Make time to experience Spring 2010 and plan for next year

 Spring the season is here, officially until Summer begins in late June. So please do get out there and experience it. In your own backyard, neighborhood, park, botanical garden, forest or tradesmen plant nursery.

Most Spring bulbs are up or emerging and the weather determines how long or little they will be putting on the show. A Rainy Day Viewing can be rewarding if you get out there before things flop to the ground. Which is one reason you want to plan a bulb garden that has material with varying heights, such as grape hyacinth mixed in with daffodils and/or tulips. The hyacinth will stand with the wettest weather, but the daffodils maybe not. On a dry day a walk thru the bulbs will reward you with fragrance, if you have selected bulbs that will provide you with such. And, finally, a choice of early, mid and late season bloomers will provide a display for a number of weeks. So now is the time to go out and about and reap the rewards of  careful planning in hopes of generating your personal horticulture masterpiece for Spring.

Nantucket holds a great celebration each spring in April - Three Million Daffodil Celebration
They are just wild about daffodils!  April 23-25 will be all things daffodils if you can manage to get there. There will be however more time to see daffodils after the event, but the true experience should be planned during the festival when everyone and everything is adorned with daffodils.

 

  

The American Daffodil Society offers a plethra of information on daffodils. Each year they select a National Gold Winner and the US Postal Service even has a daffodil themed stamp you can purchase. 

Did you know that deer and rodents will not eat your daffodils? The bulbs and leaves contain a poisonous substance that they are not interested in consuming. Tulips however are like a fine dining experience for them, so you can try surrounding your tulips with a ring of daffodils, sometimes this works, but not always.

Did you know you can plant daffodils in a shady area? If the shade is created from deciduous trees (meaning they lose their leaves in autumn) your daffodils will be a welcome display in the Spring until the trees wake up and start their own show.

Do you know the difference between a daffodil and a jonquil? If you are interested in entering daffodils in competition, it would be important to know this difference.

How about the difference between daffodil and narcissus? Careful,  could be a trick question. If you know botanical latin it will help with the answer.

It is now that I go out into the garden and determine where I need to put more bulbs for next year's display. I usually will take color coded wooden craft sticks and place them where I need to add that color to an area. Later during the Fall I acquire my bulbs and plant them where I've left a marker to do so. Easy! I don't have to worry that I'm digging an area already planted or that I'm just adding more of the same color to an area.

As a bonus I use the colored stick (it's flat like a tongue depressor) and write the name of the bulb I've just planted there. The following Spring I enjoy my walk thru the garden learning about the new bulbs that are up and asking us all to please come up close and see and touch and smell! Remember to bring some indoors to enjoy as well!

Fall Color - How to see over 700 species in one location.

I had the pleasure of visiting Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Ma. last week to attend a tour given by the horticulture curator Dennis Collins. The tour covered information on the sustainable practices now being used in the care of all aspects of the property. Anyone who is teetering on whether to go organic with landcare could certainly take a trip and see the results at Mount Auburn.

The real treat for me was the Fall show during the walk thru the grounds. The colors were amazing. There are over 5000 trees of over 700 species to see. You can walk thru the grounds following the green line in the middle of the paved pathway. It will get you back to where you started. I pretty much walked thru looking up, so be sure to watch your footing! I even found a tree that I've been trying to identify in my own neighborhood for some time now. So its a great place to go and learn about trees at all stages of their seasonal growth/display.

The oriental maples where in their glory the day I visited. It was an overcast day which allowed some pretty good capture of them with a camera. Look at this one, bright pumpkin orange! So lovely when allowed to grow into their natural form, I've seen others at business grounds that have been sheared into those mushroom shapes, such a shame when you know if left alone the majesty they can ultimately portray. Most often a tree has been pruned into some geometric shape due to someone planting them in an improper area for their growth pattern. So any of you considering planting trees out there, make certain the area will provide the space and culture needed for it's mature size, not the size you buy it when you plant it!

If you're not sure how to achieve a particular desired display of color and texture in your landscape, a visit to a renowned property such as Mount Auburn Cemetery has hundreds of examples to view. Bring paper and pencil and a camera! When you find a combination you just love capture it and document information about it. Identification tags on the plantings provide the botanical name, the common name and usually when they were planted so you can get an idea of a minimum age they are.



Don't be afraid to plant something 'different' and/or new to you in your landscape. We don't all have to have the same trees plunked down in the middle of our front lawn. As an example the Katsura tree is readily available in the industry today, and yet I see so few out there in my consultation travels. It has a beautiful bark for winter interest, great fall color and it flowers before the leaves appear in the Spring. It's great to have a yardful of Native Trees but it's also nice to have a gem like this one that's non-native, especially as a focal point. Did I mention it has a unique fragrance in the Fall when the leaves drop? Sort of like cotton candy. Now how great is all that? And look at the beautiful multi-stemmed shape of this tree at the back of the cemetery. Speaking of which, there are trail gardens and greenhouses behind the scenes that support all the wonderfulness you see as you walk thru the grounds. The rainwater from the greenhouse is captured and stored in rain barrels for use to water some of the specimen plantings that would be over-stressed during drought conditions. There are categorized bins for waste to be stored from the grounds maintenance. A bin for green clippings, a bin for dead floral display, a bin for concrete, and so on and so on. So Kudos to Mount Auburn Cemetery for talking the talk and walking the walk on sustainable practices and organic care of this historic gem. Take a look at the photos in the Potscapes Fun Slideshow for examples of sustainable plantings and practices that appear to be working for this large property (hundreds of acres) with accessible limitations (gravestones) and lots of foot traffic. I encourage you to visit Mount Auburn Cemetery ( the first cemetery garden in the United States), I assure you it is worth the trip! Bring your camera and a large supply of oh's and ah's.