A native plant inspiration

This weekend I visited a beautiful garden full of native plants in one of Boston’s western suburbs, opened to the public for one afternoon by its owner and designer, Joanne, to teach visitors how pleasing native plants can be.
 

Joanne's garden illustrates how to use native plants beautifully

     There’s so much to admire about Joanne’s garden that it’s hard to know where to start. What struck me first was the beautiful design. It had great “bones” provided by a selection of striking trees, big and small.

    Joanne moved into the house in 1990 and set out to create a garden on the quarter-acre lot. In the sunny front yard, she replaced much of the lawn with four planting beds. A drought-tolerant pollinator garden beside the foundation provides a lesson in how to combine native perennials and shrubs attractively. 

The drought-tolerant pollinator bed combines native and nonnative perennials and shrubs

I was particularly interested to see two chokeberries (Aronia arbutifolia ‘Brilliantissima’) that by fall will be covered with red fruits for birds to eat. 

Chokeberries

I see that I’ll need to move the chokeberry I planted to a sunnier spot.

    Heading through a gate and along the side of the house, I spotted an unfamiliar shrub with large shiny leaves and flat-topped flower clusters about to open.

Possumhaw viburnum

This was possumhaw viburnum (Viburnum nudum ‘Winterthur’), and it was romantically draped with two kinds of native clematis vines. 

These clematis flowers will turn from green to white

Like the chokeberries, the viburnum provides fruit for wildlife. The berries start out pink and turn blue, Joanne explained.

    The backyard was unexpectedly different from the front. As you enter, there’s a midsummer meadow garden of mostly native plants. 

The meadow garden

In a nearby spring and late summer bed, we spotted a robin foraging for fruit in a serviceberry tree (Amelanchier lamarckii).

Serviceberry fruit

    Opposite the back of the house, Joanne had set two levels of terraced planting beds into a steeply pitched hillside, with stone steps curving up the slope beside them. 

Terraced beds make planting space on the hillside

Above is a woodland garden, where I recognized some plants I grow in my own shady lot. At every turn there were beautiful specimens of native understory trees, shrubs, and shade perennials, some I’d only read about.

Mapleleaf viburnum in the woodland garden

    Joanne’s gardening techniques are inspiring too. She uses no chemicals and has no irrigation system. She fills her watering can from four water barrels for spot watering and to establish new plants. 

Water barrels supplement rain

She only wants plants that are tough enough to thrive without supplemental watering, and clearly she’s chosen the right ones. She improves soil with compost and shredded leaf mulch. I was glad to know that in addition to straight native species, she grows (neonic-free) cultivars, and she finds that they attract plenty of insects and other wildlife. She blends natives with some nonnatives in a harmonious whole.

    Birds were everywhere in the garden. Joanne cuts back on filling birdfeeders in midsummer to encourage birds to eat insects. She kept two snags (dead trees) standing for the birds and insects.

    What a boost to my gardening motivation it was to see this lovely garden! You can do great things with native plants if, like Joanne, you have knowledge and an artist’s eye.

Sunlight needed

A friend touring my garden noticed I had planted an Asian pear in a back corner surrounded by tall trees. “Won’t it need sunlight?” she asked tactfully. Exactly right—of course that little tree, now three feet tall, is not going to flourish or produce fruit in the shade.

Does this Asian pear have a future?

I’ve faced this problem since I started this garden 33 years ago. Why haven’t I learned by now not to plant sun-loving plants in the shade?

    Since we moved in, our backyard has been shaded by a line of Norway spruces along the southern edge of the lot. This provides useful privacy. But it also means that the garden’s southern exposure, its best chance at full sun for flowering plants, doesn’t get a full day’s sunlight. 

Norway spruces block the southern exposure

The sun has to rise beyond the level of the spruce tops, now above roof level, before direct sun hits my flower bed along the side of the garage. Right under the spruces, almost nothing will grow at all. 

    There’s more shade from a big oak that stands next to the back corner of the garage and a tall white pine near the spruces. 

So many trees, with the oak towering over them all

I spent several years hopefully planting classic sun perennials such as peonies, irises, and Oriental poppies. They put out floppy stems and wan, undersized leaves, reliable indicators of not enough sun. They didn’t make many flowers, and blooms that did open were small and pale.

    I did finally find a place to plant those peonies in a patch of sunlight, and I enjoy seeing them bloom every spring, although they don’t make as many flowers as they would in an open area with no trees or structures nearby. 

Peonies--so romantic!

Meanwhile, as the garden expanded, I planted more trees I loved, which led over the years to more shade. There’s only so much you can do with impatiens, those stalwart shade bloomers. I have to admit that I’ve continued to push the limits, planting part-shade plants in what’s actually full shade, only to learn my lesson once again about the need for sunlight.

For shade: impatiens, torenia, variegated foliage

 

    When we took down hemlocks to avoid killing native insects by spraying for hemlock woolly adelgid, I saw sunlight and quickly popped in some new shrubs and small trees. The self-pollinating Asian pear is a semi-dwarf that’s predicted to grow no bigger than 15 feet tall and 11 feet wide. Two varieties are grafted to the base, so if all goes well, we’ll have two kinds of pears, one type ripening in August and the other in September. 

Picking pears in the yard would be great

That’s a big if. Any pears that ripen in my yard are likely to be greeted enthusiastically by birds, squirrels, and raccoons.

    Before that, the tree will need to get enough sunlight to be able to produce flowers—no flowers, no fruit. I’m hoping I can get by with pruning back the surrounding older, taller trees to give the Asian pear some space. That may be kind of like asking a tree to grow in an apartment building’s air shaft. 

 

Learning to love shade

When I moved into a new house in 1985 and started my garden, I was disappointed to find that my fifth of an acre lot was mostly shady. The Norway maples in the curb strip effectively shaded our small front yard. In back, we had mature trees to the west, north and south, leaving a patch of lawn between the back fence and the house that got sun in the middle of the day. My first attempt to grow flowers was in that patch of sunnier ground. 

I wanted to grow roses and sun perennials. It took a long time to recognize that I was gardening in shade, whether I liked it or not.

            Some of the trees around the yard were on our property, so we could have cut them down. For each, there was a reason why we chose not to. A line of droopy Norway spruces blocked our southern exposure, but they also created a privacy barrier between our yard and our neighbor’s house. Next to the garage stood a red oak that an arborist guessed was at least 100 years old. Was I really going to evict every creature that depended on that venerable tree? Behind the fence to our west was a thicket of Norway maples rapidly growing from seed on our neighbor’s land.

            So shade gardening was my fate. I learned to love a lot of woodland plants and to seek out attractive leaf forms, textures and variegations. 

 Then we got a surprising opportunity to expand our lot to a third of an acre by buying some land from the neighbors behind us. After we cut down the Norway maples around the perimeter of our new land, I had something I’d never expected—a place to garden in almost full sun.

            But instead of putting in those English-style deep perennial borders full of sun-lovers, I went out and planted a lot more trees. We wanted a visual barrier along the back of the new lot, so we built a berm and planted evergreens including white pines, a balsam fir, and a blue spruce. I really wanted a gingko and a dawn redwood. For understory trees I had to have a stewartia, magnolias, redbuds, shadbushes, and witch hazels. By the time all that planting was done and the trees put on some height, my sunny garden area was mostly gone.

            I enjoy the variety of foliage that my shady garden offers. Later I learned about some other advantages of shade. Those Norway spruces along the south side of the yard shade our house in summer, decreasing our air conditioning bill. The berm to our west planted with now-tall evergreens shelters us from winter winds. A lot of New England’s worst invasive plants don’t prefer shade, so I have less of a battle keeping them at bay. The plants I grow in shade need less maintenance than sun-lovers would. And I’m certainly providing lots of shelter for animals, from insects on up to mammals.