Happy holidays! This week we’re revisiting our favorite festive stories from years past, like this one:
The poinsettia revolution was a long time coming. But worth waiting for.
It’s been nearly 200 years since Joel Roberts Poinsett,the first U.S. diplomat to Mexico, shipped Euphorbia pulcherrimaback to South Carolina to propagate. From then, it was only a matter of time before bright red poinsettias became a Christmas cliché.
Luckily nowadays poinsettia breeders have come up with so many new varieties and colors—pink, apricot, white, cream, gold—that the poinsettia feels new again. This holiday season we’re liberating our potted poinsettias and turning them into cut flowers:
Photography by Michelle Slatalla.
Above: Poinsettias in a wide variety of colors and with patterned bracts are widely available during the holiday season. (I found these at shops near my Mill Valley, California home. The plants pictured above came from Nancy Ann Flowers in Sausalito, Berkeley Horticultural Nursery, and a local Whole Foods.)
For years the Ecke family of Encinatas, California had the market cornered on poinsettias—and deserves the credit for developing pink and white varieties decades ago. In recent years, varieties such as ‘Autumn Leaves’ (yellow) and ‘Envy’ (chartreuse) and ‘Jingle Bell Rock’ with splatter-pattern red and white bracts have broadened the offerings.
Above: Poinsettia ‘Christmas Beauty Marble’ has dusty pink bracts outlined in cream.
The colorful parts of poinsettia plants are not petals but rather are bracts that radiate outward. Poinsettia flowers are the unobtrusive cluster in the center.
When Donald and Charlotte Molesworth first arrived at their small Kent cottage more than three decades ago, there was a derelict house and an almost totally blank canvas. The plot had once been the kitchen garden of an estate that belonged to “Cherry” Ingram, the great Victorian plant hunter. It may have looked like a wasteland, but it was one with fertile soil that had been improved over centuries.
What the couple have created since then is nothing short of extraordinary: a flourishing garden that centers around Charlotte’s awe-inspiring topiary and a cluster of small buildings (including a holiday cottage to rent) in the beautiful Kent landscape. On a rainy day we joined Charlotte for a tour of Balmoral Cottage:
Above: The house and garden is almost entirely hidden from view, which makes the magical entrance under an arch of hornbeam and down a path of ball-topped boxwood, even more tantalizing.
Balmoral Cottage is down an unmade track and tucked away behind St George’s church in the picture-postcard village of Benenden. Charlotte insists there was no masterplan when they began the garden. They requested yew seedlings as their wedding gifts and they planted them all before transplanting them at a later date.
Above: All the boxwood in the garden (and there are many varieties) was also grown from seedlings, many collected on Charlotte’s travels.
Charlotte’s horticultural talent is in her blood. Her father was a farmer on the nearby North Downs and her mother was a plantswoman who grew and sold primulas and had a love of yew. It was her aunt, another talented gardener, who first planted the seed, of training topiary. Charlotte’s skills and her garden have grown organically.
Above: Charlotte’s advice for those starting a garden is to think vertically: “When you start a garden, I think it’s the one thing that you often don’t think about, yet it’s this structure that is so valuable in the garden.”
Almost everything here has been grown, recycled, or rescued (“We are great scavengers,” admits Charlotte). The greenhouses have been built using unwanted materials destined for the scrap heap; the polytunnels were rescued. Even some of the garden’s most beautiful trees (including some stunning Malus Huphensis) were picked up as tiny seedlings on walks through the next-door estate many years ago. The large Pinus radiata and Scot’s pine that edge the garden also contribute to a wonderful borrowed landscape.
Above: The central walk of the garden is lined with box and towering topiary which leads down to a large pond. While the couple share gardening duties, Charlotte admits that she can be quite possessive over her hedging and topiary.
She’s very picky about plant hygiene as her garden is currently untouched by the ravages of box blight. She uses an organic treatment of effective microorganisms to keep the plants healthy and she is fanatical when pruning, sterilizing tools as she trims with a bleach solution. When she works on other people’s gardens, she will not only sterilize all her tools when she gets home, she will also wash all her clothes and take a shower, to ensure that no disease or harmful blight spores can travel with her.
You’d think choosing plants was easy enough—just find the ones you like, right? And for single specimens in a pot or a monoculture of, say. roses or hydrangeas, it is as simple as that.
But what about designing a border where plants need to relate to each other in a well-thought-out design? And what if you have a large blank canvas to fill with a whole range of plants. This is when it can get a little more complicated. For the third post in my column on creating A Garden From Scratch, I tackle how to figure out the kind of plants you might want in your landscape. Before you get too excited, let me clarify that I’m not talking about choosing specific plants here; this is about the bigger, long-term picture of how to put plants together in a space and why.
(To read my earlier stories in the Garden from Scratch series, go here, then here.)
Photography by Clare Coulson.
Above: Where to even begin? My cottage garden, photographed here in midsummer, is an ever-changing tableau of favorite plants and supporting acts that lurk in the background. It’s always good to remember when you start out that plants can be moved, replaced, or relocated and that the picture is never final or complete—there’s always something that can be tweaked or improved—and that is half the enjoyment of gardening.
1. Get trees in first.
Above: Early spring in my garden and there’s still not that much flowering, but the Amelanchier lamarckii tree provides starry white blossoms. By the time the spring bulbs really get going, the pretty bronze foliage of this tree will emerge providing an interesting contrast with the bright colors below. Additional structure here comes from the domed forms of Choisya ternata, hebes and Ilex crenata. In the distance, a lot of euphorbia.
Planting design is about a series of layers, from the woody plants, including trees and climbers, to the shrubs, herbaceous perennials, biennials, and annuals. Most gardens will have a mix of all of these types of plants to create a succession of interest throughout the year, and a balance of structural plants that will provide a backdrop to herbaceous plants that will flower and die back.
It’s logical to begin with the trees since they generally need the most time to mature. They are also arguably the most important thing to get right, being the least ephemeral. Incorporating some trees, or even a single specimen, can instantly ground a space, bringing strong structure, height, and impact—as well as, in many cases, year-round interest. For this same reason think very carefully before removing any mature trees or shrubs from an inherited space.
It’s the one place perhaps where it’s worth spending some money to buy something really beautiful—a trio of Amelanchier or Prunus multi-stem or specimen trees, for example, may feel like a big investment, but it will have instant impact, as well as blossoms in spring, lush foliage through summer, and then great leaf color later in the year. In winter its form has its own allure. Tip: Buy young trees—they are far more economical and will usually settle in faster than mature specimens. Buying bareroot plants also helps to keep down costs.
2. Invest in evergreens.
Above: Controlled chaos. There are a lot of frothy plants in this border snapshot including Valerian officinalis, hesperis, roses, Allium sphaerocephalon, catmint, and hardy geraniums. But the structure from clipped boxwood, hebes, and other foliage helps to ground the space and provide moments of contrast.
Another worthwhile investment: evergreen forms that will provide four-season structure. Boxwood would have ticked all the boxes, but now that these are under the dual threat of box blight and box caterpillar, few gardeners would take a risk with them. There are plenty of alternatives—yew, Ilex crenata, many pittosporums, rosemary, hebes, daphnes can all be grown into shapes that will provide permanent year-round forms and act as a foil to herbaceous plants. Deciduous plants like beech and hornbeam can also provide structure, too. (See Landscaping 101: Boxed in by Boxwood? 5 Shrubs to Try Instead.)
