a journal of...

A journal among friends...
art, words, home, people and places

Thursday, October 28, 2021

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.

















1 comment:

  1. Wow, what a fun time (times) you've had lately! And I bet your magnolia does well!! Finger's crossed (though not sure mine are that green!! hahah)

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