When my husband said his college golf mates had picked Maine for the annual get-together in 2023, I was pretty excited. I do enjoy seeing these seven couples each year and like them all, but there’s also always an opportunity to add on some garden visits. In Santa Barbara in 2014, it was Seaside Gardens in Carpinteria and Santa Barbara Botanical Garden, plus San Francisco Botanical Garden and UC Berkeley Botanical Garden. In 2016 when we met in Sun Valley, I visited both Sawtooth Botanical Garden in Ketchum and Idaho Botanical Garden in Boise. A 2017 visit to Sarasota, Florida meant I got to see wonderful Marie Selby Botanical Garden. In 2018 the site was Portland and Bend and we drove down from Vancouver, so I stopped at Seattle’s Bellevue Botanic Garden and the Soest Garden at the Urban Center for Horticulture at the University of Washington, as well as the Japanese Garden and the Lan Su Chinese Garden in Portland. This is us – the “golf widows” at the Japanese Garden.
In 2019, the golfers gathered in Marin County CA, so I got to Ruth Bancroft Garden in Walnut Creek and Filoli in Woodside. Following the Covid years, May 2022 saw us visiting Stone Harbor, NJ – and I managed stops at Garden in the Woods in Framingham MA and New England Botanical Garden in Boylston MA on the way there, and my favourite Chanticleer Garden in Wayne PA on the way home. Our wonderful October 2023 hosts live in Kennebunk, Maine, so I planned our driving trip from Toronto via Quebec so I could visit the Montreal Botanical Garden enroute. Then we drove south to Boston so I could finally realize a dream to spend lots of time at the Arnold Arboretum. After our golf visit wound up in Kennebunkport, we bade farewell to the group and drove up the coast for an overnight stay in Boothbay Harbor so I could finally see the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens. Here’s the map showing the center of the garden; at 295 acres it stretches well out beyond the main features, below.
Even before we paid to enter, I was in love with the ethos of the garden as shown below in the long parking lot border featuring native roses in fruit, asters, mountain mint (Pycnanthemum muticum) and little bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium)!
Islands featuring more formal designs with winter interest plants greet visitors in front of The Lyn And Daniel Lerner Visitor Center.
Look at this! Can you say “chartreuse love”? I see Salvia mexicana, a chartreuse taro, purple angelonia, lime-green nicotiana and dwarf papyrus.
The Heafitz Wetland Bridge near the entrance takes visitors over a piece of natural Maine forest with vernal pools and marshy ground.
Interpretive signage teaches visitors that the habitat below supports native species like the spotted salamander.
Earlier in the week, I had seen a yellow bird in the marshy growth at the Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge in Kennebunk, so I was delighted to learn its name – common yellowthroat – here.
Though the Butterfly Garden greenhouse was closed for the year, the flowerbeds outside still had lots of bloom.
With no early frost, the Dahlia Garden was still looking fabulous.
This is Dahlia ‘Hollyhill Black Beauty’.
Children were running through the Willow Tunnel, the first of many features that illustrate the attention CMBG designers paid to creating family-friendly gardens and niches, a strategy that attracts younger demographics and family memberships.
Ecological education is a primary objective here as well.
Water features like this beautiful pond with its mirrored edge play a big role in the garden, including….
….educating visitors about native aquatic species like the Eastern pondhawk dragonfly.
Panicle hydrangeas (H. paniculata) have a long season of interest, including turning colour in autumn, as these shrubs are doing in the pond border
I was impressed with the diversity of plants in mid-October, like Vernonia lettermannii ‘Iron Lady’. Like all ironweeds, it’s very attractive to butterflies such as the painted lady, below.
Winterberry (Ilex verticillata) is showy in autumn, with fruit that persists into winter until it finally becomes a meal for birds.
Across the large pond stood one of the garden’s five popular trolls or “Guardians of the Seeds”, created by Danish scultor/recycler Thomas Dambo. This one is named RØSKVA, which means “trunks”. As the garden notes: “she is the heaviest, hardest, and strongest of the trolls. Every day, Røskva climbs towards the sky, and every year she grows taller and wider. If a troll forgets something, they can always ask Røskva—she counts the seasons and remembers everything that happens around her.” The other trolls Lilja, Berk, Søren and Gro are in the forest surrounding the main gardens, and each has a role to play.
I loved this little girl engaging with Røskva (and giving an idea of scale).
Little touches, like these bumble bee topiaries incorporating diverse sedum species, add interest to a visitor’s journey through the garden.
Since we had driven up from Kennebunkport that morning, we were more than ready for lunch and found a table on the Great Lawn.
Then it was off to the Lerner Garden of the Five Senses.
Tasting, touching, smelling, looking and listening… everything a good garden needs to engage the senses.
I was enchanted by these vertical planters showing the possibilities for sun and shade in a restricted space! The silvery, sunny side, below, features Dichrondra ‘Silver Falls’, Helichrysum ‘Icicles’, Artemisia ‘Sea Salt’ and Lavandula ‘Elegance Purple’ (the lavender out of bloom in October.).
The shady side is no less beautiful. It features Australian sword fern (Nephrolepis exaltata) and its cultivar ‘Cotton Candy’, the Rex begonias ‘Escargot’, ‘Iron Cross’ and ‘Fireworks’, the Bolivian begonias ‘Angel Falls Soft Pink’ and the trailing begonia ‘Fragrant Falls’.
There were other possibilities for raised gardening, including these cool, galvanized planters with windowbox-style inserts.
Of course, with good planning and construction there’s no need to bend over to grow vegetables, and the Lerner Garden shows the productive possibilities of raised beds.
The sound of splashing water permeates the Lerner Garden, courtesy of the fountain in its handsome upper pond, whose water flows over the edge and recirculates to a lower pond.
Here, there’s a fascinating sculpture reflected perfectly in the water. It also vibrates in a breeze, creating its own unique music.
George Sherwood’s kinetic ‘Flock of Birds’ sculpture was gleaming in the October sunshine.
Rocks — smooth river rock, cobbles and cut boulders — are used extensively in the gardens. These ones offer a variety of sensory textures.
We left the Lerner Garden via a cool, shady planting under trees.
But there was still much to see at Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens. Stay tuned for Part Two including the Arbor Garden, the Haney Hillside Garden, the Vayo Meditation Garden and the amazing Bibby and Harold Alfond Children’s Garden!
Before I get to Somerset, a memory. On a trip to South Africa almost a decade ago, I enjoyed all the gardens our tour guide Donna Dawson had organized, but my very favourite was Babylonstoren in the Franschhoek wine district outside Cape Town. “Bedazzled by Babylonstoren” is the blog I wrote on my autumn 2014 visit. It combined all the best features of a truly great garden: a stunning design by Italian-French architect Patrice Taravella; diverse and beautiful ornamental and edible plantings, all organic; a vineyard that stretched for miles; a gift shop and charming farm-to-table restaurant; and an elegant spa hotel whose cottages nestled along the edge of the gardens. All that in a picturesque setting overlooked by the craggy peaks of Simonsberg.
So when Babylonstoren’s owners, telecom billionaire Koos Bekker and his wife Karen Roos, the former editor of Elle Decoration South Africa, came to England looking for a farm in the country, it made perfect sense that they would choose an historic 17th century estate in leafy Somerset. That rumor has it they had to outbid actor Johnny Depp to make their successful £12 million purchase only added to the cachet. Then they spent 6 years developing the property, working again with Patrice Taravella to create a second unique, complex organic garden and farm while transforming the house into an exclusve hotel & spa. The map below is available as a detailed pdf online.
Somehow, as we drew into The Newt’s parking lot on my June 2023 visit with Carex Tours, I knew most of the details about our upcoming visit and fondly remembered visiting Babylonstoren, but I hadn’t yet learned the actual name of the historic house that became the hotel. When our guide said “Hadspen” my heart leapt, for this had been the home of the renowned garden writer, designer and colourist, Penelope Hobhouse, who later leased it to the Canadian gardeners Nori and Sandra Pope, who went on to create what became an iconic walled garden focused on colour. Noel Kingsbury wrote an affectionate essay on the Popes, the Hobhouse estate and the drama associated with its direction. As many of my readers likely know, I’ve long had an interest in colour in the garden, focusing on it in my blog and in my photography. But 25 years ago, I also wrote a book review, below, for my column in Toronto Life Gardens on Nori and Sandra Pope’s book ‘Color by Design, so I was very familiar with the colour ethos of Hadspen House. Would I find it today? Stay tuned.
We entered The Newt via a gatehouse and a long, sinuous boardwalk through rich woodland.
Stacks of cut wood were placed along the pathway like mossy, natural works of art that double as habitat.
I walked through the entrance courtyard past the threshing barn, cyder bar and gift shop and made my way quickly to the Cottage Garden below. Beyond that was the Fragrance Garden and Cascades. (Though hotel guests have access to the gardens, Hadspen House itself is off-limits to garden visitors – I tried.)
There were familiar pairings of lavender and lambs’ ears…
…. and Jerusalem sage (Phlomis russelliana) with pale yellow-eyed grass (Sisyrinchium striatum)…
… and in the Cascades, moisture-loving Rodgersia pinnata ‘Superba’ with primulas and royal ferns.
The Cascades features a waterfall emptying into a rectilinear pool planted with waterlilies.
Next, I came to my favourite part of The Newt, the Colour Garden. It is actually a series of wattle-walled, colour-themed gardens bisected by a stone path, and you can view what’s ahead through oval windows in the wall of each garden.
Alongside, there was a touching dedication to Sandra and the late Nori Pope.
It pleased me that the new owners understood how well-loved the Popes had been, and how many people missed their creativity, including Vancouver landscape architect Ron Rule, who captured Sandra in the garden long ago.
Photo courtesy of Ron Rule Consultants Ltd., West Vancouver, B.C.
The Newt’s version of the Colour Garden begins with a Green Garden with lots of ornamental grasses and green-flowered plants like tall Angelica archangelica…
….. and euphorbias, too.
Then comes the spectacular little Red Garden….
…. with dancing corn poppies (Papaver rhoeas) and swishing Mexican feather grass (Nassella tenuissima). I noticed angelica in that garden as well – such a great plant for pollinators.
In early June, the Red Garden stretched the colour palette into hot pinks and magenta with Carthusian pink (Dianthus carthusianorum) and masterwort (Astrantia major).
A bumble bee was foraging on the geum.
It was a terribly sunny day (how could that happen for so many days in a row in England?) so my photos of The Blue Garden in particular were difficult.
Amsonia and cornflowers took centre stage. but there were campanulas and delphiniums sprinkled in as well.
Navy-blue honeywort (Cerinthe major ‘Purpurascens’) was a feature in many of the gardens I visited in England.
The White Garden is the final colour garden….
…. and the predominant plants in bloom in early June were the Hybrid Musk rose ‘Kew Gardens’ (which I had photographed earlier that week at RBG Kew in London) and the white form of red valerian or Jupiter’s beard, Centranthus ruber ‘Albus’.
On leaving the Colour Garden, I took a stroll down the Long Walk which moves down a gentle slope flanked by a stone wall overhung with white Jupiter’s beard (Centranthus ruber ‘Albus’). In the background is the hotel.
The Long Walk has its own water features like this pool at the top….
…. and a square waterlily pool fed by a rill, beyond which is another pool. In the distance are two screened houses in the produce garden.
Then it was into the Parabola Garden. In the language of mathematics, a parabola is a U- or D-shaped curve that features a vertex and symmetrical axis – like a rainbow, for instance. The Newt’s version occupies a walled garden that was originally designed as a kitchen garden by Henry Hobhouse II. Two centuries later, it was framed by Sandra and Nori Pope’s iconic colour border, below.
Photo courtesy of Ron Rule Consultants Ltd., West Vancouver, B.C.
Today, the Parabola Garden is designed as a maze and home to a collection of 267 cultivars of apple trees representing each apple-growing county of England. They grow in cordons, fan-espaliers and various other space-conserving methods. (The Cyder Bar near the garden’s entrance also pays homage to apples and features tastings.) That stone wall at the top of the photo below surrounds the garden and….
…. features the names of the apple-growing counties. Each year in the 3rd week of October, the Newt hosts a celebration called Apple Day featuring juice pressing, apple games and recipes.
Although England is famous for its hen parties, the Parabola Garden features the real thing. This pair obviously wandered up from the henhouse below.
Yet another water feature forms a central focal point in The Parabola.
Then it was under the Caterpillar Tunnel weaving through meadows towards the Produce Garden.
The base of the tunnel is planted with tromboncino, bottleneck and other varieties of squash which create a leafy canopy by late summer.
I loved the shadow play along the path.
Chives, herbs and vegetable seedlings were newly planted in mulched beds separated by pretty wattle screens. More than 350 varieties of edibles are planted here.
Coldframes held plants too tender to be planted out just yet.
And an oak-timbered fruit cage, one of a pair, protected berry bushes from hungry birds and critters.
I heard there were living newts in the produce garden’s raised, naturalistic pond, but I looked in vain. However, I did spy a handsome, green-eyed emperor dragonfly (Anax imperator).
Sadly, it was time to make my way back to the bus via a quick stop for a delicious al fresco lunch. Afterwards, I had just a few minutes to take a walk through the Winter Garden, kept at 20-25C all year long and filled with ferns, orchids, succulents, tropical fruits and tender beauties from far away…..
….. like the South American firecracker plant (Dicliptera suberecta).
And how did The Newt compare to Babylonstoren? I think they were as different from each other as Somerset apples are to Franschhoek wine grapes, yet they share the same elegant rusticity and exquisite attention to detail. And though The Newt pays homage to its English garden roots, to the Hobhouse and Pope eras, it is very much its own lovely creature, still young and growing, but looking to the future, not the past.
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The Newt is open to visitors by annual membership only and includes many benefits, including free garden tours, special events and an impressive list of seasonal workshops. It also includes entrance to partner gardens including Kew, Wakehurst, Blenheim, Great Dixter, Lost Gardens of Heligan, Tresco, Chatworth and others. Clearly, amidst all the comings-and-goings of a working farm and an award-winning boutique hotel, it is aiming for a level of exclusivity and community.
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Here are my blogs on a few of the other English gardens I visited in 2023:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’.
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.
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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.
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:
