Episode 61: Page Dickey, Azaleas, Late Mulching Tips
Leslie: Oh my gosh! We had snow in the air on April 19th in central Virginia. I am affronted! Welcome to Into the garden with Leslie here on Newsradio WINA. This show is sponsored by Dos Amigos Landscaping and Colorblends® Bulbs. I'm Leslie Harris, and by the time you're listening to this, I think all will be right with the world, spring temperature-wise anyway, but goodness, what an episode that was.
Our plant of the week is a flowering shrub like no other. Hey, that's a golf reference. Smile slightly if you got it, but be patient, if you did not. And here's another hint. Hello friends. I'll be chatting with Page Dickey, a garden author that I have idolized for decades. And lastly, we will have some tips about what to do in the garden this week.
Now I know all of you know what invasive plants are. Invasive is a funny word. I mean, it could refer to house guests that linger past brunch on a Sunday. I mean, don't these people know that you need to get back in your garden? But when you attach it to plants, it feels like you're mostly talking about alien invasives. Does anyone ever feel that they're perfectly native Monarda for example, is invasive? No? Perhaps the description is better that it's thuggish or ill mannered. So I could safeguard a few moments of my time on this earth by only saying invasive plants when I'm talking about what I usually refer to as alien invasive plants. The pernicious attributes are intrinsic, and let us agree that no native plants would ever really be invasive, only perhaps a little aggressive.
So that being settled, Blue Ridge PRISM, which is our local organization for invasive plant management, is having some events that local and further afield folks should know about. These are two virtual meetings about invasives, and even if you don't live near me, you could learn about these plants. Believe me, they are not just found in Albemarle County or even in Virginia. The first event is identification of invasive plants in summer. It's on May 10th from 1:00 to 3:00 PM, and the other one is management and control of invasive plants in summer, and that one's May 12th from 1:00 to 3:00. Each one costs $10. You can find the links to sign up in the show notes on LHgardens.com.
If you are looking to become a better steward of your land by tackling those invasive plants on your property, identifying them, knowing what to do about them, and I know you're tracking that the reason that invasive plants are so bad is that they will escape into the wild via seed, and they will take up space that won't be contributing to the food web. So maybe you could look around for a local or even start, but look around for a local group of folks who have taken up this cause. It's an important one. There are probably lots of Blue Ridge PRISM-type organizations out there, so check out your local resources.
The plant of the week is high up on the leaderboard of spring beauties. It's intimately associated with a golf tournament like no other - The Masters - and many that we grow aren't native, but they have certainly made the cut in my yard. We're talking about Azaleas. Azaleas are in the Ericaceae family, and in fact the common name is the Azalea and the botanical name for Azalea is Rhododendron. But, but, but …you might say Rhododendrons are different. They are taller. They have thicker trunks. They have fewer but fatter buds and their leaves and flowers are huge, compared with that of most Azaleas. That is all true, but Azaleas are indeed a subspecies within the genus of Rhododendron. They are not two different species. They're too much alike, even though you see those big differences. So all Azaleas are Rhododendrons, but not all Rhodies are Azaleas.
There are, as is par for the course with popular plants, thousands and thousands of cultivars. There are variegated ones. There are ones of all colors. There are tall ones and short ones and ones with variegated leaves. Most of the ones I grow in my garden are the typical Asian ones, which are at this moment loaded with white, pink, salmon and purple flowers. And there are a few red ones too, the fire engine red. I certainly didn't plant them, but there they are, looking stunning. These are the evergreen types, although as you know, evergreen doesn't mean ever the same darn leaf for years and years, so you might notice some leaf loss on these ones in fall.
You know what I will plant though, as they get older and wear out - and gosh, I hope the red ones go first - and that is native Azaleas, because there are some really good picks. There's some really strong colors of those that I might not get into, some bright oranges and stuff although bright colors are very fun. I'm particularly fond of one called Pinxter or some people call it Pinxter Bloom and it is native to the Eastern United States, and that's Rhododendron periclymenoides, but I betcha Pinxter will do. I only have one so far, but I intend to propagate it this spring and some new babies along.
The Azalea is a major harbinger of spring. Major. Get it? They love acid soil, but not too much sun and deer love them, especially the buds. So sorry about that. I have planted over 200 of them in my gardens since 2014 and there were probably about 50 big ones to start. It was Jeff's side idea to have the backyard like no other - just kidding - but they're awfully pretty. I've tried the Encore types, which are the ones that spit out a few blooms throughout the season after the first flush. And some people swear by them, but I'm okay with my big show in spring and then just sort of green blobs for the rest of the season. I feel like they score well enough to earn a green jacket. The Azalea, a champion plant.
This is Into the garden with Leslie on Newsradio WINA, kindly delivered by Colorblends® Bulbs and Dos Amigos Landscaping. Coming up, we're going to talk with Page Dickey about her latest book Uprooted, but like most of my interviews, it evolves into general gardening chat.
Welcome back to Into the garden with Leslie on Newsradio WINA and I am very honored to have somebody that I've known about for decades in my gardening head. Her name is Page Dickey and she's a garden writer and designer, and she was like this virtual mentor for me, but this was way back before the interweb. This was when I was learning to garden and all I had was the Greenwich Public Library. One of the first books that I bought for myself was the Duck Hill Journal, and I just clung to these books. There was another one written by, I think people that you know, although I think Wayne has passed away. Wayne Winterrowd and Joe Eck, A Year at North Hill and then even Martha Stewart had one back in the day, because I didn't know what would come next. I didn't know what the possibilities were, so your book just really got me going. And so thank you, Page Dickey for being with us. I really appreciate it.
Page: Thank you, Leslie, for having me.
Leslie: Page has gone around the world gardening, looking at gardens, writing about gardens. That was her first book. She's written many since, but the one I really wanted to zero in on today is her latest one, which is called Uprooted because how many years ago now have you started again?
Page: We came here 6 years ago.
Leslie: I've been in mine 8. I did this, not on the same scale and not the way you have, but yes, starting again is very interesting. So tell us about your journey and tell us about your new space.
Page: Well, my old garden, which was in North Salem, New York, not too far from New York City, I'd been there for 34 years, so kind of thought I'd always be there. But things happen as you get older and we started to worry about our finances. Duck Hill was the name of the garden and it was in Westchester County, which is a very expensive place to live with taxes. And if we were being honest with each other, the garden was getting to be too much for us. My husband Bosco had just turned 80 and I was no spring chicken anymore, and it was three acres that was totally gardened. Just every inch of it was gardened. So after mulling it around and being a little tearful for a while, we decided to move. Unlike most people our age, we decided to move north.
Leslie: Let's have more snow. This will be so fun.
Page: We love snow.
Leslie: Yeah.
Page: And so we moved to the foothills of the Berkshires, up at the edge of Massachusetts in what’s called the Northwest corner of Connecticut. So I started again and once you have a new yard, a new strip of land, a new plot, everything starts to get boiling in that. Starts to go in your mind and happily, we built an addition to the house before we moved in. So we lived nearby in a friend's guest house and went over to the house every day. So I really had a year to think about the garden and that helps
Leslie: That's a luxury.
Page: Yeah, it is a luxury, but you know what? I think it's a good idea even if you move in smack right away to at least go through part of a growing season to find out what's there, what the light is, what the setting feels like. Capture the mood. In other words, don't start digging right away, except if you need to have vegetables in a corner, dig a vegetable garden.
Leslie: That's great advice because people do ask me sometimes what's the first thing that you think about. And especially now that spring is coming upon us, although this podcast won't go out until later in spring but we're talking in late March, and what to do first. I think that's fantastic advice. What to do first is to sit back and wait and see.
Page: And really look where your sun is, where your shade is. What I did with our old place, Duck Hill, when I moved there, there were no flowers. None. No flowers, no gardens, nothing. It was really pretty much a clean slate, which was daunting in a way I thought at the time. It was an old farmhouse, so I decided to use the doors as the axis. I thought about how we walked into the house and what we saw from the windows and really what we saw from the doors. And so the first two garden areas that I made there were outside of two of the doors. I made them kind of formal in outline. I mean, they were hedged in, but then kind of wild in the planting, but that's not a bad thing to do. To think about where you're going to be, how you're going to see, how you're going to walk out of the house and all that. Here at our new place, we actually have a little garden right outside the kitchen and front door. It extends around the front of the house. So every time we walk out, we're seeing things. I think most of your people who are following you are probably more Southern, but right now, pretty much all we have is snow drops. It is so exciting to see those snowdrops.
Leslie: I just feel like that was a minute ago. Ours are passed. I'm just excited now to get out my shovel and pick up my little clumps and make them into two or three clumps. That's where we are. So right outside your door, because we'll talk about how big and wild your garden is. I mean, it's a piece of property that is not all garden. It's land and some garden. What do you choose to have right outside your back door?
Page: I always want some fragrance near the house, so you're walking in and out and you're smelling something. I did put some shrubs right by the kitchen door called Clethra or summersweet.
Leslie: Oh, I love that.
Page: It blooms in August, but it's got a beautiful scent and by the way, snowdrops smell of honey, but you have to bend down.
Leslie: You have to bend down. I said that on the podcast a couple weeks ago. I'm like really they do smell. You just have to get them right by your nose.
Page: Yeah. what I do is I pick a small bouquet of them and that way. In front of the house, it's really kind of a cottagey garden. Lots of Baptisia. I don't know the common name of Baptisia
Leslie: They call it False Indigo or something.
Page: Yeah. But it's known as Baptisia.
Leslie: It's easier
Page: And Catmint and Amsonias. I have sunflowers and one thing I decided I wanted was I wanted to bring the birds and the butterflies to the house. There are plenty in the fields, but I wanted to see them our kitchen door and out our windows, and so I did put quite a few native meadow plants in the garden, like ironweed and Veronicastrum and Helianthus, the sunflowers, the perennial sunflowers and so on. And in the summer, the sunflowers are full of goldfinches and the Ironwood is just fluttering with giant black swallowtail butterflies, and I have a tall kind of Catmint that the hummingbirds love and so on. So I try and think about how to bring the birds to the door.
Leslie: Tell me about Nepeta, the Catmint that's tall. Is it a white, or is it a purple?
Page: It's purple. No, it's purple. It's Nepeta Sibirica. It has a French name. It's called 'Souvenir d'Andre Chaudron'.
Leslie: I never heard of that one.
Page: That's a ridiculously long name. It's in the index in my book. All these plants are in my book. It's about three or four feet tall.
Leslie: No way! I think of that as such a sprawler, and they make them smaller and smaller
Page: And it doesn't sprawl. It blooms, I think a little later than the Catmint, the Nepetas that we know on the front of the border and the hummingbirds just love it.
Leslie: Ooh. Sounds like a good one. Yeah, a really good one.
Page: I put Salvias in the garden. I put all kinds of things in the garden that I know the hummingbirds will like.
Leslie: I love to look at the hummingbirds. It's so fun. I think we've described Duck Hill pretty well. But these rooms, these garden rooms with these massive hedges, and this is what I thought was gardening, because I'm looking at you and I'm looking at British gardeners and this was back in the late 80s and early 90s, and I went to town. I had the partera right out the back door. This is what we do, and then when you go to a new place or just as you get older, I think your priorities change and I can't decide whether it's because you and I are older gardeners now who have just evolved in the, well, let's see what nature is bringing us, as opposed to let's create a room with hedges. Is it us, or is it a movement in gardening? What do you think?
Page: Well, first of all, Leslie, you look like you're about 18 years old.
Leslie: You need glasses, Sweetie!!
Page: I think a lot of it is a movement. I think we're all more interested in what they call pollinator gardens or gardens that attract wildlife that use more natives, so I think that's part of it. In my case and as you said, at my old garden, it was all formal enclosures. I have one enclosed cutting garden here. It's enclosed with a rail fence and some wires, so that supposedly the rabbits don't get in but you can see right through it so it's not that secretive, wonderful thing. But here because I'm really in a rural setting and the house is surrounded by fields, I just wanted to see through to that wildness. And so I wanted any gardens I did to have that feeling of wildness. In the front garden, we have a gravel path going through it and I did add just a few boxwoods, not many.
Leslie: Little structure.
Page: A little structure, and in one part against the house really, I put in a hedge of dwarf Korean lilac, really just because it smells so good. But other than that, it's all kind of loose and wild. I have two wonderful trees in this front garden and they add some structure and actually they were there before I came.
Leslie: What are they?
Page: They're serviceberries. They are Shadbush.
Leslie: Yes, that was the first tree I planted on this property.
Page: Yeah. It's so full of birds all the time, but also it's so, so pretty. And a woman designer who worked at this property 25 years ago for another owner had planted a lot of serviceberries, which just makes me so happy.
Leslie: Yeah. It is. They really are. So can you picture yourself as a 30 year old Page Dickey moving into the property where you are now? It's called Church House, right?
Page: Right, because the house was a church.
Leslie: The house was a church. And so you're 30 and you're brimming with ideas and you are ready to go and you're moving into Church House and not Duck Hill. How would it have been different? Can you picture anything?
Page: Definitely. I would've had more garden spaces, bigger garden spaces. I mean, the cutting garden in the back of the house, I made it I think it's about 30 feet square. I probably would've made it 80 feet square. I don't know if I would've made any of it terribly more formal, because I think the kind of garden you have is often dictated - not dictated but suggested by the setting. Duck Hill, my old garden was in a more suburban area where in closing it, making it very private just seemed right. You know, I immediately put a hedge along the road. I had a hemlock hedge and then it seemed right for the property and the house was kind of a prim, old farmhouse, kind of Greek revival farmhouse. So that seemed right for there. I just don't think it would be right here.
Leslie: So you think you would've been wise enough back then, except for that huge cutting garden?
Page: I think I would've been. I think I would've been. The other thing at Duck Hill, I had what I called a woodland garden. Well, somebody said dismissively, Page, it's just a copse of trees.
Leslie: That will do.
Page: It did do, and it was around two edges of our property. It was just a gathering of trees around two edges, but I made paths in it, and then I made a garden and I have to tell you Leslie, in the end, it wasn't formal at all. It was full of spring delights, spring ephemerals as they're called and trillium and spring phlox and all that stuff. Lots of Hellebores and Epimedium and blah, blah, blah. It was my favorite part of the garden in the end. It was the hardest to leave. So I have a feeling that had I been 20 years younger or 30 years younger when I came here, I might have wanted to take some of our woods here because we have about 12 acres of woods here, and I've got paths all through them. I might have wanted to make a "Woodland" garden in part of it. And being older and with a different set of thinking, I just want to see what's there natively. I'm not going to plant it with fancy plants. We have a native trillium and we have a lot of plants in the woods that are all new to me, and I'm just nurturing them. I'm just getting rid of the invasives and letting them catch their breath and spread, rather than me making a garden there. I have a feeling if I were 40 or even 50 today, I might have made a garden there.
Leslie: It would be hard to resist, I think.
Page: Yeah.
Leslie: This is Into the garden with Leslie on Newsradio WINA, and we're talking with Page Dickey about her new garden and her old garden, because it's hard to let go of gardens. It really is. You'd be amused to know that I think I have a woodland garden and I garden on 0.8 acres right next to a large university at the base of a small mountain and there are deer and I had to put in a deer fence and I had these beautiful old, over a hundred year old oaks and Tulip Poplars, and this was not me. This is what I inherited and I'm so excited to use that as an excuse for my penchant for Asian... I love my hostas and hydrangeas, but I love the woods.
Page: Yes, we all do.
Leslie: I know the words and the works of Doug Tallamy and natives, and so I asked before how we've evolved. Partially it's been what we've been taught and what has been learned out in the greater world that we're listening to. I was so pleased to have Doug Tallamy on the show last spring, and I've read all of his books. Tell me what you think of when you are the steward now of this 17 acres. What's going through your mind in terms of not gardening, but simply managing and encouraging what you want to encourage?
Page: Doug Tallamy is certainly one of my mentors. I hope he's everybody's mentor, and his new thing of two thirds for the birds, so that nothing wrong with having high phlox, daffodils and snowdrops and peonies, but he's encouraging people say, that's your one third and two thirds could be native, which makes you stop and think a little bit. He's the one who taught me that it isn't. It was something I really had to stand back and think about. He said it's not just about making a garden beautiful. That was in the beginning. That was always what I was trying to do.
Leslie: And you were very good at it.
Page: I don't know, but anyway, painting pictures with a garden. But what he said is if you think about making it a welcoming habitat by planting some natives which allow the right sort of bugs to come, which are the bugs that feed the baby birds, et cetera, et cetera, as this wonderful long process, that happens once you start to plant some native shrubs and some native trees, like maybe just one oak, oak being the most important tree. And so I very much had all of that in mind when I came here, and I was blessed with these fields and then the woods. And the woods are young and scrappy, but full of potential and some of them are high and rocky and some of them are low and wet. So I started right away. I have a young man who helps me once a week, and he's a lot stronger and more vigorous than I am. I taught him what were the invasives in the woods. We just have a few invasives in the meadows and we work on those together, just pulling, pulling, pulling. But in the woods, there were a lot of woody invasives. Most of us have woody invasives in our woods, and we just start cutting them down, pulling them out. It's just amazing what happens. All of a sudden, they're replaced by natives so that nurturing the woods here and the fields has just been my new project and just so thrilling.
Leslie: In just six years, you've seen some really good progress in terms of getting it to what it should be?
Page: You wouldn't believe it. Yes. Just amazing.
Leslie: That's very encouraging.
Page: But one thing I was going to say is I did have a deer fence at Duck Hill, which was blissful.
Leslie: Oh, yes.
Page: Yeah.
Leslie: It's so important.
Page: But we don't have one here. So the deer, it's a battle
Leslie: But I think you have found a good product. I've heard you mention it a couple times.
Page: Deer Defeat .
Leslie: There's so many names. When I was a professional, we used Deer Off, I think. There's Deer Scram. There's deer this, there's deer that.
Page: Well, you just have to be sure it's organic because some of them are full of poison and you don't want to be putting poison...
Leslie: Oh gosh, no. Most of them are based on just bad smells that the deer don't want to have.
Page: Yeah. It's bad smells, but Deer Defeat works. I'll spread it on little oak trees or things like that once a month and it seems to help. What happens here is we have a lot of preserves around us, and they're open for deer hunting starting in November, and our neighbors have 70 acres that sort of wraps around us and the deer go "time to go to Page's and roost
Leslie: Oh, great.
Page: Where nobody's going to be shooting at us.
Leslie: Oh no!
Page: And then they stay all winter and so they browse on all those small woody things. In the woodland of course, they would never think of browsing on barberry. I don't know if you have barberry down there.
Leslie: We do, and it's still sold in nurseries sometimes.
Page: It's just shocking.
Leslie: It's just awful. I talked about it a couple weeks ago.
Page: It turns out I don't have much here, and every once in a while I see a sprig of it and I just pull it out. It pulls out pretty easily.
Leslie: It does, which is nice. I was going to ask, or actually I was going to tell listeners just in case, although I do talk about Doug Tallamy quite a bit. He is the entomologist from the University of Delaware, who wrote three really seminal books that changed my way of thinking about gardening, and the first one was Bringing Nature Home and Nature's Best Hope. That's where he introduces his great idea of a national park that's homegrown, like you can turn your yard into a little bit of nature of a park here, and then of course his latest one is The Nature of Oaks. So to summarize what Page and I both know, and what many gardeners already know is that oaks are probably the most important. If you want to do something good for the world, plant an oak. And I know that you are nurturing the babies that you're coming across and actually protecting them with that spray and sometimes physical barriers too.
Page: Oh yeah, absolutely. And it's just amazing. In six years, the oaks, the young baby oaks that we've encircled with wire so that the deer don't get them, have just shot up. I mean, they must grow a foot a year anyway. That's very exciting to see it
Leslie: It is. And also for people who may not know, the reason that the oaks are so important is that more than any other type of tree or plant, they host the most lepidoptera, so little bugs for the birds to eat and so they are incredibly important
Page: And the nuts are important too, as food for all kinds of animals
Leslie: They're just like the condominium of wildlife in your yard. So if you have them, always keep them and if you have little babies, look out for them. I also wanted to talk to you because you've seen so many. You've been a garden designer. Do you currently design actively for others, or ...?
Page: A little bit. I'm trying to phase that out
Leslie: Me too. Trying to phase that out. I just want to garden here, but I do little snackable projects and it's a fun thing to do, but you've seen so many beautiful gardens. Tell us about that book that you edited of some of the world's most beautiful gardens.
Page: Actually, Leslie long before that, my second book after Duck Hill Journal was called Breaking Ground, and it was portraits of 10 garden designers, and I'm trying to think. Half of those garden designers were in Europe and half of them were across America. I spent two years traveling in England and France and Arizona and California and the Midwest, working on that book. And up until that point, I'd just always been in my own garden. I had done writing, but it was always about my own garden. Writing this second book about other people's gardens all over America and Europe just changed my life.
For one thing, I learned so much from them, like the importance of water and all sorts of things that I hadn't really thought about. Each book after that, until one recent book I wrote called Embroidered Ground. I don't know if you know that, but that was about Duck Hill. Between the first book I did and Embroidered Ground, all the books that I did were of gardens all over America. And one thing, of course, that's so exciting when you see gardens all over, besides how imaginative Americans are, is to see plants in their native habitat. And you go, oh, this is why this plant does well here and maybe doesn't do so well in my garden, like rosemary or something. Anyway, it was just a thrill for me and every time I wrote, every time I traveled around and came home, I came home enriched with ideas and I think going and seeing other people's gardens, which we couldn't do these days really, really helps us to.... It really inspires us.
Leslie: I was just going to say, speaking of that, seeing other people's gardens, aren't you one of the founders of The Garden Conservancy?
Page: I'm one of the founders. Well, I was the co-founder of the Open Days Program. It's where you can go around and private gardens all over America, open their doors and there's a directory out. The new directory is out right now. I hope it's in every library. I remember going to somebody's garden last year, and they had a plant on a table right by their front door and I went, wow! I never thought to use that outside. I can't remember what it was now, but it was something I think of as a houseplant that would be inside and there it was, just looking so beautiful. So even if you go around other people's gardens and you say, well now I know not to do that.
Leslie: Okay. Point taken. I see what not to do. That's very good.
Page: I have to tell you that I love to see joyfulness in gardens. I love to see gardens where people obviously love to garden and they're expressing themselves in their gardens. It can be the tiniest front or backyard, but you can always tell. You can always tell when it's a real gardener there
Leslie: Before we hit record, Page and I were talking about the rules of gardening and how we might have started gardening reading books that talked about rules and this is what you should do. And that is a word that you like to avoid when you're talking to others about gardening. Tell us about that.
Page: Yes, I'm not big on rules. I mean, I'm pretty good about federal rules. I pay my taxes et cetera, but when it comes to gardening, I think we can easily become intimidated by what some people might expect from our garden. And I've always thought don't listen to anybody else. Just go out there and do your thing and plant. And if you want clashing colors, do it. Put those clashing colors together. Good heavens! Great Dixter, one of the famous gardens in England, does clashing colors all the time. Just have fun. I remember once I was designing a garden and the client said to me, Page, it must be beautiful. And I said to her, actually, it has to be beautiful in your eyes. Not necessarily in anybody else's eyes. Well, she didn't get that, but ...
Leslie: She was reading too many magazines.
Page: Yeah. Right. But anyway, we're all told that this is the time to plant sweet peas and this is the time to prune. I always know prune roses when the Forsythia blooms and stuff like that. And if you do it and you get around to it, well, that's fine. But if you don't and you do it another time, that's fine too. And don't ever be intimidated. Just get out there and dig and enjoy it.
Leslie: That's such great advice because that means you would never know if you're going to like gardening until you just get that shovel and start. The first thing that I did was we moved into our new house and I thought, oh, what is this thing that's growing? I will dig it up. It seems to be a root ball. I will now ....wait, I think I know something about if you split this in half, let's see what happens. Boom!! It was in half. I had two hostas and I was hooked. I could have killed the plant, but I wouldn't have really cared. I think just fiddling around and trying, and that idea of a beautiful clash. I was much beholden to the ideas of the silvers and the blues and the grays and the cool colors until I started actually gardening for others. I started my business and I ran into a woman who just said, no, I want all the colors, and she had a glorious, cheerful garden. It was terrific. A great clash, there's nothing better sometimes.
Page: Yeah, definitely. Definitely. It's like having a box of crayons. Just get out there. And also the other thing I hear is people saying, oh, it's just so expensive. I heard that last night. Oh, I'd like to start a garden, but it's so expensive. Well, I didn't have a penny when I started gardening, but you buy one plant and the next year you split it apart, and the next year you split it into 10 pieces and all of a sudden, you got a show and you beg plants from people. It doesn't have to be expensive.
Leslie: It doesn't have to be expensive. If you find a gardening friend, at some point, they'll be pulling out the Monarda. I tell some of my friends who are just starting, you go around my garden. You're a good gardener. You go around my garden, you get whatever you want, you dig it up well, you take a little division, you make it so I never saw what you took, and just take it and they do.
Page: And also, unless the clock is ticking, don't be afraid to plant small. Young trees grow faster. Smaller perennials are healthier than those great big quart things that are probably pot bound. So think small actually, and you'd be surprised how fast it all grows.
Leslie: It does. It does, and it's always surprising how fast time flies. For instance, this podcast. For instance, our gardening lives, they are flying away, but I'm enjoying every day and obviously you are too, and I wish you just happiness up in the woods there. I think that's very cool. Oh, I have one more thing. We do have time for one more thing. I heard you say I have a Fen. I didn't even know what a Fen is. Tell us about your Fen. What the heck is a Fen?
Page: I thought a Fen was some romantic thing in a British 18th Century novel.
Leslie: Like a grotto or something, right?
Page: Right. We have a little wetland, but what's different about the wetland is that they say it's calcareous, which means it's sweet.
Leslie: Not acid?
Page: It's not. We actually have peat moss. It's not acid, it's sweet.
Leslie: Oh, interesting.
Page: A Fen is rich in protein and it has water running through it, rather than standing in it. And it is so full of wildflowers. So many of the things we like to grow in our garden grow naturally in this Fen, so I'm building a boardwalk through it.
Leslie: To be able to see everything really well?
Page: Yeah. Because it is pretty squishy to walk in, to put it mildly. So we're doing a … we ... John is doing the boardwalk
Leslie: I have a John.
Page: I'm cheering him on
Leslie: I have a Tim. He's terrific.
Page: And it's just so exciting. Of course, I had a friend come and identify some of the plants that I didn't know, and in a small space, he says they're about a hundred different native species.
Leslie: Oh my goodness. It's like South Africa come again. That's amazing.
Page: Yeah, it's really exciting
Leslie: Well, congratulations on this book, and there are going to be links to this book in the show notes. Page, thank you so much for chatting with me today. I really enjoyed it.
Page: Thank you, Leslie.
Leslie: This is Into the Garden with Leslie on Newsradio WINA, and coming up in just a moment, we're going to talk about what to do in your garden this week.
Welcome back to Into the Garden with Leslie on Newsradio WINA. Page Dicky, I love how she has strong opinions on how she wants to garden and what she values on her land, but also that she firmly believes that gardening is very personal and expressive, and I agree. I believe the action of gardening is best enjoyed experientially and experimentally, and that the resulting visual of a garden should make the gardener happy. I paid so much attention to Page's first book, the Duck Hill Journal back in the day and I am loving Uprooted, but it sounds like she wrote quite a few things in between that I have missed out on, so I'm going to put them on my list. All the links will be in the show notes on LH gardens.com.
Last week I mentioned No Mow May and how on a very small and not too visible spot. I am going to give it a try. I actually had already started to leave my little patch unmown a couple of weeks ago, but apparently Jeff was very into a history podcast when he was mowing this past Saturday because my nascent meadow is no more. Oh, well! It will be much more accurate if we leave off the mowing just for May anyhow. I had jumped the gun. If you're attempted to try it out, here's a word of caution besides the HOA and neighborhood judgment ramifications that I touched on last week, and that is when it's time to cut it back, I don't think cutting it back to the level of the rest of the grass is going to go well for your little meadow. I plan to use my string trimmer and just take some off the top as it were, because I'm thinking that the long trusses that have been shielded from the sun might scorch if you just go all the way down on the first go, but you know, who knows? I might never cut it back. It might become a glorious pastoral tableau that stays all summer.
Questions from listeners. Here's a question - what if you don't deadhead flowering bulbs? Well, you may as well quit gardening if you don't. No, I'm just kidding. No, nothing will happen if you don't deadhead flowering bulbs. When you do, it's a best practice type of thing. Deadheading daffodils and tulips, you're simply giving the plant the best chance to flower next year, because you're keeping it from putting its energy into producing seeds. Have you ever seen a huge swath of daffodils that just comes back year after year without any tending, anybody paying attention to it at all? That happens because they just don't need us. They are in just so happy a place that best practice deadheading thing, it just isn't necessary.
As I've mentioned, I do snap off the seed heads of tulips and daffodils when I see them just because it's easy for me. And well, if I get a better chance at a flower next year, great. I certainly don't have the flexibility in my hamstrings to get that done with all the little aranthus and snowdrops and squills and all the other short fellows. They are left to their own devices.
Are your hydrangea macrophyllas acting mysteriously this spring? I am really at a loss. I just don't know what to prune and when, even though I know exactly what to prune and when, because this is what I do. But the bits that are alive should look alive at this stage and I keep getting fooled. We got these late frosts and a few weeks ago, I thought, okay, I'm going to be able to see now what got fried and what didn't, what died and what is going to leaf out. I really don't have much hope of flowers at all I'm thinking, but I do admire the foliage of the big leaf hydrangeas, so I'm hoping to settle for that. But each time I circle around a shrub full of ugly brown sticks in the last couple of weeks, ready to make my move, ready to get rid of the ugly sticks and to settle for the green foliage, I cut something off that is alive. I mean, there's that telltale sign of a circle of green cambrium and I'm like, doggone it! I should not have cut that, but I grow very weary of looking at brown sticks in an ever verdant garden. Come on, you hydrangea macrophyllas, either leaf out or die, because I'm really losing patience here. Tick Tock. I have ladies walking through the garden this Sunday and brown hydrangea sticks are a scenario that I would very much like to avoid.
What did I do in my garden this week? Well, I mulched and that's pretty much it because it was seven yards and just me and I actually had to clean up some beds of sticks and other egregious atrocities before I was able to even mulch. But I have a couple tips for you on mulching. Are you ready? With my crew, we always mulch in February or sometimes January, February or March before things were up. But as a personal gardener, if you do it yourself, if you do it later in the spring, or even in summer, you don't have to mulch as much. The plants are up and running and taking over the earth and they are their own green mulch, and you can just put a little brown in between them.
Another tip is if you're like me and you leave leaves as mulch, but you want a neater look in some spots, you can toss a light layer of your double shredded hardwood bark beauty right over the leaves, and you get instant presto tidiness plus two layers of mulch. And the last tip is consider just mulching the edges of some beds, especially if that leaf litter that you might have left is helping you out in the middle of the bed. I tossed the beautiful stuff on both sides of some woodland paths, because that's where I get the biggest bang for my mulch buck and effort. It looks like somebody is gardening in these spots, even though it's just the edges. At the Brooklyn Bridge Park, that one that was literally created over old piers in the East River in Manhattan, the look is very natural in that garden, but they mulch this way so that visitors can know that this is a space or this is the edge of a space that is cared for, and I think they literally put up signs that say cue to care.
So you all never ever use that dyed mulch, right? I mean, I'm not going to tell you what to do, it's your garden, but that stuff is unnatural looking and full of the chemicals from the dye. It's the devil's work. I'm just kidding. Wait, am I kidding? Of course. I'm kidding. Don't use it.
Thanks so much for all the podcast reviews you've been leaving recently. From PA Owens, she said 'You've introduced me to some wonderful new garden resources with wit and laughter. I love the show'. Thank you, PA Owens. Oh, and I got a very nice email from Tom Millmont who lives in the Chicago suburbs and he wrote: Great job with the podcast. Love listening to it on my Saturday mornings. I heard a new-to-me tip on a different podcast that I thought I'd share. I guess it would be helpful for those who don't wear gloves. And he sent me an audio clip, which I listened to and it was so simple and wonderful, and I've actually done this before, but it makes good sense. I do wear gloves, but sometimes when I'm working with seeds and I don't want gloves, because I need to feel better, you can run your fingernails and scrape a bar of soap, and therefore what's under your fingernails, you are proactively avoiding. The dirt can't get under there because it's soap under there first and it makes them much easier to clean. Thanks for that, Tom.
And then I got another nice email from Donna in Hartford. She said, I thought I would reach out to say I love to listen to your podcast during my very long commute. I only have to do the drive a couple of times a week, but your show helps me enjoy the time. I garden in Connecticut so we're a little behind you in Virginia, but have to say we are soul sisters when it comes to gardening. Your matter of fact approach and easy sense of humor make for a great podcast. I finally got around to looking you up on the web to see some of the great picks that you post from your guests. Definitely going to try some of Cerone Hamlin's mini garden ideas. I am so glad Donna, that you went to the blog because I like to write and it offers some backup information from the podcast and of course, lots of links and photographs. So all of you do visit LHgardens.com and have a look. And while you are there, hey, you could support the podcast by buying me a virtual coffee.
I'd like to thank our sponsors, Colorblends® Bulbs. Colorblends® is a third generation bulb company offering top sized flower bulbs directly to ambitious residential gardeners and landscape professionals at wholesale prices. I like to think that I am ambitious and I always buy my bulbs from Colorblends® every year. And they are blooming in my garden so spectacularly this year, they're making me very happy. I named this show Into the Garden with Leslie and you know why, and I'll see you next week.