Turtle Pond Again

Three years ago, I did a post about Turtle Pond at my wife's family's cabin in Wells, Maine. I never tire of observing the plants and wildlife here and it seemed time for another post. Every year, I do some subtle editing of the plants along the edge of the pond to reveal and frame the views from the house and deck. Theses three photographs are in order looking left to right from the deck. There is much to learn about textures of foliage and the tapestry of how plants mingle in nature. This is a pond that expands when beavers periodically dam the brook that drains the pond. Many of the trees, mostly red maples, that where around the pond were drowned and died leaving skeletons that are bird magnets. Many mornings we wake up to find a Great Blue Heron sailing off the pond.

I have been studying the work of Peit Oudolf in his most recent book, Planting: A New Perspective, and his work in the ground at The High Line in Manhattan and I am struck at how his most recent gardens replicate how plants intertwine in nature. I am seeing it here at Turtle Pond and in many of the fields and wetlands I am noticing on bike rides in the southern coast of Maine.

The challenge for me is how to make this naturalistic style work in my own garden, especially the woodland garden. Several of the public gardens in Peterborough that would benefit from this style: the new garden at Putnam Park and the three gardens at Teixeira Park. This method of planting doesn't use blocks of plants, like a Gertrude Jekyll style or even Oudolf's earlier work, which is fairly easy to imagine creating. Plants in nature have drifts, singles, intermingling and every combination in between. It is constantly fluctuating and evolving depending on light, water, soil conditions, weather  and perhaps most importantly, survival of the fittest.

On Turtle Pond

Turtle Pond from the Deck

Textures in the Wetlands adjacent to the Pond

Turtle Pond hasn't been this small in years. The drought has dried the pond to about the size I first saw it about a quarter of a century ago. In the last decade, the beavers have created dams that have increased its size and have flooded the wetlands. Many of the red maples have died there and have created a birders paradise.

My in laws have a cabin on Turtle Pond about 5 miles inland from the ocean in Wells, Maine. The cabin is not winterized and has electricity but no TV or telephone. Watching the wildlife from the deck is the entertainment. When I first came to the cabin, you had to carry your bags about a football field distance from the road and it felt quite remote, especially before cellphones came along.

In the last several years, since my father-in-law got Alzheimer's disease, I have been involved in maintaining the land on the property. I have been clearing brush, mowing the fields and keeping nature from engulfing the cabin. In the meantime, I have become a more keen gardener and have been observing the plants around the cabin and their habitats. This year, the wetlands next to the pond are lush and relatively dry (because they are not flooded) and I have been noticing how the diverse population of plant species have woven themselves into a tapestry of textures.

I am embarrassed to say, that I don't know most the plants that are growing in these wetlands. I seem to know more about rare and unusual plants from Korea and Japan than I know about the native plants outside my own backdoor. I need to correct that. At ant rate, what I am noticing are the combinations of textures created by the grasses, ferns, spireas and the rounded leaves of the pickerel weed. They look ravishing in a very subtle way. I am certain William Robinson, Gertrude Jekyll, Karl Foerster and more recently Piet Oudolf noted all these things many years ago but I am finally seeing them now.

What I would like to do next in my gardening education is to track down some of the planting plans that these gardening Gods have created and pick them apart to see how they interpreted the combinations they observed in nature, each in their own unique way that reflected the times in which they lived. Hopefully it will give me insight into how I will build the wild garden that I am developing on my own plot. Time will tell.