The Quartet of Conduit Pots

The shock of Fall, when the garden that looks like this in July....



...looks like this in mid-December.



Instead of billowing voluptuousness—crowded foliage and flowers, fleets of containers—there are now mostly sticks, how-much-mess to be raked up—and what are those black spiral things?  (Which were right there in the high Summer picture, but barely visible amid all the surf of foliage and the distraction of flowers.  Go ahead: take another look in the Summer picture above.  I'll wait.)

The black spiral things are the black "conduit" pots.  And yes, they're on stands.  They get emptied, dismantled, and brought under cover for the Winter; the front-left one is already half-way in transit.

The structural stuff first, then the "Why-the-hell-would-anyone-want-that?" stuff.

The spiral part is a section of big galvanized-steel culvert, power-coated black.



It's two feet in diameter—big enough to hold a 25-gallon black nursery pot.



Take out the nursery pot, and you can see that the spiral conduit just fits onto a round black-steel stand.



The stand, in turn...



...is poked down into and atop a yew.



That yew is the end of a hedge of yews (in this case heading out to the left).  The hedge itself will be ten feet tall (someday); right now it's small and gappy and barely three feet tall.
PICTURE When the hedge IS ten feet tall, and full and happy, the end yew under the black-steel stand will have filled out as well, completely hiding the stand.  The section of spiral conduit will look like a crazy (in a good way) pot sitting on a low yew at the end of the hedge.  A garden version of a newel post at the end of a balastrade.

With all four of the conduit pots in the carriage house for the Winter, the long axis of the garden is more quiet.  And with the brush raked—tomorrow I promise—the gentle Winter collapse of the beds on either side is, actually, a nice contrast.  Order and geometry flanked by Winter-induced chaos.



But look again at the garden with the four (well three) conduits in place.



Those four pots make a rectangle; right now there're piles of brush at the center of it.  But in the Summer, lots of pots are grouped around a big tender tree.



The center group and the four conduit pots set up an energy field, so to speak:  They section-out some of the long axis, so it isn't just a long axis.  It's a series of more human-scaled set-pieces.

If I stand at about the center of the conduit-pot rectangle—where the tropical tree and the pots are grouped in the Summer—and at look East, I'm facing back to the house.


Between me and the house is a rose pergola spanning the axis like a huppah.  And forty feet in back of that, the French doors into room at the heart of the house: the center hall with the huge fireplace.  It all lines up, from the chimney right on out into the garden.

Facing West, back the other way, there's some year-round shrubbery topped in the Summer that incredible white-agave thing called a furcraea.



With the furcraea in the greenhouse for the Winter, you can see that the grass beyond it widens way out to make room for the reflecting pool.  Seventy feet long, but only as wide as the grass of the axis.







In the snowy part of Winter, the young sequoia at the end is at its strongest reveal. (When the sequoia is seventy feet tall, we won't have to worry that it will show up year-round.)

With the center chimney to start, the rose pergola "huppah" as the first pause, and the furcraea the last pause before the big Reflecting Pool garden and the climactic sequoia beyond it, the quartet of conduit pots is the mid-point of the garden's biggest journey.  So it's the center everything.  And as such, that center needed some serious demarcation.

It wasn't enough that there's also a cross-pathway through the conduit-rectangle's center point, leading to the North, to the carriage house...



...and to the south, to a free-standing wisteria that will, in time, be backed by a ten-foot hedge of American holly.



But with the bulk and billow of the gardens themselves in warm weather, you don't notice this crosswalk until you're right at its crossing.  (Which is great: it's a discovery, a surprise.)  But in itself it can't help "center" the axis as you look down it.

I needed some other kind of marker for that center, that says, without a doubt: You Are Here.  And so, the quartet of huge, black, spiral-steel pots, looking like they're perched on yews.

And in the Summer, their shocking prehistoric-looking plants.



Pretty good, eh?  It's starting to look like the pot is, indeed, perching atop the yew.  And how about those annuals?  Solanum quitoense with variegated ivy.  Yum.

And early one particularly misty morning, the furry leaves catch all the dew and turn into spiny silver velvet.



Incredible!  But this is, after all, the center.  Respect must be paid, and why waste the opportunity?  Part of the thrill of a garden is creating the intense need to Do Something Right Here—and then going right ahead and Doing it.

But this being New England, not California, the shocking prehistoric-looking plants are only annuals, and the pots themselves will last the longest when they enjoy five months—mid-December through mid-May—out of the cold weather.

Through the long Winter and even into early Spring, then, the conduit pots are gone.  The long axis is "just" a long axis, with only length to recommend it.



But at almost 500 feet, house-to-sequoia, length is its own thrill.