Through the Open Garden Gate

 The garden season that was

By LAURA NICKERSON

As gardening seasons go, 2009 wasn’t the best by a long shot but it wasn’t the worst either.

Though spring was late and unpredictable, it finally came in with a burst of blazing heat followed by cool, dry temperatures that were great for many June flowers. As the drought dragged on though, vegetable crops were stressed except for the cruciferous varieties and some beans.

Then when the rains finally came – and they still haven’t let up – the over-abundance of water along with the continuing cold led to soggy conditions perfect for the formation of molds and fungi. Tomato blight and many fungal diseases destroyed a lot of crops this year.

There’s always an up side, though. In this case the continuing rains will protect plants from winter dry out through the long cold season ahead. We’ll just have to get out there in our raincoats and boots to finish the fall garden clean-up ritual.

It’s about the same with this column.

Call this the ‘Fall Housecleaning Edition,’ the column that ties up loose ends and closes up shop for the winter. I’ve covered a lot of ground this summer, from spring bulbs to winter protection and plenty for the seasons in between. I’ve gone on about garden design, garden style and garden accessories. I’ve highlighted plants including hydrangeas and roses and encouraged you to garden for the birds with bird feeders, houses and baths placed throughout the garden.

And sure, we could go on even more with topics like plants to use for Christmas decorating, creating beauty in the winter garden, navigating the world of online garden catalogues and continuing tips about healthy houseplants.

Instead I leave you those topics to discover on your own and encourage you to bring the magic of plants into your home for the winter. Take some time to map out your garden plans for next year, start your spring seedlings and do your garden research. I’ll be doing mine – somewhere near a beach in sunny Florida, where some plants that we grow here as small indoor potted trees are grown out-of-doors, in some cases reaching heights of 100 feet and girths wider than a house.

It’s amazing what a little sun and warmth can do!

Look for this column, Through the Open Garden Gate, at Info Northeast next spring, with an opening story about the history and benefits of community gardens. The line-up of great garden topics for the complete 2010 season is already prepared and ready to go.

Meanwhile, send your garden questions to the Town Talk Garden Forum. I’d be delighted to answer them throughout the winter.

Thanks for reading, and good gardening indoors and out – Laura Nickerson

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Through the Open Garden Gate

We’ve had a couple of hard frosts and now it’s a bit chilly for working long hours in the garden. But don't abandon your garden just yet. Your plants still need protection from the very weather that has driven most gardeners indoors. With the promise of better weather still ahead, with a few days at least reaching temperatures of 50 or 60, there’s no need to forego the simple projects that may save your most treasured and tender plants from a difficult winter or a slow spring death.

Roses and other perennials, flowering shrubs and young trees need a minimum amount of winter protection in our USDA Hardiness Zone 4 climate. Though there are variables, including your terrain, the prevailing wind direction and protective structures, chances are some of your plants are completely unprotected. The following methods are generally accepted in horticultural circles as being beneficial to particular plants.

Roses: Protecting roses from the sub-zero temperatures of a northern Michigan winter is a three-step process. First, cut rose canes back to about 24 inches. Next, wind string around the canes to hold them in an upright position. Finally, mound soil to a height of 8-12 inches right over the base of the canes. You can even add a leaf, straw or hay mulch over the mounded soil. In the spring, at the first signs of new growth, remove the mounds.

Flowering shrubs and young deciduous trees: These plants can suffer greatly during ice storms, blizzards or from high wind, when their delicate outward branching forms are most susceptible to breakage and frost damage. To minimize problems, wrap their branches in a spiral that holds them in an upward direction close to the trunk. Then cover the entire plant with polypropylene netting designed for this purpose. Unwrap in late spring.

Evergreens: Both wire cages wrapped with burlap, and wooden A-frame “tents” help to keep the heavy branches of most evergreens free from the burden of ice and snow. Set four or five poles in the ground around the plant allowing for the free movement of branches. Wrap burlap from pole to pole, going completely around the tree. This form of protection keeps wind away from the shrub and inhibits snow and ice from collecting. Wooden A-frames are exactly as they sound; an A-shaped covering built as a roof over a young tree to prevent ice and snow from collecting on it.

Other simpler forms of winter protection can benefit all plants in a general way. Fall watering refers to an active schedule of watering plants right up until the ground freezes. This protects against the possibility of roots drying out over the winter and is a good practice to adopt in the northern garden.

Windbreaks are just that. They break the prevailing wind from directly hitting a plant continuously over the winter months. You need not have a long row of hundred-year-old pines to have an effective wind break. Smaller plants can benefit from a few bales of straw or hay to divert the force of the prevailing wind. Next year, while your garden is growing, you can plant a larger natural windbreak.

Mulching is the answer to a lot of garden problems. It smothers weeds, retains soil moisture, adds nutrients and offers winter protection. Plants with a thick coat of straw, hay or leaves over their roots are less likely to heave during early spring freeze and thaw cycles and are better protected in during winters of poor snow cover.

So get out in your garden; get mulching, get watering and get you plants the winter protection they need.

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Through the Open Garden Gate

Keeping an eye on the weather in anticipation of frost, plastic sheets close at hand to protect the last vestige of life in your garden is a rite of autumn in Northeast Michigan. If you find yourself keeping an eye on the weather as much as you are on your squash and pumpkins, you’re not alone.

Gardeners have searched for centuries for ways to extend the garden season and one way they manage to do that is with garden cloches.

Online sources suggest that antique glass garden cloches originated in Italy in the early seventeenth century.

A contemporary green bell glass cloche protects a young recently planted gallardia on a frosty morning.

 Several garden antiques books state that cloches originated in France in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. But the best look back we have at these highly prized and sought after garden antiques is to Victorian England. There cloches are still in use protecting young seedlings in the gardens of old rural country house estates.

We do owe the French one thing related to glass cloches and that is their name. The word cloche means bell in French and these heavy vintage glass lids resemble nothing so much as a large glass bell. They were designed specifically to protect plants from cold weather. Most once had a glass knot on the top, the point at which the glassblowing process was completed, making an ideal handle to move it to another location or prop it open to let in air. By the time an antique cloche is found, these glass knots are often already broken off.

View a cloche and it’s easy to see how they warm the soil under their domes and create a perfect growing environment for tender young plants. Cloches can have a diameter of more than two feet, and be just as tall, in very large styles or as small as six or seven inches. Cloches were used to heat the ground prior to planting, as post-planting mini-greenhouses for young starts or employed sporadically on cold spring nights to prevent frost damage to any plant that would fit inside. Large estates would have had dozens of these, for employed gardeners to use when the temperature dropped suddenly.

Through the Open Garden Gate

Clean up time in the garden

Most of us in Northeast Michigan have had our first hard freeze. Though we may still be waiting for the last buzzing bee to glean every last drop of pollen from our fast-fading flower beds, believe me when I say, the time to clean your garden is now.

Through the Open Garden Gate

Collected or home made, birdhouses have a place in the garden

Nothing says country garden like an interesting birdhouse attached to a post, hung from a porch or dangling from a tree branch. These diminutive structures add charm, grace and whimsy to almost any garden design. Proportioned correctly, they may actually attract birds.

Today’s garden centers, gift shops, antique shows and flea markets are full of so many birdhouse design choices it’s almost as complex as shopping for your own home. Peaked roof or flat, shingled or sided, single residence, duplex or an entire condominium for your feathered friends; all these and more are readily available. While many of these designs may offer exactly the look you are seeking, know in advance that it is sometimes strictly accidental if a commercially made birdhouse finds an occupant to suit it.

Birds are creatures of habit. Certain functions at certain times of the year, certain foods consumed, certain nests built, and certain homes chosen by their dimensions and height. If the birdhouse creator was only after an attractive look, then it will be an act of providence if a bird decides to nest in one of his houses.

If, on the other hand, specific dimensions were followed to attract specific species of birds for your geographic area and you have taken other immediate avian needs like food and water into consideration, chances are good that a bird will find your newly provided quarters and make them home.

A tiny chickadee prefers a house 6- to 8-inches-deep, with an interior room four-by-four inches, an entry hole one inch in diameter and from one to six inches above the floor, the entire house placed six to 10 feet above the ground.

Through the open garden gate

Go native with asters and goldenrod

If your desire has ever been to imitate or duplicate the beauty of nature by using native plants in your  garden, surely the late-summer views along every roadside in Northeast Michigan are worth an attempt to capture. What better way to bring home the glory than by planting aster and goldenrod – two natives that form complimentary drifts of intense purple and vibrant gold in the wild?

Asters, with their intensely colored blossoms light up the garden on a sunny day.

There are many native Michigan asters and the ones we see most on the road side are the native New Englands. The word aster has Greek origins meaning star, for the shape of its flowers and asters are indeed the stars of the fall garden. These fabulous plants, which can reach a height of 7 feet, melt our hearts with their dizzying displays of a million tiny blue, purple and fuschia flowers punctuated with sunny yellow centers. When they just happen to be found sharing space with endless mounds of fluffy, spun-gold solidago or goldenrod, we can finally understand the expression that gardens are human, while nature is Divine.

New England asters are readily available online, at local nurseries and in garden catalogues. There are many cultivars to choose from, varying in color, height, and habit.

Some of the best are: 

Alma Potschke, a brilliant, fall-blooming fuschia shade that gets not only three-five feet tall but also three feet full.

Purple Dome, with deep clear color and a height of only 18 inches.

Harrington’s Pink, light coral pink, and a cultivated height of three-four feet.

Hello Lucy, a tall cultivar with violet blue blossoms that are two inches in diameter.

September Ruby, an unusual red aster with the same tall habit and one-inch ruby-red blooms.

Wedding Lace, a white-blooming aster, also at a height of three-four feet.

Other species of aster, some of which are native and some not, blend well with this New England type in the late summer garden. Some to consider are A. cordifolia, a late summer native with white or sky blue flowers on tall plants; A. ericoides, a native prairie plant with white or pale blue flowers on shorter one-three foot plants; and A. laevis, one of the last asters to bloom in late fall, with light blue flowers on two-three foot plants.

A river of New England asters nearly six feet tall defines an island bed in this Roscommon county garden while below  Solidago speciosa, a native goldenrod well-suited to home gardens, forms huge clumps and showy flower heads.

The non-native A. novae belgii or New York aster is a lower-growing plant hybridized in many colors that looks great in front of the taller native varieties. One of the best is A. novae belgii Wood’s Blue, a brilliant true-blue bloomer under 24 inches tall.

Asters have a long but sporadic history as a medicinal plant, both in Native American culture and with other herbalists. It is currently viewed as a possible “nerve tonic” or calmative, all above-ground parts of the plant being used but especially the flowers. As with all botanicals, put yourself in the hands of a skilled herbalist and consult with your physician about possible drug interactions.

Goldenrod has had a bad rap for years due to its association with hay fever. The real culprit of that ailment is ragweed, a wind-pollinated perennial weed with inconspicuous green flowers that bloom at the same time as the insect-pollinated, yellow-flowered goldenrod. You would need to put your whole face right into a bunch of goldenrod to be affected in even the slightest way by its pollen which is never windborne. It is sticky and adheres to the flowers until some bug transports it to another flower.

Goldenrod’s botanical or Latin name, solidago, means to strengthen or make whole, and it has been used since ancient times in healing.

Traditionally it was used to ease laryngitis and clear a sore throat as well as to treat infections. According to the University of Maryland Medical Center website, goldenrod is used often today, especially in Europe to reduce inflammation, relieve muscle spasms, fight infections and cancer with its antioxidant properties and lower blood pressure among other things.

There are at least 130 varieties of Solidago growing wild in the United States and many more have been hybridized and cultivated as garden specimens. Of at least eight growing freely throughout northern Michigan, a few that work well in the northern garden without becoming too rampant and weedy are: 

S.rugosa but only the cultivar Fireworks, which is clump-forming and a profuse bloomer.

S.caesia or blue-stemmed goldenrod will work even in Zone 3, prefers a more moist soil than most solidagos and will tolerate some shade. Plant behind asters at the edge of a wood, where asters will still get sun.

S.juncea is very hardy and usually the first to bloom, in late July. It is native to open woodland and drier grassland.

S.ohioensis or Ohio goldenrod. Native near wet shorelines and moist grasslands. Reaches two-four feet and has flat-topped clusters of yellow flowers. Well-suited not only to prairie gardens but to herbaceous borders as well. Blends particularly well with New England asters.

Asters and goldenrod steal the show for weeks on end at a time when little else is flowering. To round out the garden with other late-blooming natives use rudbeckia (black-eyed Susan,) Echinacea (coneflower,) and physostegia virginiana (obedient plant.) Their colors all fall into the purple with yellow scheme, which is always an attractive combination. Both the Suzies and the obedient plant may need careful monitoring to ensure that they do not take over a whole bed. Otherwise all of these plants are virtually care-free so plant some natives, sit back and enjoy the show.

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