Port Potager

Last week we stayed in Southwest Harbor on Mount Desert Island for our summer vacation. In addition to lots of hiking, rock scrambles, and some sea kayaking in Acadia National Park , we also took time out of a sunny morning to visit Thuya Garden in Northeast Harbor. These formal, English-style gardens  are on the site of an old lodge (a great building in and of itself). The property was donated to the town and the gardens are now for the public. It seems to me that the compressed growing season in Maine means that things tend to flower almost all at once — and to pretty marvelous effect. Different beds have different color schemes, but the clear pinks, blues and yellows above was one of my favorites. Also impressive are the delphiniums. These are enormous — though they have been carefully, individually staked. This explains why mine always look so floppy and pathetic — that and the fact that it probably gets a little too hot in the perennial border here. ...

The very cold temperatures we’ve had lately (not to mention late-season snows!) have set us back by at least two weeks in our planting schedule. Because nighttime temperatures have been in the 20s, we’re not able to keep seedlings outside to harden off, which means they aren’t ready to plant.  You can also see that the weather has frozen our daffodils and tulips in their tracks, and nothing is blooming: But if you look closely in the photo, you’ll also be able to tell how we’ve been spending our time instead. Did you notice that the house is yellow? We finally  got started on this enormous project this weekend, even though we’ve known for years that A) the house needs paint, and B) that it’s destined to be yellow. So before the perennial border plants get too big to work around — and while we don’t have anything to plant — we got out there and started scraping off the old paint: If you look closely. you can tell that we have crushed some of our ...

Perhaps you recall that last summer I spent a month in Costa Rica . During that time, Kirk took care of the garden by himself. He did a great job keeping up with the vegetables, but there wasn't any time left for just one person (with a day job) to keep up the perennial border. So this year it needed a lot of work. All the weeds that weren't pulled last year went to seed, so I had my work cut out for me in that department. There were also some plants that didn't make it through the winter and others that were in serious need of dividing.  The best part of summer vacation is having the time to get lost in an outdoor task, and that's just what I did this past weekend. Or maybe week. It's nice to forget what day it is, too. Anyway, here's the result of the perennial border overhaul. This section will take us from the garden gate along the driveway to the corner of the bed.  Immediately outside the garden gate at the top of the driveway is a cl...

In the small miracle department: Our littlest hydrangea somehow managed to put out a flower this year. After suffering through two brutal winters and a fairly intense rehab pruning session, I wasn't expecting anything at all out the two white hydrangeas in the perennial border. I thought the best case scenario would be some new growth.  Not impressed? Well, this one has never bloomed since I bought it several years ago . I also think a little scale is in order: Can you even see it? This particular hydrangea "bush" is right in the center of that photo, in front of a stand of Siberian irises. It's just to the left of a small patch of mini red petunias. Once you see just how little this plant (still) is, I think you can appreciate just how surprising that single bloom really is. I will definitely take it!

We've had two brutal winters in a row, and the extreme low temperatures and heavy snow brutalized the hydrangea in the perennial border: That pile of sticks is pretty typical of how a hydrangea looks in the dead of winter, but the blooming tulips in the background make it clear that it is now May. What we should see in a healthy, happy hydrangea are lots of leaf buds: And yes, we do have some canes that are clearly still alive. Not many, though. The great majority are definitely dead. I waited a long time to come to that determination, because hydrangeas take a while to wake up in the spring. If you prune carelessly, you can easily lose a season's flowers, so it's best to wait.  ( We didn't have any flowers last year , either, and it wasn't due to overzealous pruning so much as an intensely cold winter that killed all the flower buds.) By now it's clear that most of those canes are lost causes and can be pulled out to make room for some new...

We've been meaning to do this for quite some time, and this weekend Kirk finished making trellises for the climbing roses in the perennial border: Kirk bought a few cedar boards and ripped them down into 1.5-inch strips. He cut dadoes into the crosspieces to attach them, and each trellis is hung on the house using a custom bracket cut on the jigsaw from pressure-treated pine (painted white to match the house trim): It was much trickier to prune and train the roses, since our climbers are very thorny, but we managed to do it without too much bloodshed: We had a lot of die-back on our rose canes this winter since they were crushed under the weight of so much snow for so long. That might actually be good for us, since we'll have a chance to train pliable, new canes instead of dealing with old, woody ones. This is just one set of trellises; there are others on the other corner of the porch. I'm excited to see the roses leaf out and bloom so we can s...

Between last weekend and today, we made our final push to clean up the garden for the winter. Though the veggie beds and winter tunnels have been ready to go for some time, we still had to take care of the perennial border: This is my least favorite task of the whole year, the trimming back of all the perennial plants and the raking of leaves for the winter clean-up. I am always sorely tempted to call it all mulch and let it go, but it is much harder to clean up in the spring before the bulbs come up. So here we are, out in the cold getting it taken care of before what looks to be a week-long nor'easter heads our way. Also crossed off the list was some plant protection: This is our little fig tree. Last year we corralled it in a box of leaves, but it was such a harsh winter that that it died most of the way back anyway. Over the summer it did put out two new shoots, and it looks like we may have a fig bush instead of a tree. Because it is so small, we wrappe...

This is one of those good new/bad new posts. The bad news is that it looks like our harsh winter did a number on the hydrangeas in the perennial border. Here's what the big one looked like back in June:   That's a whole bunch of dead sticks, with a tiny bit of green growth at the base. For comparison, look at the photos from June last year : that same hydrangea is pretty well filled in with green leaves along its branches around the same time of year.  I let the sticks stay as they were for a really long time, just to be sure that they were really dead and not just sleeping. The thing with hydrangeas is that they set buds to flower long before winter, and if you prune them off, you are cutting away all of your future, summertime flowers.   But I think it's fair to say that these are goners. All the hydrangeas around town have big, beautiful blooms now that it's July. Here's what our looks like: So it's not dead, but I think the odds ...

When I wasn't at the ball fields for the kids' baseball games this past (long) weekend, I finally was able to tackle a project I'd been meaning to get to all spring. The weather decided to cooperate (mostly), and I buckled down got to work on updating the perennial border.  The harsh winter we had wasn't at all kind to some of our perennials. Several plants that normally wouldn't have trouble overwintering died back to just a few scraggly stems, or bit the dust completely. Some casualties included both artemisia, some stonecrop, the carnations, and most of a heucherella (if you're really interested in the evolution of the border, you can scroll through previous posts about it to see just what I'm talking about). This left me with some holes to fill this year, which I did my moving some existing things around and buying some new plants. My hatchback full of plants include a white peony ("Mrs. Edward Harding"), three white salvia (...

Tropical Storm Andrea dumped a ton of rain on us last Friday, which did a number on the perennial border. I expected this: Peonies are gorgeous, but they don't do well in the rain. In general, the white flower garden requires more fastidious deadheading, because white petals turn to brown in a blink.  Knowing that the rains would clobber a lot of our spring blooms, I made sure to snap some photos before  the rain. Early June is one of my favorite moments in this garden: Here you can see that some giant white peonies are already flopping over. I have them in a hoop, but I don't think it's a tall enough one to handle the weight of these flowers. You can also see red climbing roses poking up above the peonies and small white geraniums. These need to be trellised, and should eventually fan up the side of the window. On the corner of the border you can see another rose bush trying to climb without a trellis. When we build one, it will go up the corner of the...