Aucubas are almost the perfect shrub. Tolerant of the deepest shade, evergreen, quick-growing, plenty of cool cultivars and more coming along, and deer-proof. (Actually I'm not sure about this one; I plant almost all my aucubas in Manhattan. They may have an occasional coyote there, but no deer.)

Here in Hopkinton, aucubas are one of the endless experiments, because, alas, they're just barely hardy. They prefer it a bit milder, a solid Zone 7 to 9. We're Zone 7 only by the skin of our teeth.

Nonetheless, my variety 'Roxanne' seems stalwart.
And it has a primo spot, with great drainage, lots of Sun, and sheltering house walls to the West and the North. It's naturally a bit lower—a good thing with aucubas, which, in milder climates at least, can get leggy.

But, so far, none of the all-Winter-and-into-Spring display of berries. (Roxanne is self-fertile too; aucubas usually crave at least other cultivars in the neighborhood, if not an actual male of the species shoveling out the pollen.)

Look at this shot I took on March 29 of an aucuba in one of my many (ahem!) Manhattan gardens. The berries are striking both in size—they are as wide as a blueberry, but half again as long—and color, which is a saturated red. The berries smolder amid the dark leaves.

With the often high-variegated cultivars—like 'Picturata' here, also shot in March 29—the berries take on a jaunty character, saying "Oh yes indeed, you dope, red does too go with yellow."

But no berries for my Roxanne, even after a mild Winter. Which is (duh) because there were no blooms the year before, because that Winter was such a bitch.

The flowers are tiny tiny things, but in profuse branchy clusters that give a frothy moment to what can otherwise be (in milder climates) a large and heavy bush. Here they are, again on March 29, on another bush in Manhattan.

The flower clusters form the Fall before, and erupt so early in Spring that the bush's Fall and Winter berry crop can still be around, as in my photos here. So a nasty Winter where aucubas aren't all that hardy anyway can kill back the branch tips. That means no flowers that Spring, no berries that Fall, and—the real "sign of Spring" here: No berries the following Spring either.

Eff you, then, Winter of 2009. But (with a smile), thank you Winter of 2010: Rozanne's tips got through the Winter just fine, and the buds are coming out eagerly!
In Spring 2011, may my Rozanne still be berrying in thanks too.

Yuck, another March day of biblical rain. Time for the last fire of the season in the wood stove. It's the last fire not because we won't, on principle, be having any fires in April, which, after all, can have nasty wet weather, even snow.

It's the last fire because it's the last of the firewood. Argh.

March and April are the months to ensure there's enough firewood for the coming November, when it's cold enough to start up the wood stoves again. If you get your firewood in the Fall, it's too late. Yes, the wood that you buy is already "seasoned", i.e., it's hung out at the vendors woodpile for a year already. But that's still not dry enough to burn well. (What a hard lesson that has been.) It needs to be stacked in Spring, to dry out that one additional Summer and be tinder-dry when you want it most, all Fall and Winter to come.

We have three wood stoves, two of which we use daily when it's cold. So we can burn four cords of firewood a Winter. Actually, we can burn more than four cords, which is why we've run out by the end of March, not the end of April.

So this Spring I'll get two more cords, for six total. There is nothing like the warm feeling of knowing that you've got all the firewood—and all the seriously dry firewood—you could ever want for the Winter to come.

I've discovered that (thank god) I really love to stack firewood, too.

We stack it in a large wood shed. The lower portion to the left holds the first delivery of two cords.
The pile in the foreground is the next delivery of two cords, which now need to be stacked in the taller two sections to the right. They hold just shy of three.

Good progress: the lefter of the tall sections is stacked to the rafters. When I get the rest of the pile into the right-hand section, there will be room to start stacking up yet a third delivery. With firewood, More really is More.

But a third delivery of two cords won't all fit in the right section, and you have to buy two cords at a time.

Not a problem: I'll stack the last cord in front of the shed, covering it were a tarp. It will be the first wood to burn come Fall anyway; by December it will be up in smoke and I'll be into the wood from the shed itself.

No matter what the weather (or the economy), the Winter of 2010-2011 will be a warm one. Whew.

Hardy orange is a thorny bastard, but an essential shrub for your garden nonetheless. Mine is a star of mine, and so I blog it often.

The latin is Poncirus trifoliata. (The leaflets are always in threes; who knows what "poncirus" mans.) With such uncompromisingly sharp, numerous, spike-like thorns, poncirus pruning is always a careful even meditative activity. Quick moves usually result in bloodshed.

Clearly, my poncirus really needs a serious going-over.
The good news is that it wants one too: Hardy orange loves to be pruned.

Honestly.

All those thorns? Just a prickly exterior; at its heart, this is a plant that craves your most attentive and disciplined cuts.






First, I need to cut off the "water-spout" branches...
...named because they shoot straight up from the plant, and with few if any side branches along the way. You can see them spouting up from the main ball, around and even into the smaller (and newer) top ball. Bad Ball Etiquette! I'll prune these spouts off promptly.

Going more deeply into my pruning—our pruning, the orange and me—the bottom ball has finally gotten too wide.
To my eye, it needs to be a third narrower. This isn't a project you want to cozy up to annually, when it's enough just to cut off those spouts, and then tip back the rest of the new growth.

But that light annual pruning means that the ball of the bush still increases year by year, inch by inch. And my orange is around twenty years old. It was just a two-foot pip when it arrived in a box from Louisiana back in the latest Eighties. No balls at all then. So it's time for a major rejuvenation.

Spring is the time for all poncirus pruning. Traditionally you wait until right after the bush is through blooming. But this 20th Anniversay ball-reduction project is so serious, so necessary, that I'm thinking that we both, orange and I, want me to get to it ASAP.

So, my thorny friend, it's this week. By Easter Sunday you'll once again look svelte, tight, and high, just like you did as a teen-ager.

Spring is when the new plants appear.

Most of them pop up from the ground, but others pop out of the UPS truck.
Like the in-ground plants, the UPS plants never arrive until the right time of the year either. They are just as reliable too—if they don't show up one day, not to worry, they'll do it the next.

And better than anything I already have growing in-ground, UPS plants are plants are new to my gardens, plants I've never held in my hand before.

Or else they are plants for clients, which means they are making me money that I can, at least in part, spend on more plants for my own gardens. Either way, then, plants in boxes mean more as well as new plants in the gardens. Hooray!

This box held a pair of persimmon trees for a client.



















With such startling orange fruit hanging on the limbs in the Fall...
























...they are a showy-enough tree even when not grown for eating.

Get yours where I got mine, at the alluringly-imperative website www.Eat-It.com.

What garden doesn't have Summer daisies? Sunflowers, zinnias, rudbeckia?

I myself have a well-known addiction to silphiums, which were one of the first posts here at Dirt Central, and a sunny family of continuing interest. And what until you see the silphiums that get planted here this Summer. What a tribe, what a seductive focus it is when you're a silphiumophile. (And before I wrap up this digression, here's where to shop for them.)

And then there're the Fall daisies: asters, mums, farfugiums. Whoops, I digress again. Sorry. We're in Spring now. So: Daisies in the Spring? Oh yes indeedy. Butterbur is the creepiest.

It's creepy in that it really wants to spread over the entire neighborhood, thanks to startling energy and thick (but shallow and very easily controlled) rhizomes.

But better, it's creepy because it looks like an alien emissary, on an inscrutable mission, collecting data to send back to Butterovia. It has the intelligent yet unblinking gaze, and the not-from-this-planet form, of the praying mantis.

I grow my butterbur in a narrow bed between the gravel driveway and the north side of the house, where the butterbur is advantageously sited to monitor all comings and goings. You can only enter both the house and the gardens via the driveway, and what a plant built for surveillance it is.

In earliest Spring, a golf-ball-sized sphere or two suddenly appears above the soil, so early in the season you're not yet looking for anything to happen in the garden. So it's a stealthy appearance. Soon the spheres open shamelessly to tight heads of chilly greenish-white daisies.
Around the base of all is a ruff of toothy—no, fangy—bracts. It's all a "flower cluster" only when you're reading the manual that you got from Morticia Addams and English itself is a second language. When Life on Earth is what you study from a distant star system.

And if the report back from the Planet Butterovia is positive, next year you summon more of your kind...
...to increase monitoring the Tall Noisy Humans who come and go, and the Taller One who is always outside intervening in the horticulture. Yes, that one, who doesn't know that butterbur isn't horticulture at all, but an interloper from afar just in disguise.

Well, guys, the jig is up. I'm the exterior and outside version of what we humans, in some strata at least, call a "queer decorator". Costumes, ornaments, what-goes-with-what? These are my life. So I had you spotted from the get-go. (Who do you think planted you right along the driveway, so you'd see everything?)

Survey away. Transmit all your data back to the homeland. And what about setting up some appearances over there, in Butterovia? Press coverage? A lecture tour?

This blog is all well and good, but it's also just me doing all the work of documenting the plants in my garden— including you. It's about time that at least one the "plants" started documenting me.

So thanks for your years of patient observation. Now let's make some hay while the sun's shining. You thought you were doing surveillance; to me it's more PR. The beginning of a wider market, a new angle, maybe a product launch.

About that lecture tour. Let's have lunch.

Forsythia-yellow flowers, forsythia-flower sized, but on a shade-tolerant groundcover or sprawling shrub. "Winter" jasmine lives up to its name, even in New England, blooming for weeks, sometimes even in a mild February, but reliably by late March and into April.

Jasmine is a formidable and weed-proof groundcover in full sun, building up a mat of willowy, wand-like stems several feet thick over time. The stems root where they touch ground too, so this can be groundcover for the largest-scale situations. A more candid phrasing: Winter Jasmine is a firm believer in Manifest Destiny.

Control your jasmine's spread by trimming around the perimeter of the colony each Fall; if you've got the equipment and the energy, every fifth Spring brush-hog the colony down to a few inches in thickness.

Winter jasmine is also completely deer-proof, and in my experience will grow in just about anything this side of a swamp and that side of pure sand. So it's a plant of almost alarming flexibility, even appetite.

I myself am pulling the stems up through my espaliered pair of Southern magnolias.
The goal is that they'll get high enough and long enough to poke out through the foliage cascade down with both grace and, in Winter, the showy yellow bloom. While Winter jasmine is hardy on the ground to Zone 5, it's only hardy to Zone 6 when grown upwards.

So grow it on the up-and-up wherever you grow Southern magnolias, free-standing or espaliered.

What? No espaliers around to thread with Winter jasmine? You can also grow it up fences and buildings too—as long as you're in Zone 6 that is—as long as you've got something to tie it to along the way. The plant doesn't form aerial roots like ivy, nor does it twine like wisteria. So it needs support. This is a good thing: When growing upward, the jasmine can only go where you want it to; when growing on the ground, it's liable to go anywhere it damn pleases.

One last quirk: Unlike the blessedly, powerfully fragrant Daphne mezereum 'Album', Winter jasmine is scentless. I guess jasmine fragrance is more tender than the plants that produce it. But for flowers in Winter, I'm grateful regardless.

OMG indeed: My pampas grass lived! Normally Zone 7, and there've been several Winter where my gardens didn't make it out of Zone 6. This isn't my first attempt to establish this Argentine native up here in New England.

This particular colony has poked along for several years, thanks to my crucial assist each Fall of mulch around the clump and a pyramid of rain-shedding wind-baffle fabric over it. But each Summer, was I rewarded with pampas plumes? Two-foot, fluffy, parchment-white exclamations ten feet tall—and not just one or two, either. I wanted a panoply of plumes! OK, at least three.

But nada.

So last Fall, in the spirit of "Live or croak, see if I care", I didn't do a damn thing to prepare my pampas grass clump for the coming blizzards and icy rains. All that cold and wet can just funnel down into the very heart of the clump, assisted so ably by the stiff leaves.

Maybe out of cussedness (the pampas grass), luck (both of us), or just a heavy-snow but NOT ultra-cold Winter, this is what the clump looked like this week, when Spring officially arrived:
Yes, there's actual green in there. (It's important to keep looking through the right end of the 'scope here: The victory is that there's ANY green at all.)

Closer still, it looks even more perky.
Yes, I stacked the deck what little I could, planting the cultivar 'Icalma', which is from really high up in the Andes, or maybe it was really far South in South America? Either way, where it feels more and more like Boston and less and less like Buenos Aires. And it's typical for plants to get hardier, a bit, as they get older and bigger. And it was, all in all, a mild Winter, albeit a wet one.

But with pampas grass, the proof is in the plumes: If it doesn't bloom, the foliage alone isn't worth it. I'm thinking that if this Summer isn't a plumy one, it's the last year for 'Icalma'.

I'm rooting for you, my dear. But you're compost if you don't come through for me. Stay tuned.

I have plenty of Spring excitement in the garden, one reason I'm so easy (so far) about forgetting about what everyone is supposed to have, those Spring bulbs and lots of forsythia.

Like this beautiful daphne.
This is the rare white form of Daphne mezereum, whose flowers are normally pink:
But pink doesn't go with much else besides more pink. (OK, it also goes with blue, white, & burgundy too—but never never with yellow, which is so much the color of the rest of Spring flowers, especially for me.)

And so if I wanted to have this daphne anywhere other than in my Pink Borders, it would have to be the white form, Daphne mezereum 'Album'. And, my oh my, you will want to have this Daphne mezereum right by your house—right by a convenient walkway and a convenient doorway, so you can cozy up to the bush even on the chilly, rainy, forty-degree Spring days its blossoms seem to crave—so you can put your face right into the bush and bathe in the powerful gardenia-like scent.

Those blossoms may be tiny, but there are hundreds of them, and the scent is remarkably penetrating.
I'm by no means a "great nose" but I can enjoy the fragrance from twenty or thirty feet away on a still day.

But more is more, intenser is intenser: This shrub demands intimacy. If it were way out in the Pink Borders—easily a hundred feet from the house, and across squishy grass most of the way—I might never get all the way out there on a miserable early-Spring day to enjoy the performance.

And besides, this is a one-season shrub. The summer foliage is modest, and the overall habit is tidy but not especially engaging in July or August. To have it at the front of the Pink Borders (so I could get my whole face in it without having to trudge into the muddy beds) would mean I'd have to look at its only-modest charms all Summer.

Better to have this shrub at once immediately handy but, on the other hand, completely out of the way. A bit of a trick indeed. Thankfully I've just such a pathway, more of a definer of one of the doorway beds than a true foot-traffic passage. Honestly, it's the pathway to nowhere—ending right at the daphne.
And "its" pathway leads right around to the back door. So the whole trip is mud-free.
The perfect access to the shrub in March and April, and "just" the bluestone edge of that side of the doorway bed the rest of the season.

In late March, I smell my daphne when it really wants me to. And then I can ignore it the rest of the year. Delicious!

And yes, one of the next signs-of-Spring pictures will show this bed all tidied up for the Summer season.

Spring? Again? Whose idea is this? Even before I've got all the Winter work done—ordering plants, developing the marketing mailings, stacking six cords (you heard me) of firewood so it's tinder-dry for next Winter, taking a trip to somewhere warm (usually Key West, as this year) to work (you heard me) on those mailings and do more shooting for GardenShorts.com, doing the last of the pre-Spring lectures—and can finally Take A Break?

But then I go outside on the first day that doesn't have disgusting Winter weather and see this:

Snowdrops and Winter Aconite, furled patiently against the mid-30's temps at eight AM this morning.

Here's another patch of them at ten AM, and ten degrees warmer. Everyone is opened up, basking in the bright sun.

Oh brother: If the Spring bulbs are up and out, Spring is here again. Already. Damn.

Spring is the bungee of my yearly gardening cycle, and every year I'm the unwilling payload. Just when I was hoping to rest up from all the work of the Winter, Spring catapults me back into client projects and the ramp-up here at home to the peak season of Summer and Fall.

Which have nothing to do with my gardens' Spring bulbs and their blooms.

Yes, Spring bulbs seem like a "Well, why not?" option. Their easy and inevitable color is both interim (taking place before the peak Summer and early Fall seasons here) and interstitial (taking place in the otherwise empty space between all those more important and much larger shrubs and perennials). This is just what we're supposed to do: Let no garden space go unadorned, let no week pass without having something in bloom.

But the interstitial space in my beds isn't, actually, interstitial. First, it's where all the dead leaves and collapsed stems have accumulated since last Fall. Letting the perennials and grasses stay up for the Winter is good for off-season wildlife habitat; I also like being reminded January through April just how full and eager everything was last August.

In "Fall-cleaned" gardens, the beds would already be opened up, tidied up, and therefore all ready to welcome all the Spring stuff that can then poke up unimpeded to greet the chilly sun and cold rains with their, admittedly, colorful flowers. But the beds would have a low, flat and bare look all Winter.

Second, I have so many plants that aren't reliably hardy without some Winter protection, which is often in the form of heavy mulching. I can't have Spring bulbs where all the mounds of mulch that protect those chancy plants spread out to: the "chancies" don't get unmulched, fully, into May. It would be a nightmare to try and "finger out" the mulch if there were also clumps of bulb foliage trying to get up through it.

So the big clean-up has to happen in early Spring instead of late Fall, and I need full access to the beds.

But even if I had the change of heart and did the Big Clean-up in Fall, there's still way too much to do in the beds in Spring, that can only be done in Spring: Transplanting, pruning, training, unprotecting all the semi-hardy stuff, making room for all the tender stuff that must get planted for the Summer show. So I'd still need to step through the beds to work; Spring bulbs would just get flattened.

So Winter aconite and snowdrops are only where there isn't something else more important—more Summer-related—to get to work on. Like this a deep semi-shady bed along the driveway, which people just stream past in June through October anyway in their zeal to get into the main gardens themselves.
Both species of bulbs came with the property, right in this very spot, and I do nothing to encourage them further.  Yes yes, I should be grateful for their unbidden bounty, at the time of year when there's not much else popping but witch hazel and hellebores. And it's not like I have a large collection of either of those to include now either.

Or the comparatively narrow bed by the street, with beautyberry bushes interplanted with dafs and scilla. So true, it's nothing at all in Winter.

The beautyberry (Callicarpa is the Latin) bears only on new growth, so last year's stems aren't much use anyway. I can reach in to cut them to the ground even as the daffodils and scilla between them are poking up between the old leaves. (And I'll do that this weekend I promise.)

And besides, cutting the bush to the ground each Spring means that the bushes never get more than one-year high and wide, which is much more compact than if they were left to grow free-range.
Best of all, at least from a bulb-centric vantage, when the callicarpa are cut down to the nubs and out of the way at least visually, the bulbs fill in enough to "control" the bed while they're blooming. And a few weeks later the new sprouts of callicarpa have lengthened enough to hide the curing bulb foliage and the bare spaces it will soon reveal. So it's a great partnership, the bushes "handing the mike" to the bulbs for March and April, and the bulbs handing it right back in May when their performance is through.

For the rest of the garden—at least until I can afford to have a larger staff, who could handle all the Fall clean-up for me—Spring bulbs just aren't in the picture.  And so they aren't my own signs of Spring in the garden either.

Other gardeners take heart in those crocuses and dafs, tulips and scilla. (Here' my only crocus, close to the front road so the squirrels are too afraid to dig it up.)

For me, Spring shows in so many other ways, as we'll see in the coming series of posts.