Daffodil Workshop at North Hill

The Daffodil Meadow with a hedge of Forsythia 'Vermont Sunrise' beyond

Yesterday, I played hooky and went to workshop on the Four Ways of Using Daffodils led by Joe Eck. It was North Hill Garden's inaugural class for their new series of gardening workshops. Twice a month throughout the summer, North Hill, the remarkable garden of Joe Eck and his partner, the late Wayne Winterrowd, will host a two hour workshop.

For the first hour of the informal talk, we sat in the kitchen with a cup of coffee and Joe went over the different classes of narcissus, their uses and his favorite sources for daffodils. According to Eck, the four uses of daffodils are 1) naturalizing in a meadow 2) planted in groups of 40-50 in the bays of shrubbery 3) planting beneath roses in particular 4) forced in pots, to be placed in the house in February or in the garden in April.

I personally have had mixed success with daffodils and was interested to learn that narcissus require full sun and are very intolerant of wet soil. I also learned that some varieties are good naturalizers while others should be treated as an annual or a short-loved perennial.

During the second hour, Joe lead us around the garden to see examples of narcissus used successfully and perhaps more importantly, the failures. The highlight of the day was visiting the Daffodil Meadow. Joe and Wayne have planted large groups (50-100 of a single cultivar) of mainly large trumpets over the years. Joe estimated they have multiplied to over 100,000 bulbs. If you limit yourself to mid-season cultivars, the show will last about 3 weeks. The talk was capped up with a light lunch and a glass of wine back.

The next class on May 20th is called How To Use Magnolias in a Garden. Joe will also be leading this talk and promised to illustrate the proper pruning of magnolias in order to best integrate them into the garden. He hopes to keep the classes limited to about a dozen participants. If you get the chance to attend one of the workshops you will not be disappointed.

Beginning on April the 29 and continuing until October 8, their extraordinary garden will be open to the public each Friday and Saturday afternoon from 1:00 until 4:00. It is a great opportunity to follow the progress of the garden throughout the season. They will also be selling their books and pots will be on sale. The gardeners will be on hand to answer questions about the garden or identify unusual plants. For more information, see the North Hill Garden's website.

Intention and Restraint

Lisa Brooks' drawing for the Gardening on Slopes chapter of Joe Eck's book, Elements of Garden Design

My garden is terraced on a hill and has three distinct sections, each on a different level. I am working on the design of the lowest third of the garden, a woodland garden under development, which I call the Wild Garden in honor of Irish writer William Robinson's legendary garden Gravetye Manor in West Sussex, England. The two upper levels are designed formally with hedges and axes but this lower garden, I want to feel much more naturalistic. There is a newly installed 5-foot-tall granite post that is as a focal point calling the visitor to the next room, but once entered, I want it to feel very different from the other parts of the garden.

As I am planning my Wild Garden, the garden's intention is at the forefront of my thought process. I first heard of a garden having an intention in Joe Eck's book, Elements of Garden Design. In the first chapter, he calls intention "the clearest idea of what one wishes to create." I think of intention as a sort of mission statement for the garden.

The intention of my Wild Garden is based on a compilation of gardens I have visited and read about over the years. Robinson's classic book, The Wild Garden inspires me as does the more contemporary writings of European designers Dan Pearson, Noel Kingsbury and the late Henk Gerritsen. The American, author, Rick Darke's book The American Woodland Garden is another influence. My garden is also inspired by the hikes I have taken here in the Monadnock Region of New Hampshire and the great White Mountains of my home state.

Eck writes that a garden's "success will lie in its concrete realization, in the arrangement of treasured plants within a framework of less transitory elements of trees, shrubs, hedges, pavement, architecture." That success is dependent on restraint. For every decision made about the garden needs to be consistent with the plan. Anything that strays from the plan will weaken the final overall effect and therefore the success of the garden.

Remembering Wayne Winterrowd

Entrance Path to the House at North Hill

Wayne Winterrowd died at the age of 68 on September 17 at his home, North Hill, in Readsboro, VT. I first heard of Wayne and his partner Joe Eck when I read Rosemary Verey's book The American Man's Garden. The year was 1993 and I was beginning to gardening seriously. I was intrigued by this garden in Vermont and all the unusual plants they were able to grow. In those days, North Hill was opened to the public on the last day of June, July and August each year as a fundraiser for the Brattleboro AIDS project. Unfortunately, I had to work In Manchester, NH that June afternoon so I called to ask if I might come an hour earlier so I could make it back to work (a two-and-half hour drive) in time. I had no idea then what a rude and crazy request that was at the time. Wayne answered the phone and said of course, come earlier if you like, so I did. When I arrived to the garden an hour early, I could hear the weed trimmer working overtime getting the garden ready for the visitors. I met Joe at the garden entrance to explain the circumstances, I could tell immediately he was not pleased (and rightly so!) with this early bird. I suspect he was less pleased with Wayne. But when Wayne arrived at the scene, he could not have been more welcoming.

So my first visit to North Hill I had the place to myself for an hour. I had never seen anything like it. It was jaw-droppingly gorgeous. The design was wonderful and the plants were better. I could recognize few if any plants and I knew at that moment I wanted to have a garden. A REAL garden. Something special like this magical place.

About five years later, I took a weekend-long garden design class at North Hill with about 15 other gardeners. Wayne and Joe had lectures on garden design and each of the students presented their gardens and got advice from the dynamic duo. At the end of the class, I asked Wayne if I might return to North Hill later in the winter and spring to learn from the garden in the other seasons. I was interested in the bones of the garden and I wanted see the changes during the long winter months when the garden was dormant. Not surprisingly, Wayne immediately gave his blessing and I had the luxury of being in the garden by myself during the winter. I studied the garden in their book A Year at North Hill: Four Seasons in a Vermont Garden. I returned in November after a light snow and again in April when the Cornus mas, early magnolias and the daffodils were blooming. I cross-referenced each visit with the corresponding chapter in the book and had one of the best possible learning experiences a neophyte gardener could imagine.

The last time I heard from Wayne was last May. I had signed up for their symposium with Fergus Garrett and some other wonderful speakers but it had been filled to capacity. I received a typewritten letter informing me that the symposium was closed. At the bottom of the letter was a note written in Wayne's beautiful and distinctive handwriting. He was apologizing for the situation and inviting me to "please come visit the garden." I wish I had. Wayne was a very generous and thoughtful man. He was among the finest of our American garden writers. He will be greatly missed.

On Drawing Gardens

North Hill, Readsboro, VT

I made this drawing on September 22, 2004 while visiting North Hill, the garden of Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd. When I look at it, I am immediately brought back to that day. I remember the light, the temperature and the experience of being in the garden.

I believe that visiting well-made gardens is the best way to become a better gardener. Early in my gardening life, I began to keep a gardening journal. I now have five large books full of plant lists, observations, recommendations and, most importantly, drawings. Whenever I visit a garden, I try to take a moment to make a drawing. In this drawing, I wanted to remind myself of the effectiveness of hedges in creating garden rooms. I was struck by the horizontal line of the yew hedges and the opposing vertical lines of the clipped evergreens in the foreground and the natural arborvitae hedge forming another wall in the next garden room. I also wanted to make note of the negative space that is so effectively marked by the shrub and perennial silhouettes in front of the yew hedge.

The her book The Making of a Garden, Rosemary Verey talks about the importance of drawing gardens. She instructs any student interested in a career in garden design to "draw-even roughly-the shapes of trees and shrubs." It is very easy, when visiting a garden, to move too quickly without taking the garden in. Drawing forces us to to sit, observe and take in every aspect of the garden. Drawing a perennial or tree that is new to us is the perfect introduction to that plant. Usually it is my drawing, not my description of a plant, that enables me to identify a plant in a garden I have just visited.

The next time you visit a garden take a seat on a garden bench and give yourself ten minutes to make a drawing of the garden. You can focus on a plant, garden ornament our an interesting view of the garden. Don't be afraid if you don't believe you have any skill at drawing. Take that moment to be in that garden and truly experience it.

Time to Shovel the Boxwoods

The front garden before

The front garden after

The hall with balls

We got 18 inches of wet snow today, so it is time to shovel the boxwoods. I have 37 rounded boxwoods in my garden. They are mostly a Sheridan hybrid called Buxus x 'Green Gem'. The Sheridan hybrids were developed at the Sheridan Nursery in Oakville, Ontario. They are a cross of English box, B. sempervirens, which gives them a nice dark green color, and the excellent hardiness of B. var. koreana. They have been quite happy in the exposed areas of my garden which often experience extended periods of -20 degrees F.

I first fell for boxwoods while visiting North Hill, the Readsboro, VT garden of Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd. Near the house and throughout the garden, they planted rounded boxwoods. Sixteen boxwoods add punctuation and provide a repeated rhythm in their rose garden. In 1997, I took a design class at North Hill and Joe and Wayne were talking about the importance of repetition in the garden. I decided to add spherical boxwoods to my garden to provide a unifying presence throughout the property.

In the upper front garden, I copied Bunny Williams' paired rows boxwoods on either side of the pathway. I have under-planted them with Epimedium pinnatum ssp.colchicum. I selected that plant because it is a distinctive but vigorous ground cover with handsome foliage and yellow flowers in May.

I planted 17 boxwoods on the step garden which links the upper garden to the lower garden. I like to call it the Hall with Balls. This time, I under-planted the boxwoods with the lesser known native American pachysandra, Pachysandra procumbens . I wanted to emulate the mass of round shrubs that I had read about in the late Nicole de Vesian's garden in Provence. I felt that garden should not be busy with flowers but should be an area where the visitor would "cleanse their palate" before entering the floriferous lower garden. I have also been working on pruning the Cornus officinalis tree to accentuate the bark and branching pattern of the trunks. Another Provence gardener and land artist, named Marc Nucera, has inspired me to pay closer attention to the pruning the trees as if they were sculpture.

When all the shoveling is done, I find the dark green rounds popping their heads out of the snow quite satisfying. For me, it is a subtle reminder that come summer these rounds will be popping out of foliage textures and flowers.

You might like these two books by Eck and Winterrowd: Our Life in Gardens and A Year at North Hill. Louisa Jones has two books that include the work of Nicole se Vesian and Marc Nucera: The French Country Garden and New Gardens in Provence. By the way, I think Joe Eck has written one of the most concise books on garden design called Elements of Garden Design. It has about 30 4-5 page essays on topics like intention, structure, repose and children in the garden. Each a very quick, enjoyable and informative read.