Green thoughts in a gray landscape

During a Christmas week visit to New York, I noticed some ways city dwellers bring greenery into their surroundings. People crave vegetation. There were shrubs toughing it out in pots in the front areaways of brownstones, big planters in front of skyscrapers, window boxes, even fake vegetation, such as this plastic sheet printed to make a Brooklyn chain link fence look like a wall of ivy, 

Nice try

and this blanket of artificial turf masking a utility area on Roosevelt Island.

Something must be really unsightly

    I sure miss greenery during the shortest days. House plants help. In addition to cleaning the air and converting the carbon dioxide we exhale into extra oxygen in the house, indoor plants have many demonstrated psychological benefits. They reportedly promote calm, attentiveness and creativity and increase productivity. I’d just say they make winter less depressing and bring life to sterile man-made environments. We weren’t made to live without plants.

Houseplants remind us of greenery to come

    There’s an often-mentioned theory that the reason we surround our houses with lawns is that early humans felt safer in grasslands where they could spot approaching predators before they pounced. This strikes me as possible but completely unproveable, as are many products of the school of thought that attributes the behavior and psychology of modern-day human beings to hunter-gatherer culture earlier in our evolution.

If only he'd had a lawn!-Reconstruction by Mauricio Anton

    Now that the sabre-toothed tigers are gone, we can skip a lot of that lawn and replace it with a more diverse landscape. Even video game designers have gotten past the ubiquitous veldt, endowing their imagined landscapes with lush, region-specific vegetation. That’s what I’m hoping for in my yard. In winter, I’m glad that I planted lots of evergreen shrubs and trees that offer splashes of color in the otherwise drab view from the back of the house. They also provide shelter for wildlife, confirmed as birds pop in and out of the branches.

At least there's something in the yard that's not brown or gray

    As I survey the scene from the back windows, I’m hoping that in addition to the conifers, the thick layer of fall leaves I piled on the beds this fall is also doing good for creatures in the yard. I picture insects burrowed into the leaf litter and sleeping in the flower stalks I left standing. The theory is that lots of beneficial insects will emerge in spring ready to start their work as predators keeping leaf-eating insect populations in balance.

Beneficial lacewing prepares for winter

    Last year in late winter we went south to New Orleans, Memphis and Nashville seeking an earlier spring. We did see some green leaves, 

New Orleans has ferns that don't grow in New England

but I learned what I was really yearning for was the day-by-day unfolding of spring at home. 

     One of the pleasures of tending the same garden space over the years is adding to your store of observations about how it changes through the seasons. I know that winter doesn’t mean an end to all natural processes, they’re just happening where I can’t see them. Roots are still storing nutrients, ready to send them up into new growth in spring. Until then, I’ll crave green things.

Come back soon!

Too many trees

Back in 1997 during a major garden expansion, I had fun shopping for trees with garden designer Betsy Brown. She drove me around Massachusetts to pick out saplings of favorite tree species I’d dreamed of including in my ideal garden—in retrospect, too many of them. Betsy artfully placed new trees and shrubs in open ground we’d annexed, standing back to direct the landscape crew to move them a few feet this way and that until they were spaced just right.

    The new trees on the berm at the back of the lot looked a bit forlorn with lots of mulch between them. Back then it was hard to imagine that they’d ever fill the empty space.

Newly planted trees on the berm, 1997

Well, twenty years later, they’ve done that and more.  First the young trees grew taller and fuller. Then they reached out and touched branches with their neighbors. 

Touching shoulders in 2006

This year I looked at some photos and realized the trees on the berm were crowded. We’d planted them too close together.

This week--too crowded

    When my friend Marlyn invited me on a tree walk through Newton Cemetery, I got to see a more farsighted planting approach. Groves and single trees were amply spaced to create painterly vistas. I observed what several of my trees would look like if they’d grown up with unlimited room to spread out and no nearby competition for sunlight and moisture.

Japanese umbrella pine at Newton Cemetery

And trying to grow in my crowded yard

     






     I’ve taken down some trees over the years to reduce crowding. Betsy’s original design involved a circle of lawn lined by four graceful white-flowered redbuds (Cercis canadensis f. alba). I’ve since regretfully removed two of them. When they were young, their lithe branches lined with tiny white blooms in May looked like dancers in a green woodland. 

One of the redbuds in its early days

Unfortunately, the trunks couldn’t grow straight because of expanding shade from taller trees.  

One of two remaining redbuds, reaching for sunlight

As the ill-fated pair leaned farther and farther out over the lawn and shaded out perennials I wanted to grow nearby, I made up my mind that they’d have to go. Their stumps still make me feel like an assassin, as do the empty spaces left by hemlocks we took down this year.

What terrible person cut down this tree?

    At this point there’s no easy way to make more room for the trees. I can let the inter-weaving of branches continue or make more hard choices and edit out more trees. As I plant in the empty space left by the hemlocks, I notice that as they expanded, they distorted the growth of surrounding trees. A Hinoki false cypress (Chamaecyparis obtusa) has no living branches on one side where a hemlock muscled in on it. 

Branches died on the side where the hemlock shaded out this tree

    If I did remove trees from the berm, the ones remaining wouldn’t have symmetrical shapes. Once they’ve shed their needles because of too much shade, branches of these conifers won’t send out new foliage.

    What to do? I’ll probably delay action until one of the trees dwindles or becomes a danger and has to come down. It hurts to cut down trees.

Attention friends: I'll be speaking at the Massachusetts Horticultural Society's Ecological Gardening Symposium next Wednesday, November 8, at Elm Bank in Wellesley, MA. Here's a link to the program information. I'd love to see you there.