Borrowed finery

I don't have any flowering trees at the moment, unless you count the maple with its tiny red dots. But I enjoy the ones I pass on my daily round at this time of year.

This is one of two enormous weeping cherries in my neighborhood.

 

These cherries along the road by Old Mill Park always remind me of little girls putting on their party dresses and holding out their skirts.

 

And this one is, I think, a pear tree - not the lollipop Bradford pear but the real thing, with bronze color in the fall and altogether a benign presence.

 

Maybe it's a Callery pear.

And then, of course, we have our own cherry blossom festival along Lewis Street each spring.

 

Between those and my neighbor's cherry, I think I may not need any (except a wild cherry which is native and will attract wildlife). So maybe a crabapple instead. The classic 'sargentii' would be the one.

Magnolia mysteries

The magnolias have been particularly beautiful this year, or maybe I am just noticing them with fresh eyes. Not having grown up with them, it took me some time to appreciate them. Well, there seem to be two kinds, one evergreen and the other - the ones in bloom now - not.

Here are two beauties in town, one on Lewis St. opposite the Wheelers, the other near the farmer's market.

 

 

A bit of research reveals that it's the Southern magnolia that's evergreen, with leathery leaves and the most delicious creamy saucer-shaped blooms. We some some gorgeous trees in flower at the National Arboretum last year.


 

I have been toying with the magnolia x loebneri 'leonard messel' that Martha Stewart recommends, for the back corner of the garden. This is one of the deciduous ones - I don't think I have the room for the Southern. But the spot I have in mind is too shady and occasionally too wet. Maybe in the front?? The dithering continues.

Oh, the possibilities

The white dogwood that came with the house has been slowly dying back the last few years, and I finally had it taken out. Of course, the first thing I realized was how nicely it had screened the neighbor's driveway from view - not entirely, but just enough to give us both some privacy. But it also revealed that side of the front lawn as ripe for development!

Here are views from the house looking down toward the street (the weird mess at the top is the Soil Moist), looking up from the street with the neighbor's driveway at left, and up toward the house, with just a few branches of the maple in view at right.

 
 
 

It certainly looks bleak, doesn't it? Apart from the scraggly state of the lawn, I am most aware of the full sun that this side of the lawn enjoys. Many possibilities have been floating through my mind: a set of shrubs, including a lilac just for the flowers; a perennial border of sun lovers to include scads of lilies; a wee little vegetable garden bordered with low shrubs... But of course, the most important consideration is what would actually look good there from a design sense. How to make whatever garden is there flow with the rest of the space? And what garden should be created that will not end up being burdensome to maintain?

And don't forget Mom's advice to keep it low.

Winterthur in spring

I knew of Winterthur as a house full of furniture, collected over decades by one of the Duponts. What I didn't realize until I visited this week is that Henry Francis Dupont, or H.F., was an avid gardener. He created acres of naturalized woodland gardens that are at their best in spring. A great believer in the succession of bloom, he planted acres (another highlight of his gardens is their scale) of early spring bulbs like Siberian squill, chionodoxa, winter aconite, snowdrops and daffodils (which we missed) followed by anemones (the Italian ones, they seem to grow taller than mine), bluebells, forget-me-nots and trillium (which we did see), all punctuated by flowering trees and the dark greens of the pinetum.

Here's a picture of the saucer magnolias, above a carpet of forget-me-nots.






And then there were the sweeps of anemones



and the hillsides of Virginia bluebells (alas, he had only the common blue, unlike some of us fortunates who have inherited the white, smirk)



to say nothing of the multitude of trilliums, mostly the white ones, but also a few yellow and the dark red of the wake robins.



The flowering trees and shrubs were intoxicating, cherries, magnolias, intensely fragrant Carlesii viburnum,



even the redbuds, whose color is hard to work with, I think. I usually prefer them in someone else's garden.
Well, see where HF put them and how well they do.
The weather was absolutely perfect - blue skies, sun, mid-70s - and all was right with the world, if only for a few days...

Borrowed landscapes

This is a bit of a stretch, because I can't see these borrowed landscapes from my house. But I love seeing them as I drive around Fredericksburg: the huge flowering quince on William Street catty-corner from Jake and Mike's; the wild pear trees seen from the bridge to nowhere, revealing themselves among the bare branches of other trees, then subsiding into anonymous green in a few weeks; the weeping cherry trees along Wakefield Avenue in Ferry Farm. I don't grow any of these myself, but I enjoy the fruits of other people's labors.