled garden (it reminded me of the one at St. Gaudin's with its distant white statuary at far ends).  We wandered through the camellia garden, and then to the smaller more open groves where he pointed out sun-loving vines, succulents and late blossoms, Tom patiently fielding questions about plant names and growing conditions, differences and similarities among the species.  He has an enormous range of garden knowledge.

In the midst of all this wildness, he has opened a space where he's built three separated cinderblock one-room "houses"...a kitchen, a "necessary", and a living room with fireplace "to keep myself warm while I'm out here".  Vines crawl up and around them with shrubs hugging their sides, while inside each art covers the walls.  The adjacent patio where he served us tea overlooks one of the ponds where on my earlier visit long boundaries of small yellow lilies hugged the edges.  It's a homey, elegant sort of camp in the midst of the garden.  His own residence is in town, but he works at the garden most days, all day.  His children, mostly grown now, and his garden are clearly his life.

We'd have happily spent hours more there, but we all had appointments to attend to.  Our last stop was the nursery, where Tom picked out not only my magnolia ("Just one to try out!" I begged, knowing I hadn't anywhere near his prowess) but also four or five others, loading the bed of Steve's truck even as he talked us through them.  His garden, his passion for the work, his skill, his generosity are care in person.

After Monday night's long-awaited rain (goodness!  Rain seems ever to drip over this blog, too, I'm realizing...waiting for, wishing for, finally a drop or ten), I woke this morning to a yard leaf-sogged but happy, and went out to dig Tom's gifts in, hoping they take well in my ground, too.  

There is my new magnolia...keep your greenest fingers crossed that it thrives even under my care and my root-rock-clay ground.

Witness

Rain after dark

 Waking early,  the sound of rain cohering with the dark, I send a message of gratitude for this gift from the skies to my hardened ground, and then begin to scan, mentally, the yard, wondering what might have been left out in it: the car windows open or some cushion soaking?  Not from worry, exactly...just a habitual sense of where things are at this moment, of pulling in or taking out, if necessary.

Or so I think.  I do remember a newly opened bag of organic soil behind the new Empress of China dogwood I brought home last week (a gentle trade for all those trees that died in summer) and put in a large pot on the far side of the yard to await its final planting by some as yet unnamed gardener, as it is too big for me to dig in myself.  It's a lovely tree, with hundreds of tiny buds between elongated leaves...not the dogwood one usually sees...promising to ripen into lots of small flowers in a yard like mine, partial shade to a few hours of sun.  I fervently wish it well.

Empress of China dogwood (at garden center)

So I get up, put on my raincoat, find a tarp in the shed, and walk out in the dark to cover the soil.  Finding nothing else to save from rain, I stop for a while and listen to it, watch the glistening in the dark, on leaves, on the shiny metal of my car caught in the still-bright lamplight on the street, on the flagstones and tree barks.  

It's not so much this task which has drawn me out, I realize, but the rain itself.  The bag of soil was only an excuse to be out in this early air, be out in the cooling-down that rain brings.  So I don't rush back into the house, though under my hooded coat I am still in my nightgown.  Carefully I pick my way across the front of the house, almost, but not quite, tripping over a stone I will ask Alexander and his friend Louis to dig out for me. (And thank you, stone, I think, for not tripping me, as grateful for that as for the rain.)  

Instead, I stay listening from the porch, cup warming my hands. There are many shades of light that manage to transform dark...if only I could turn that into a piece of art, to hold it, the thought and the light-frought dark itself, in something more than a memory.  Before waking, I dreamed (the dream itself is gone now) that I told myself something important...what was it?...oh, that I am better beginning things than finishing them.  (Well, I knew that.) If I sit here in the dark, rain alone attending (or attending alone this rain), will more illuminations come to me?  These days, introspection...the need for, the ground for...seemS more dire.  What I have to learn yet, to yearn after...surely dreams cannot hold it all.

At first there is only the sound of rain accompanying me, but then, at odd intervals, a sound like thunder rumbling, though more muffled, not sharp-edged like thunder, sets me wondering.  Nothing like lightning appears. The rain is too soft for that.  Maybe a plane?  But the growling to last that long is strange, like plane after plane, and anyway, it isn't often we hear planes going over head; a helicopter, yes, going to and from the medical center pad, but it isn't a sound like a helicopter.  (And a whole raft of planes...why?)

There is no wind, either.  The rain falls, almost gently, not needle-hard, straight down.  The back motion-light goes on...maybe a deer or rabbit, picking carefully her time to venture nearer my herbs.  Another car, tires hissing on the blacktop, this time from the main road going downhill, sets me wondering about its destination.  Perhaps a farmer about to set up at the Farmer's Market.  Someone opening the drug store at the corner.  Someone driving a young one to the Y for swim team.  Or going to Saturday work, not perhaps happy with rain, but bearing with it to get where they need to go, glad it's not a storm they need to drive in, or weekday traffic.

Or someone who, like me, is just awake early, going for coffee or an errand they made up just to be out.  Being out in it, accepting what rain and its dispersion of light offers, is a way of being inside oneself.

Interior

I look across the street, and next door, but there are no windows lit yet.  It won't be the distracting glare of daylight, inside or out, for a while yet.