Author Archives: Janet

A Visit to Andrew Bunting’s Belvidere

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During my September Garden Bloggers’ Fling in the Philadelphia area, my favourite small garden was Andrew Bunting’s delightful property in Swarthmore. Perhaps that’s no surprise, given that the owner is the Vice-President of Horticulture with the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society. Founded in 1827, the PHS is the oldest horticultural society in the U.S., responsible for the annual Philadelphia Flower Show as well as a host of endeavors including 120 community gardens; maintenance of public landscapes in the city and suburbs including museums, the art gallery and public squares; street tree programs; the 28-acre estate garden at Meadowbrook Farm; Landcare, in which vacant city lots are turned from blighted properties to neighbourhood parks; pop-up ephemeral gardens; and a program to train former convicts to be gardeners.

Since buying the house on its one-third acre in 1999, this garden is where Andrew has experimented with an eclectic roster of plants and an evolving approach to design – in fact, five redesigns in his time there. I especially loved seeing his home through the tall, wispy wands of ‘Skyracer’ purple moor grass (Molinia caerulea subsp. arundinacea), a grass that shines in my own garden in autumn. Beyond is a gravel garden bisected by a broad flagstone walk with a small patch of lawn that creates a nice balance of negative space, as well as lavenders and verbascums and other drought-tolerant plants, many native. A stone trough acts as a birdbath and a terracotta urn features a chartreuse explosion of colocasia (likely ‘Maui Gold’).

Arkansas bluestar (Amsonia hubrichtii) with its needle-like leaves is prominent in the front garden; its blue flowers are attractive in spring but its brilliant gold fall color gives it long-season appeal. Barely visible in the foliage is a wooden chair.  Originally white, the front door and window shutters were painted gray, picking up the colors of the flagstone.

Behind the amsonia is Hydrangea paniculata ‘Limelight’ and, at left, willow-leaf spicebush (Lindera glauca var. salicifolia), which also has good autumn colour.

The vine around the door and on the house’s front wall is self-clinging Chinese silver-vein creeper (Parthenocissus henryana).  I love the mailbox and house numbers.

My colour-tuned eye picked up the echo between the red glasses indoors and the big caladium and chartreuse-and-red coleus in Andrew’s windowbox.

Our time was limited and there was so much to see, but I could have spent hours studying the gravel garden, including many native plants like giant coneflower (Rudbeckia maxima), below. Andrew’s influences around gravel include Beth Chatto’s garden in England, the Gravel Garden designed by Lisa Roper at Chanticleer (see my latest blog here) and Jeff Epping’s work at Olbrich Gardens in Madison, Wisconsin. The gravel is 1/2 inch granite but Andrew says it’s more like 1/4 inch.

Here is native wild quinine (Parthenium integrifolium).

And American beautyberry (Callicarpa americana) with its vibrant violet fruit.

Andrew removed much of the original driveway beside the house which was too narrow for cars and turned it into a shady sideyard garden with a path leading to the old garage – which became a charming summerhouse. Those little purple flowers are Vernonia lettermannii ‘Iron Butterfly’, a good fall bloomer and, incidentally, a Pennsylvania Horticultural Society 2023 Gold Medal Plant Winner!

Turning the corner at the back of the house, I saw more evidence of a plantsman’s wonderland with assorted tropicals in pots and a potting bench topped by colourful annuals.

Andrew was holding court in the back garden, so I asked him to pose. His own history in horticulture is very deep. Even at a young age, he knew a career in gardening was in his future – and it relates to the name of his own garden. As he has written in an essay about becoming a gardener, “My grandfather farmed in southeastern Nebraska, just outside a little town called Belvidere. I loved those couple of weeks on the farm every summer. Something about that agrarian lifestyle resonated with me then, and still does today. I loved the crops in the field, my grandmother’s vegetable garden, and the smell of hay.” He did internships at the Morton Arboretum, Fairchild Tropical Garden and the Scott Arboretum, where he worked in the late 1980s for three years.  In 1990 he visited more than a hundred gardens in England, meeting Rosemary Verey, Beth Chatto, Christopher Lloyd and working for a while at Penelope Hobhouse’s  Tintinhull. That autumn, he travelled to New Zealand and worked for a designer for 3 months. Returning to Pennsylvania, he got a part-time position at Chanticleer as it was becoming a public garden, working there for 18 months while starting his own landscape business on the side. In 1993, he became curator of the Scott arboretum at Swarthmore College and stayed there for 22 years, until becoming Assistant Director and Director of Plant Collections at Chicago Botanic Garden in 2015.  

I saw Andrew during a garden symposium in Chicago in 2018, below, when he spoke about how he directed the content and curation of CBG’s permanent plant collection. Next, a job offer at the Atlanta Botanic Garden arose and he became Vice-President of Horticulture and Plant Collections at Atlanta Botanic Garden, giving him the chance to grow broad-leaved plants. Then the opportunity at Pennsylvania Horticultural Society opened up and he returned to Swarthmore and the abundance of public gardens that make the Philadelphia area “America’s Garden Capital”.  

When Andrew bought the house in 1999 the back yard was filled with a jungle of pokeweed. With the help of his landscape crew and a bobcat, he installed a 35 x 12 foot patio spanning the back of the house.  It’s the perfect setting for a lush ‘garden room’ created with pots of banana, canna and palms.  These tropicals get carried down to the cool, damp, cellar-like basement for winter through the entrance partially shown at left.

There are potted plants everywhere, many on vintage tables…..

…. and étageres.

Textural foliage combinations caught my eye, like this chartreuse sweet potato vine (Ipomoea batatas) with Euphorbia x martinii ‘Ascot Rainbow’ euphorbia and a fancy-leaved pelargonium.

There are bromeliads here too, like Portea petropolitana.

Most chairs in the garden were built by Chanticleer’s Dan Benarcik – and can actually be ordered custom online as kits or fully assembled! Note that the granite gravel has been used here, which Andrew says is a less expensive solution than flagstone paving. At right, you can see the entrance to the covered part of the summerhouse, aka the old garage.

So many artful touches here, combining with the rich plant palette to create a beautiful outdoor living space.

Let’s take a peek into the summerhouse, where a comfy leather sofa awaits.  As Andrew once said in an online Masterclass chat with Noel Kingsbury and Annie Guilfoyle, many people in the Philadelphia area go to the New Jersey shore or the Poconos in summer, but he prefers his own garden – “less traffic and more access to gardening”.  And I can imagine sitting in here behind the screen doors during a summer thunderstorm, candles lit, perhaps with a little glass of something tasty.

The back of the summerhouse is more open to the elements and features the perfect stage set. I don’t know what the silvery Adonis mannequin was once wearing on his sculpted torso, but I’m willing to bet it was Ralph Lauren, now nicely accented with tillandsias and begonias.

Nearby are more colocasias and blue Salvia guaranitica.

I loved all the seating (still more Dan Benarcik chairs), this time on a shady patio with a dining table.

Sometimes the seating is more about atmosphere and lichen-rich patina than it is about an actual place to sit.

In a shady spot at the back of the garden is a naturalistic pond because… every garden needs a little water.

I was sad not to have time to take a peek behind the back fence into the neighbour’s yard, where there’s an Andrew-designed large, shared quadrangle vegetable garden, but it was late in the season for veggies anyway.  Mostly, I was happy that we were able to see this lovely garden in dry weather, since we were soon to find ourselves on the soaking end of Tropical Storm Ophelia.

Oudolf Field at Hauser & Wirth

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Having visited and often written about Dutch designer Piet Oudolf’s garden on the High Line in many seasons – May, June, mid-summer and autumn; having blogged about his fabulous Lurie Garden in Chicago; but mostly having photographed and written about the seasons passing in the Oudolf-designed entry border at Toronto Botanical Garden, a few miles from my home, I was beyond excited to finally visit Oudolf Field at Hauser & Wirth Gallery at Dunslade Farm in Somerset, near Bruton.  First we walked through the gallery, one of 21 galleries worldwide founded originally in Zurich in 1992 by Iwan and Manuela Wirth along with Manuela’s mother, art patron and collector Ursula Hauser. The Somerset gallery resulted from the renovation of a collection of old farm buildings and is located near the Wirths’ home.  Like all their galleries, it features high-profile modern artists such as Americans Richard Jackson, below…

… and Paul McCarthy, whose silicone White Snow Dwarves, below, from the Ursula Hauser collection was displayed near the exit to the garden.

Leaving the gallery which was designed by Argentine-born architect Luis Laplace, visitors pass through a cloister garden designed by Piet Oudolf and featuring the sculpture Lemur Heads by Franz West.  Unlike the meadow beyond, this space contains woodlanders and shade-tolerant species.  

The small trees in this garden are paper mulberry (Broussonetia papyrifera) with their fuzzy, globular female flowers.

Martagon lilies were just beginning to show colour.

We began with a talk from head gardener Mark Dumbelton, who spoke about the beginnings of the garden and expanded on some of its challenges, mainly around the soil. Indeed, when we visited England was on its way to enduring the hottest June on record since 1884, according to the Royal Meteorological Society, and watering was being done by hand.  Behind Mark, I noticed the white inflorescences of….

Ornithogalum ponticum ‘Sochi’, a Russian native bulb that contrasts well with emerging grasses and makes a good cut flower.

Near the gallery is a naturalistic pond surrounded by pink flowering rush (Butomnus umbellatus).

You can see the pond at the left, below, on Piet’s colourful 2012 plan for the wildflower meadow in the Hauser & Wirth catalogue.  Spread out over 1.5 acres are seventeen curved, informal planting beds separated by a central gravel path as well as lawn paths between the beds and surrounded by an existing hedge, beyond which Piet planted trees.

He explained his rationale for Oudolf Field in the video below.  

With Mark’s talk finished, we were set loose in the meadow. I viewed it through spires of peach foxtail lily (Eremurus), a lovely perennial for early summer whose….  

….. tall inflorescences never fail to attract the attention of visitors – and bees! This one looks like the Dutch cultivar Eremurus x isabellinus ‘Romance’.  

I was intrigued by the ten turf circles in the central path through the meadow.  The path lets visitors stroll from one end to the other, but the playful circles relieve the tedium of this long expanse of purposeful gravel.  

They are so unlike Piet’s characteristic naturalistic style, but in fact they point to his pragmatic design knowledge and site adaptability. (Yes, he designs woodlands and knows shrubs and trees as well as his favourite perennials!) 

I was reminded in studying these circles of my own visit to Piet and Anja’s garden in Hummelo, Netherlands in 1999 which was designed in part to reflect one of his early Dutch influences, the great designer Mien Ruys (1904-99), the so-called “mother of modernist gardens”.  Both his famous hedges and circle gardens, below, were his interpretation of what has been called “contemporary formalism” by his frequent literary collaborator Noel Kingsbury.

I feel very fortunate to have spoken with Piet then, at the beginning of his international fame. I made a photo of him at their outdoor table with spring-flowering shrubs in flower around us. Anja was in their nursery (gone now) with customers, and their little dog sat in a chair nearby.

Back to Oudolf Field, the overwhelming mood here on June 9th was of soft pastel mauves and blues amidst the emerging green of the grasses and summer perennials. Eastern beebalm (Monarda bradburiana) native to the American southeast was in full flower in front of the blue blossoms of narrowleaf bluestar (Amsonia hubrichtii), a south-central American native that turns brilliant chartreuse-gold in autumn.   Emerging through the grasses were the big starry globes of star-of-Persia allium (A.cristophii).  

I had never seen Monarda bradburiana before spotting it in Piet’s design at the High Line years ago.  Like many of the plants he uses – and sometimes introduces to commerce – it has withstood his field testing at Hummelo. This compact species has the good characteristics of the beebalms, including pollinator appeal, without the negative drawbacks, such as powdery mildew.

I saw tall Carthusian pinks(Dianthus carthusianorum) in almost every garden I visited in June, including Sissinghurst and Hillside, the garden of Dan Pearson and Huw Morgan. 

Early June, following the explosion of spring bulbs and before the summer abundance of flowering perennials is sometimes considered an “in-between” time in the garden. That quiet interlude is helped immensely by the many ornamental onions, and Piet uses them to great advantage in all his gardens, both for their flowers and later seedheads.  Below, again, you see Allium cristophii along with the Corten steel edging used to delineate the beds.

After seeing Allium atropurpureum, below, amidst grasses, I came back to Canada and immediately ordered some for my own June garden.

Here is Allium atropurpureum with Amsonia hubrichtii.

… and with Oenothera lindheimeri, i.e. gaura.

Looking back to the gallery through the gardens, including dark-leaved penstemons.

Piet uses various low grasses as matrix plants, including Sporobolus heterolepis, below, and Sesleria autumnalis.

The weather was so warm the day we were there in this record-setting dry June, the assistant gardener was working full-time to water.

While the garden is situated within pre-existing hedges, Piet planted trees on the boundary to contain it further.

The Pavilion, designed by Chilean architect Smiljan Radić and installed in March 2015, sits at the end of Oudolf Field and is intended to “create a dialogue between the gallery complex and pavilion and their relationship with the garden”. Radić says it is “part of a history of small romantic constructions seen in parks or large gardens, the so-called follies.”  Built of white, translucent fibreglass with cedar flooring and set atop large quarry stones, visitors can view the garden from within the shell.     

Heading into the gallery for lunch, I passed the attractive bar — a work of art in itself.

It was a lunch I would have enjoyed much more if I hadn’t been feeling the beginnings of what turned out to be my first case of Covid in more than 3 years– and the unexpected and sudden end later that night of my wonderful English garden tour. But I was so delighted to have experienced yet another masterpiece in the always-varied oeuvre of Piet Oudolf.

Fall Fruitfulness at the Arnold Arboretum

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At 281 acres (113 hectares), Boston’s Arnold Arboretum is not the kind of place you waltz through in a few hours.  (And this is not the kind of blog you waltz through quickly – unless you’re a plant geek like me. Fair warning.)

So when we arrived on Sunday, October 8th after driving from New Hampshire, braving Boston’s famous traffic and entering the garden via the Walter Street gate and Peters Hill, we knew we wouldn’t be seeing much of it that day.  Fortunately, we would return on Monday morning and enter from the main Arborway Gate – and I’ve put both entrances on the garden map below.

Unlike the rest of the arboretum, Peters Hill – which is a “drumlin” in geological terms, a hill comprised of glacial till deposited as the glaciers retreated around 12,000 years ago and the third highest hill in Boston – also features a meadow, which in October was mostly native asters and non-native Queen Anne’s lace. 

But I was aiming at Peters Hill because it has the arboretum’s collection of crabapples, hawthorns and mountain ash trees, among other species – and I knew they would be in fruit now.  It was an opportunity to find one of my favourite crabapples, Sargent’s crabapple, or Malus sargentii, a beautiful, dwarf species covered in May with white blossoms and buzzing bees. It was named by the Arnold’s resident taxonomist and dendrologist, German-born Alfred Rehder (1863-1949), in honour of…..

….the Arnold Arboretum’s first director Charles Sprague Sargent (1841-1927), who collected seed of the small tree in a salt marsh in Japan in 1892. He also collected seed of a cherry on that trip which, though other botanists had previously classified it as different species, would also be named for him, Prunus sargentii, Japanese hill cherry or Sargent’s cherry.  Charles Sargent had graduated from Harvard College in Biology in 1862, served with the Union Army during the Civil War, then returned to his wealthy family’s 130-acre Brookline estate to manage its landscape. When Harvard decided to establish an arboretum in 1872, he was appointed its director, a position he held for 55 years until his death. The photo below was made in 1901 when he was 60. In reading the memorial written by Arnold taxonomist Alfred Rehder in 1927, one gains a sense of the immense size of Charles Sargent’s accomplishments, at the Arnold, in the native sylva of North America, and throughout the world in the plants he himself collected and those collected under his supervision.

Perhaps the Arnold’s most renowned personality is Ernest Henry “Chinese” Wilson (1876-1930). Born in Chipping Camden, Gloucestershire, he was travelling to San Francisco from New York by train in spring 1899 on his first Chinese plant collecting trip for James Veitch & Sons nursery in England when he visited the Arnold Arboretum for five days with a letter of introduction to Charles Sargent, in order to learn their techniques for preserving shipped plants and seeds.  On his second trip for Veitch’s in 1903, he collected the regal lily (L. regale). But he had so impressed Charles Sargent that he was offered a job in 1906 doing plant exploration for the Arnold, with journeys to China made in 1907, 1908 and 1910; one to Japan in 1911-16 for cultivated cherries and azaleas; Korea and Formosa in 1917-18; and New Zealand, India, Central and South America in 1922-24 to establish connections with botanical gardens and explore southern gymnosperms.  He was Assistant Director of the Arnold from 1919-27, and following Charles Sargent’s death in 1927, Wilson assumed the role of Keeper of the Arboretum.  A skilled story-teller, he also wrote hundreds of articles and several books.  He died in 1930 at the age of 54 along with his wife in a tragic car accident in Massachusetts while returning from a visit to their daughter in upstate New York.  

Below are just a dozen of the 2,000 species Wilson is credited with introducing to the western world.  Others include Stewartia sinensis and Malus hupehensis.

1-Acer griseum, 2-Actinidia deliciosa-kiwi, 3-Clematis armandii, 4-Cornus kousa var. chinensis, 5-Ilex pernyi, 6-Jasminum mesnyi, 7-Kolkwitzia amabilis, 8-Lilium regale, 9-Rhododendron davidsonianum, 10-Rhododendron decorum, 11-Rhododendron williamsianum, 12-Rosa moyesii

I wanted to have a look at the fruit of the crabapple species on Peters Hill, although summer’s abundant rain had resulted in considerable apple blight on the leaves.  Below is Malus ‘Golden Hornet’….

….. and Malus ‘David’….

…. and the tiny yellow fruit of Malus x robusta var. xanthocarpa (Malus baccata x M. prunifolia).

Charles Sargent was especially interested in hawthorns, and the hawthorn collection also resides on Peters Hill, including cockspur thorn (Crataegus crus-galli) with its vicious thorns.

Sorbus commixta is sometimes called the Japanese rowan; its orange fruit is as attractive as its spring flowers.

One of my favourite small Sorbus species is Korean mountain ash, S. alnifolia.  It was covered with tiny, salmon-pink fruit.

Tired from our long driving day and walk, we sat on a bench on Peters Hill. I loved that the Arnold turns fallen trees into these handsome benches – this one was a red oak (Quercus rubra) that blew down in a windstorm on October 30, 2017 that left 1.5 million people without power.

As we circled Peters Hill to head out and drive to our hotel in nearby Dedham, we came upon a hive of activity marking the Arnold’s “Second Sunday” event, one of three offered in late summer/early autumn 2023. According to the website, these days “reflect an institutional value to expand our welcome and outreach to all surrounding neighborhoods, especially those that have received less attention in the past. The events offer visitors opportunities to learn more about Peters Hill as well as venture into other areas of our landscape that lie off the beaten path”.  Arnold intern Zach Shein, below, was manning one of the booths and showing off some of the arboretum’s “spooky plants” in time for Halloween. 

Here were a few of his samples, clockwise from upper left:  poison ivy (Rhus radicans);  trifoliate orange (Citrus trifoliata); castor bean (Ricinus communis); and autumn monkshood (Aconitum carmichaelii Arendsii Group).  

Nearby, Arnold evolutionary biologist Anna Feller was explaining her research on the reproductive strategies of Phlox paniculata to interested visitors.  Then it was time to find our hotel for the night in nearby Dedbury.

*****

The next morning, refreshed, we returned to the Arnold’s main gate for a longer visit.  Since it was Indigenous Peoples Day, the Hunnewell Visitor Center (1892) was closed.  But we wanted to be outside anyway here at North America’s first public arboretum.  A National Historic Landmark, the Arnold Arboretum is owned by the City of Boston and managed by Harvard University under a 1,000-year lease signed in 1882. It is a major part of the Emerald Necklace, a 7-mile network of parks and green spaces laid out by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted for the Boston Parks Department between 1878 and 1896.  As a city park, it is free to all.  

In an arboretum, one expects to find native plants like tuliptree, but I was interested in the tree below, Liriodendron x sinoamericanum, a hybrid of the American and Chinese species.

I stood under the pagoda or giant dogwood (Cornus controversa) from Asia to admire the beautiful symmetry of its foliage. This species and my favourite native shrub, Cornus alternifolia (I grow five in my garden), are the only dogwoods with alternate leaves.

Black tupelo (Nyssa sylvatica) is one of the last deciduous trees to turn colour, usually bright gold-to-red, before losing its leaves.  

I’ve photographed a lot of lindens, but this was my first Amur linden (Tilia amurensis).

Trifoliate orange (Citrus trifoliata) is a hardy member of the citrus family, Rutaceae.  Although very seedy, the fruits are edible, but bitter (good for marmalade, I hear) – and the wicked thorns are an effective deterrent to herbivory.

We came to the Leventritt Shrub & Vine Garden and spent time strolling through this 3-acre collection.

Flowering dogwood (Cornus florida) leaves were changing colour and the fruit had already been sampled by birds.

I liked the deep-wine fall colour of this smooth arrowwood viburnum (Viburnum recognitum), a native northeast shrub previously unknown to me. But the great surprise came when I looked at the plant label, for it had been sourced in 1968 from the Dominion Arboretum in Ottawa, specifically from L.C. Sherk.  Larry became a friend of mine decades later when he was chief horticulturist for an Ontario nursery chain.

The goldenrain tree (Koelreuteria paniculata) gets its common name for its yellow flowers, but in late summer it develops interesting capsule fruit, below, which are rose-colored before turning brown.  This tree is ‘Rose Lantern’.

I had never seen Isodon henryi before, but was interested to read that its unique properties makes it a “frost flower” on certain wintry days.

Walking under the vines arrayed neatly on the rows of steel trellises in the garden, I looked up to see the backlit leaves and prickly stems of Smilax sieboldii from Asia, and thought how apropos is the common name of members of this genus:  greenbriar”. 

Next up was the Arnold’s Bonsai & Penjing exhibit.  It is amazing to think that this Hinoki cypress (Chamaecyparis obtusa ‘Chabo-Hiba’), acquired in 1937 by the Arnold as part of former American Ambassador to Japan Larz Anderson’s Collection of Japanese Dwarfed Trees, actually germinated in 1799. 

Smooth cranberry bush viburnum (V. opulus var. calvescens), a European species, bore clusters of red fruit very similar to native N. American highbush cranberry.

…. while the large Asian shrub sapphire-berry (Symplocos paniculata) was attracting lots of admirers with its brilliant blue fruit.

Not to be outdone, Japanese beautyberry (Callicarpa japonica ‘Leucocarpa’) bore its white autumn fruit like a pearl cluster necklace.

Sometimes, as a plant photographer, I forget to see the forest for the trees, so I took a moment here to gaze across the Bussey Hill landscape with its remarkable collection of towering trees and fruiting shrubs. Throughout the arboretum, visitors were enjoying the warm fall weather and I saw many families engaging their kids in the natural world. What a gift is the Arnold Arboretum to the people of Boston.

Then we headed up to the Explorers Garden….

…. and took  the Chinese path to climb the hill. (This signage reminded me of the wonderful David Lam Asian Garden at the University of British Columbia Botanical Garden, where various path signs are named after explorers like von Siebold, Fortune, Forrest, Henry, Kingdon Ward and yes, the Wilson Glade. This is my blog on that fabulous garden.)

In the Explorers Garden we found the two oldest Franklin trees (Franklinia alatamaha) in the world, still bearing a few beautiful, perfumed, white blossoms, below. Naturalist William Bartram (1729-1823) named this tree, which he grew from seed he collected in 1776 from a small, relict population growing along the banks of the Altamaha River in coastal Georgia. He named it to honor Benjamin Franklin, a good friend of his father, the American botanist and early plant explorer John Bartram (1699-1777), with whom William had first seen the tree 11 years earlier. (Franklin, of course, helped draft the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution and is featured on the American $100 bill.)  The specific epithet refers to an alternative historic name of the river. There are no longer Franklin trees growing in the wild; it is believed that the trees the Bartrams found were glacial survivors on their way to extinction.

The interpretive sign includes information on the species.  A relative of Stewartia and Camellia, the Franklin tree is a member of the tea family, Theaceae.  In temperate regions, it blooms in September and October, unusually late for a woody plant, and displays its fragrant flowers alongside showy autumn foliage. The two Franklin trees growing in the Arnold Arboretum’s garden are the oldest and largest such trees in the world. They came from 1905 cuttings of a tree grown in Bartram’s Philadelphia garden that had sent to the Arnold in 1884.

They sprawl like giant shrubs, rooting themselves wherever their branches make contact with the ground. Now widely available in commerce, Franklin tree is difficult to establish, preferring sandy, acidic soil that remains consistently moist.  Today, the species itself is kept alive through cultivation in gardens.

Moving on, we came to Chinese fringetree (Chionanthus retusus) with handsome blue fruit.

Seven-son-flower (Heptacodium miconioides), so named for the seven small, white flowers in each cluster, was now showing off its bright red calyces or sepals.  This autumn show and the bee-friendly September flowers are highlights of this large, sprawling shrub. According to Gary Koller, writing for the Arnold, Henry ‘Chinese’ Wilson “collected the plant at Hsing-shan in western Hupeh (Hubei) province, China (Collection Number 2232). He made two collections of it, one in July and the other in October 1907, from cliffs at nine hundred meters (about three thousand feet) above sea level, where it was rare. In examining the herbarium specimens, Rehder (the Arnold’s taxonomist) found ‘that only a single ripe fruit was available for examination,’ which probably explains why no living plants resulted from that expedition. Rehder named the plant Heptacodium miconioides.”  It would not be until the 1980 Sino-American Botanical Expedition, in which the Arnold’s Steven Spongberg participated, when seed obtained from a shrub growing in the Hangzhou Botanical Garden was brought back to the U.S. that seven-son-flower would be grown in North America.

Another species growing in the Explorers Garden from seed collected by the Sino-American Botanical Expedition is a mountain-ash-like tree called Yu’s whitebeam, Alniaria yuana (formerly Sorbus), with plump, shiny fruit.

As we headed back towards our car, we passed the Euonymus collection, all in fruit, including the pink capsules of flat-stalked spindle (E. planipes), with the orange fruit still to be revealed.  It was labelled E. sachalinense, but I believe that name has been changed, according to sources online.

I was also pleased to see the fruiting habit of a plant I know from the collection at my local Mount Pleasant Cemetery, Oriental photinia (P. villosa var. villosa).   I even included it in a blog called June Whites. But you can see that the leaves on this species, as well as most of the Malus, Crataegus and other members of the Rosaceae family, were afflicted with disease, likely fire blight, after a very wet spring/summer in 2023.

I heard the clip-clop of a horse and looking at the road was greeted with the smile of a passing Boston Park Ranger. Mounted rangers patrol the arboretum and other parks in the Green Necklace.

We took a different road towards the exit than the one on which we’d entered three-and-a-half hours earlier; that brought us close to one of the Arnold’s three ponds. Originally maintained as decorative features, recent restoration has resulted in a naturalistic habitat for aquatic wildlife and plants, including the bald cypress at left. It felt like the perfect ecological bookend to the historic Hunnewell Building where we’d begun our visit, on this fine October day.

*****

If you’re planning a garden trip to New England, I highly recommend Jana Milbocker’s excellent ‘The Garden Tourist’s New England‘, featuring 140 private and public gardens and nurseries. It’s available on her website Enchanted Gardens.

Montreal Botanical Garden in Autumn

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Normally, on the Friday of Canadian Thanksgiving weekend, I’d be making sure I had all the ingredients for a big family dinner:  turkey, apples and pumpkin for pies, etc.  But this year on October 6th my husband Doug and I were at the first stop on a 12-day road trip that would take us from Toronto east to Montreal, then south to Boston and Kennebunkport, Maine.  In other words, we were at my favourite large botanical garden on the planet:  Montreal Botanical Garden (MBG).  And their pretty entrance display was evocative of autumn, Thanksgiving and Halloween!

Before going further, let’s look at a map of the 185–acre (75-hectare) garden, which you can find online as a .pdf file here.   The arboretum is filled with taxonomic collections of plants of all kind and there are Chinese and Japanese gardens and wonderful greenhouses filled with tropicals and desert plants, but because our time was limited, I chose to stay in the most densely planted part of the garden, which I’ve circled in red….

…. and enlarged and labelled below.  (If I’d had more time I would have headed to the Shade Garden, which is always fabulous in its textural design and which I’ve blogged about previously, link at the end of this blog.)

Let’s start in the Perennial Garden, Jardin des Plantes Vivaces, with its long, geometrical layout. Dahlias were still looking good and the ornamental grasses were stunning.

Autumn colour was just beginning after our wet, cloudy summer in eastern Canada, but the Virginia creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia) was putting on a nice fall show in the long arbor.

The beds in the perennial garden are filled with treasures, though the spring- and summer-bloomers were now forming seeds. But I was interested that Geranium Rozanne was still flowering in the centre beds.

Grasses plus asters! Is there a better combination for October?  This lovely purple-flowered aster was labelled Symphyotrichum novae-angliae ‘Cloud Burst’, which must be very rare because the only reference to it online is from the Royal Horticultural Society, which lists it as a New York aster with an unresolved name. But MBG is pretty good on taxonomy so I’m going to take their word.

This is a stunning, magenta-flowered New England aster with a compact form, Symphyotrichum novae-angliae ‘Vibrant Dome’.

Bumble bees, hover flies and honey bees were all over S. novae-angliae ‘Barr’s Blue’.

It was a pleasure to find more unusual asters in the garden, like the bushy aster Symphyotrichum dumosum ‘Pink Bouquet’….

… and native species, like old field aster, Symphyotrichum pilosum var. pilosum, below.

I had never come across this vigorous Japanese aster, Aster innumae ‘Hortensis’.

There were other late-blooming perennials, too, including Japanese anemones. The one below is Anemone hupehensis ‘Prinz Henrich’.

And for those who like hardy chrysanthemums, a beautiful display from Chrysanthemum Mammoth™ ‘Red Daisy’.

I’m accustomed to seeing calamint (Clinopodium nepeta) flowering profusely in summer and attracting tons of bees – but this level of bloom in autumn was unexpected. Was it cut back after initial flowering? What a great perennial.

Autumn monkshood is one of the best plants for October, but this cultivar fit the weather. Meet ‘Cloudy’ (Aconitum carmichaelii Arendsii Group).—and just as toxic as its azure-blue monkshood cousins.

I’ve never seen pitcher sage (Salvia azurea) standing upright, which is a shame. With that sky-blue colour, it would be the perfect autumn plant. Nonetheless, the bees love it.

And, of course, there are the big border sedums. This one is Hylotelephium ‘Autumn Fire’.

But the plants that really shine in autumn are the ornamental grasses, and Montreal Botanical Garden has a large selection. Below, Miscanthus sinensis ‘Berlin’ makes a lovely partner to ‘Fireworks’ goldenrod (Solidago rugosa).

One of my favourite effects in planting design, and one I’ve written about for a magazine (see ‘Sheer Intrigue’ in this American Gardener .pdf) is the use of grasses as screens, or scrims, or veils. In the pairing below, ‘Goldgehänge’ tufted hair grass (Deschampsia cespitosa) acts as a screen for blackeyed susans.

The tall moor grasses (Molinia arundinacea) make fabulous scrims, whether it’s the airy flowers or the stems, like ‘Skyracer’, below, in front of old field asters.

I was absolutely enchanted with this combination of northern sea oats (Chasmanthium latifolium) and ‘Dewey Blue’ switch grass (Panicum virgatum). And it made me wonder why some people say they don’t care for grasses in a garden!

I grow big bluestem (Andropogon gerardii) in my meadows at Lake Muskoka, but ‘Blackhawks’, below, is a dramatic cultivar of that native grass.

Positioned well, dahlias can add so much to perennial borders, like orange ‘Sylvia’ being graced by red Persicaria amplexicaulis ‘Firetail’ and an anise hyssop, likely Agastache ‘Blue Fortune’.

Bush clover (Lespedeza thunbergii) is a good semi-woody plant for early autumn; this is the cultivar ‘White Fountain’.

I was interested that MBG features a few of the knotweeds in the perennial garden. The one below is Himalayan knotweed, Koenigia polystachya, a perennial which has reportedly escaped into the wild on the mild Pacific coast.

And I don’t know whether the pink-flowered cultivar of Japanese knotweed, Reynoutria japonica ‘Crimson Beauty’, is as invasive as the straight species (some sources say it’s not), or whether MBG simply has the means and people power to keep it under control.

In the section that features interesting bulbs and luscious swamp hibiscus (H. moscheutos), I was intrigued by the fall colour on the burgundy-leaved cultivar ‘Dark Mystery’, whose foliage had turned apricot, orange and gold.

The Food Garden was mostly finished, but the grains section looked vibrant. The amaranths, in particular, are varied and attractive. The one below is Amaranthus tricolor ‘Elephant’s Head’ — an excellent likeness, right?  

Okra is as pretty in flower as it is a valuable edible. The one below was labelled Abelmoschus esculentus ‘Motherland’, but in researching okras online, I discovered this on a page from SowTrue Seeds called “Field Notes: The Utopian Project”. “Beyond the myriad okra varieties is a row of several closely-related species that are not actually okra but its cousins, if you will. Most of these don’t produce edible pods, but some do. A surprise and a historical mystery is hiding among those cousin species. It’s a bushy plant with huge leaves bigger than an open-spread hand. This variety is called Motherland okra, and it has been stewarded by Jon Jackson of Comfort Farms in Millegdeville, GA, whose family got it from West Africa. As the plants started to produce blossoms, Chris noticed that they resembled those of a couple of other unusual-looking okra varieties, one of which is Mayan okra. While most okra Southerners are familiar with is of the species Abelmoschus esculentus, and varieties of this species are also found all over Africa, India and Southeast Asia, Chris believes Motherland, Mayan, and this one USDA accession are actually Abelmoschus callei, a similar but distinct species originally endemic to West Africa. He wonders how many other A. callei varieties are out there hiding in plain sight, just considered to be okra like all the others.”

There are borders devoted to edible flowers, like this nasturtium, Tropaeolum minus ‘Bloody Mary’…..

….. and this inspiring combinations of herbs and vegetables with edible flowers, like the common fennel (Foeniculum vulgare) and purple ‘Redbor’ cabbage with the playful pink pompoms of annual Gomphrena globosa ‘Firecracker’.

The Food Garden includes plants from the four corners of the world, including this dwarf tamarillo with its unripe fruit, Solanum abutiloides, which will turn orange eventually.

The Herb Garden looked past its prime, but I was interested in this basil, which despite its Latin name, Ocimum americanum, is actually from Zambia.

The Garden of Innovation features newly-introduced annuals, perennials and tropicals….

…. including many award-winners, like the Perennial Plant Associations’ 2023 Plant of the Year, Rudbeckia ‘American Gold Rush’, from my friend, plant breeder Brent Horvath of Intrinsic Perennials.  Though it’s past its prime, keep in mind that this is October 6th, long after most blackeyed susan species and hybrids have finished blooming.

Much of this garden is devoted to annuals, such as this petunia with the tiniest flowers, P. x atkinsiniana ‘Itsy Pink’.

New coleus introductions, such as Coleus scutellarioides ‘Talavera Burgundy Lime’, show off the remarkable colour combinations and adaptability of this foliage annual.

Breeders worked hard to get bearded iris to re-flower in autumn, after their June debut.  This one is aptly-named ‘Lovely Again’.

I ducked under the arch wreathed with Virginia creeper to peek into the Quebec Corner garden, which looked much like the natural woodland around my Lake Muskoka cottage. However, with time passing and lunch calling, I started to exit before catching a movement in a serviceberry nearby.

And there was a bird I know mostly by its song — at Lake Muskoka we call it the “Oh Canada bird” (Oh Canada-Canada-Canada!): the white-throated sparrow (Zonotrichia albicollis).

Sadly, there was no time to explore the Shrub & Vine Garden, but I managed a quick look at a few beautiful hydrangeas, including H. paniculata Limelight Prime…

….and H. macrophylla Endless Summer Twist-n-Shout.

In all the years I’ve visited gardens, in North America and around the world, I’ve often been accompanied by my husband, Doug. As I approached his chair overlooking the pond near the peony and iris collection, I recalled him waiting for me (sometimes reading his book) at the Keukenhof in the Netherlands; Dutch designer Piet Oudolf’s garden at Hummelo; Kyoto Botanical Garden; the Orto Botanico in Palermo and Rome; the Jardin des Plantes in Paris and Monet’s Giverny; Savill Garden, Hampton Court, Sissinghurst and many others in England; Chanticleer near Philadelphia; Garden in the Woods and New England Botanical Garden near Boston; Seaside Gardens in Carpinteria, California; Los Angeles County Arboretum; Fairchild Tropical Garden in Miami, and many, many more. He is often my chauffeur and I’m the terrible map reader (much easier with GPS now); he enjoys being in all the gardens and patiently waits for me to finish my photo shoot.  So thank you, Doug.

But he did want to have lunch, so we walked back to the restaurant near the entrance where I noted the gorgeous hanging basket of begonias.

Then it was off towards the Pie-IX subway stop just a block away to head back to our hotel. We walked past the entrance gardens, still looking superb….

…. with their mix of colourful annuals, always one of my favourite examples of plant design. And, as always, I gave thanks (on Thanksgiving Weekend, no less) that I had the opportunity to enjoy the excellence that is the Montreal Botanical Garden.

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Interested in reading more about the wonderful gardens of Montreal Botanical Garden?  Here are three of my previous blogs:

Mellow Yellow Magnolias

Au Revoir René Giguère – Alpine Garden

A Shade Garden Master Class

Chanticleer Garden in Early Autumn – Part 2

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When I paused my tour in my last blog, Part 1, we were leaving the Ruin Garden. Let’s take a moment to explore a little section of Minder Woods, nearby. This entrance moves through a planting of white wood aster (Eurybia divaricata) and ostrich ferns on the left and Begonia grandis var. evansiana ‘Alba’ on the right.

Further down the path are ‘Pamina’ Japanese anemones (Anemone hupehensis var. japonica) with ostrich ferns.

I loved this artful bench, just one of numerous handsome places to sit in Chanticleer’s gardens.

This tea viburnum (V. setigerum) is known for its dependable autumn display of berries.

Japanese toad lily season had begun; the one below is Tricyrtis hirta ‘Miyazaki’.

Though I grow a few species of snakeroot, I had never seen this compact one: Actaea japonica var. acerina.

Touring the Gravel Garden, below, is a little like walking into a drought-tolerant plant treasure box. Situated on a sunny, south-facing slope, it is packed with plants thriving in gritty soil that has also been top-dressed with gravel. Plants might be native drylanders, Mediterranean species, succulents or cacti. Below, a big beaked yucca (Y. rostrata) adds exclamation marks to one bed. Though this yucca is cold-hardy, any tender plants used here are moved by cart to heated greenhouses for the winter.

I had to work to find the name of the yellow-flowered plant in the trough on the right; it’s Bigelowia nuttallii, Nuttall’s rayless goldenrod.

Look at this beautiful Agave attenuata in its trough. Alongside is an interesting prickly-pear cactus that I think might be Opuntia cochenillifera ‘Variegated’.

Lisa Roper, the Gravel Garden horticulturist (and my friend) likes to combine different plant textures, for example the big century plant (Agave americana) below with fine-textured plants like lavender and santolina. Oh, and that lovely little purple-flowered plant?

I’m so glad you asked! I asked Joe Henderson and he supplied the name. It’s Eryngium leavenworthii or Leavenworth’s eryngo, an annual native to dry, rocky prairies and waste places in the central U.S.

The gravel garden occupies niches and stone steps up a gently-sloped hill. In fact, each step has its own little collection in Chanticleer’s plant list which is updated yearly. Mexican feather grass (Nassella tenuissima) is allowed to self-seed around, but all self-seeders are carefully edited — a chore in rich gravel.

Seedheads offer a clue to what was blooming here in summer, like the wand-like Liatris microcephala and the Seseli gummiferum with its umbel inflorescence, below.

Lisa incorporates lots of interesting gladiolus species in the garden, including the beauty below, which I believe to be G. oppositiflorus.

Of the fine-textured carexes and grasses, this seep muhly grass stands out, Muhlenbergia reverchonii.

I had to ask my friends on Facebook’s Plant Idents page to help me out with an i.d. for the plant below. We finally came up with the genus Pseudognaphalium.… and then I was able to refer to the online plant list to give us the species P. obtusifolium, better known as sweet everlasting, or rabbit tobacco. It has a rich ethnobotanical history.

I could have stayed in the Gravel Garden all night, but our 4-hour stay meant I had to keep moving, so down I went to explore the sweeping beds between the Gravel Garden and the great lawn below the main house. These beds are considered part of Minder Woods. They’re always inspiring and often seem to have a purple-and-orange theme, including big purple alliums and orange kniphofia I photographed one spring. This time of year, asters (Symphyotrichum laeve ‘Bluebird’), Russian sage (Salvia yangii/Perovskia atriplicifolia) and tender sages like Salvia ‘Amistad’ and Salvia leucantha form the purple/blue palette while the orange is supplied by Zinnia ‘Queen Lime Orange’, tall ‘Garland Orange’ marigolds (Tagetes erecta), Cosmos sulphureus ‘Sunset Orange’, Mexican sunflowers (Tithonia rotundifolia) and dahlias ‘Sonic Boom’, ‘Kabloom’, ‘Honeymoon’ and ‘David Howard’, among others.

The orange flowers below include zinnia, cosmos and marigold. In these photos you can also see the first year rosettes of the biennial verbascums that will tower in these beds next year.

What would our late summer-autumn gardens be without asters? Chanticleer uses a combination in its gardens, but the taller lavender-lilac ones seem to be Symphyotrichum laeve ‘Bluebird’.

Well-grown annuals add so much to the late summer garden. Below is the fabulous, tall zinnia, ‘Queen Lime Orange’. On the right is tender Mexican sage, Salvia leucantha ‘Santa Barbara’. The hydrangea is H. paniculata ‘Limelight’.

Adding a screen-like grass in front of plants turns plant design into a bewitching form of stagecraft. That’s purple love grass (Eragrostis spectabilis), below……

…. and look how it serves as a mysterious scrim curtain in front of the brilliant zinnias. Isn’t it magical?

The Elevated Walk was built in 2015 to access the main house from the ponds and the great lawn below, and its plant roster has matured beautifully now. Here is that white-flowered sweet everlasting again, along with the compact Russian sage ‘Little Spire’ and rattlesnake master. The wine-coloured seedheads are Angelica gigas. The walkway itself is composed of porous materials.

The areas beneath the Elevated Walk are also planted with trees, shrubs and perennials, like the Aspen Grove, below. That means they’re at eye level with visitors on the walkway, a little like a treetop walk in other gardens.

With its persistent seed heads, rattlesnake master (Eryngium yuccifolium) adds seasons of interest to a border. And those oblong, dark seedheads belong to Rudbeckia maxima.

The Apple House occupies a place of honor on the walkway. Go inside and you’re treated to fabulous, colourful murals – but no apples these days.

A few of my fellow garden bloggers stopped on the Elevated Walk to admire the fall-changing foliage of this beautiful Japanese maple (Acer palmatum subsp. amoenum). And look at that stunning railing

The prize at the top of the walkway is Chanticleer House, once home to Adolph Rosengarten Sr. and his wife, and also the setting for several colourful flower beds, like the one in the Overlook below, punctuated by spears of the succulent Furcraea foetida ‘Mediopicta‘. The variegated plant at right is Euphorbia x martinii ‘Ascot Rainbow’.

I grew angelonia (purple plant below) for the first time this summer, and though it lasted in flower for months, I didn’t see one bee or butterfly on it. Too bad – otherwise the perfect bedding annual. Blue-flowered Salvia farinacea, on the other hand, is a great pollinator plant. The nodding, white and pink flowers are South African foxglove (Ceratotheca triloba).

The fluffy white flowers below belong to Euphorbia hypericifiolia Breathless Blush.

The house terrace always features an array of chartreuse-leaved plants. I’m not exactly sure what the chartreuse plant below is, but it might be Salix sachalinensis ‘Golden Sunshine’. 

This border was tropical-looking, with its spiky golden bromeliads (Aechmea blanchetiana Hawaii). The phormum at right is ‘Pink Panther’.

I love the little gloriosa daisy at front, R. hirta ‘Zahara’. The twirly, brown foliage plant at the rear is Acalypha wilkesiana ‘Ceylon’.

Dozens of pots were arrayed in front of Chanticleer House, and those with dark leaves played nicely with the dark shutters.

And here is a charming gesture that sets Chanticleer apart from so many gardens. There is always a basin filled with colourful floating flowers and leaves plucked from the gardens. This one even contains the green fruit colloquially known as, yes, “hairy balls”, but is more properly called Gomphocarpus physocarpus. A tender shrub related to milkweeds, it also provides food for monarch butterfly caterpillars.

A few of my fellow garden bloggers were relaxing on the sun porch. Originally glassed-in, it was a favourite lookout for Adolph Rosengarten Sr’s wife, Christine Penrose Rosengarten.

The porch featured one of the many beautiful floral arrangements crafted from the garden’s flowers. (And there is that spectacular ‘Harvey Koop’ dahlia from the Cutting Garden in Part One!)

As a confirmed ‘meadow gardener’, one of the reasons I was overjoyed to be visiting Chanticleer in late summer was the chance to see the Flowery Lawn. Originally a rectangle of manicured turfgrass between the house and swimming pool, the decision to let it become a tended meadow was such a good one. In spring, it’s all daffodils, but on this day it featured several types of anise hyssop (Agastache) including ‘Blue Fortune’, ‘Blue Boa’, ‘Little Adder’, ‘Purple Haze’ and ‘Serpentine’. Though native butterfly milkweed was out of bloom, tropical milkweed (Asclepias curassavica) added flashes of orange. The tall plant with yellow flowers is a daylily, Hemerocallis ‘September Sol’.

The dark-blue salvia with the anise hyssop is ‘Big Blue’ — and it looks to me like pale-mauve calamint (Calamintha nepeta) is in this garden too.

A lonely monarch butterfly was nectaring on the asclepias before the big migration south. In our region, it was a very poor summer for monarchs – I only saw 2 at our cottage, and no eggs on all my milkweed.

A big carpenter bee was foraging on the anise hyssop.

The bloggers were treated to a delicious Middle Eastern meal in the Chanticleer House garden, which gave me time to sit and enjoy yet another bouquet. I love the way the crimson amaranth cascades so nicely. Those tiny orange fruits, by the way, come from Talinum grandiflorum, aka “jewels of Opar”.

The swimming pool always look so inviting. (Way back in the day, a few decades ago, I did have a dip in that pool – invited, of course!)

The Old French literary word for rooster was chantecler and there are many carved versions at Chanticleer.

Who wouldn’t want to roost in this lovely garden, amongst silvery euphorbias and crambes?

The East Bed forms the boundary to the house garden, and is filled with lush tropicals, like the bananas, ‘Hilo Beauty’ caladium, ‘King Tut’ dwarf cyperus, and more.

I’m always drawn to inspiring colour combinations, and this tropical duo in the East Bed rang my bell. The taro is Colocasia ‘Distant Memory’; the red-leaved Mexican native shrub is Euphorbia cotinifolia, sometimes called smoketree spurge.

Aiming for one last visit to the Teacup Garden, I walked out of the main house garden towards Emily’s house, i.e. the offices and visitor’s centre, where this massive oak tree was carpeted with Symphyotrichum ericoides ‘Snow Flurry’, a compact heath aster used extensively in many of the gardens.

How much fun is this? Tropical lianas getting the balcony treatment.

I circled around the front of Emily’s house, where of course there were more spectacular plant designs.

This luscious arrangement of tropicals was my last plant photo, including strap-leaved Alcantarea imperialis, pink-leaved caladiums, canna lily, begonias and other delicious plants. And, of course, a bench for enjoyment.

And as if these precious hours at Chanticleer weren’t enough, along with food and drinks there was a great band.

We danced! Even those of us with aching knees from walking up and down the garden’s hills danced. It was another visit we won’t soon forget. Thank you Bill Thomas and the entire Chanticleer team. You are simply the best.