We Have Moved

The London-Faringdon coach, 1835, James Pollard (1792 - 1867)

Notes from Juniper Hill blog has moved to a new location and can now be found at www.josephvalentine.com, or by clicking here.  In addition to writing about gardens and gardening, more and more of my time lately has been devoted to garden photography.  For that reason, it seemed like the right time to combine that work with the Notes from Juniper Hill gardening blog so that everything is in one convenient and easily accessible location on the web.

This blog will still be here for accessing archival material, so please feel free to visit anytime.  You will also be able to connect back to this site at any time from our new location.

I would like to thank all of you loyal followers of Notes from Juniper Hill over the past several years. Your thoughtful comments and encouragement have made writing the blog a true delight!  And, I hope that you’ll check out the new blog which has a fresher, cleaner and more simplified look and is now fully integrated with my photography website.  I'll look forward to catching up with you at our new home!

Cheers,

Joe Valentine

Seasons Greetings

Garden Inspirations Workshop

Interested in growing better vegetables next season?  Then, here's the event for you!  "Growing Vegetables," the second annual Garden Inspirations workshop to benefit the Latchis Theatre, in Brattleboro, Vermont is intended to provide gardeners with practical down-to-earth information about growing veggies, from choosing seeds this winter, growing those seeds into plants in the spring and summer, and then harvesting and cooking with them next fall.  The day will include insights from experienced Vermont farmers as well as acclaimed TV personality, Roger Swain, known to millions as the host of the popular PBS show, "The Victory Garden."  It all happens on Saturday, January 24th.  What better way to put a little springtime into a cold January day than learning how to grow warm season vegetables!  Click "read more" for additional info below....

Fickle December

It has been one of those periods in early December when the thermometer can't make up its mind where it wants to settle.  Consequently we have gone through more than a few days where it has both warmed up and cooled down in a matter of hours.  And, when you add a little moisture to this atmospheric uncertainty, you often end up with sleet or freezing rain that can pretty much blanket everything.  This makes for terrible driving on the roads and even worse walking on the pavements.  On the other hand, these conditions can create some of the most unexpected and unusual effects you'll get to see in the garden until the hornworms devour all your tomatoes next summer. 

I walked through the garden recently with my camera and captured a few photos.  As you'll see, most of the plants that are still left standing this late in the season take on an entirely different look when exposed to ice and snow.  I think they are beautiful even though many are either as dead as a door nail or, at the very least, as dormant as a hedgehog on Ambien.  Some, that are encased in ice, sparkle like the best crystal and radiate an inner beauty that rivals the plant's best appearance during the gardening season. In that sense, winter has given them a second chance to shine.

For a slideshow of photos, click on the image below...

So Long, November

As usual, I heard a lot of complaints about November this year.  For starters, November is one of those transitional months, simultaneously marking the end of the often beautiful and colorful fall and the beginning of the often long and intractable winter.  So, it's not unexpected that people get a little whiny during November when all they have to look forward to is three months of wool scarves and mittens. However, most of the complaints I hear about November have to do with how dreary it is.  And, for this I think it gets a bad rap.

Thinking Outside The Boxwood

At the beginning of every winter you can find me dragging heavy wooden teepees out of the barn to protect my most vulnerable plants.  It's a winter garden chore I look forward to about as much as I do the return of the black flies in the spring.

Guest Blogger- Gordon Hayward

A Walk Along New York City's High-Line

The garden’s power to transform experience was never made clearer to me than a late November week when Mary and I walked south down the full length of The High Line on New York City’s West Side.  After seeing MOMA during the morning, and having a superb brunch at Norma’s in the Hotel Parker Meridien, we set out for the High Line with our niece Rebecca and her mate Michael who live in London; they were visiting NYC for the first time.

Garden Inspirations Workshop

Winters can be very, very long for New England gardeners but here's an event that will be sure to put a little June back in your January.  It's a Garden Inspirations Workshop to benefit Brattleboro's historic Latchis Theater led by four of Vermont's preeminent gardening experts; Gordon Hayward, Julie Moir Messervy, Dan Snow and Helen O'Donnell.

Guest Blogger- Maude Odgers

Make Your Garden Sing

“A garden should make you feel you've entered privileged space -- a place not just set apart but reverberant -- and it seems to me that, to achieve this, the gardener must put some kind of twist on the existing landscape, turn its prose into something nearer poetry.”   - Michael Pollan

Have you ever been to someone's garden and come home and said, “I wish my garden looked like that.” Well I suspect all gardeners, young and old, beginner and advanced, have felt this way. Sometimes it’s hard to figure out what it is that we are drawn to in a garden, yet we have a sense it ‘feels right.’ Trying to implement what we see and sense isn’t always easy. The beauty and the mystery is that all gardens are unique. Ideas may be borrowed but how they are used becomes ours.

In my years of gardening there are some threads that I’ve discovered that help a garden work and ‘feel right.’ How you make them unique to you is your job, but starting with a few basics is helpful. These are the ones that stand out for me:

Puppets in Paradise

Looking for something to do with the kids this weekend?  Sandglass Theater presents two days of puppetry and performance in the enchanted setting of landscape architects Gordon and Mary Hayward’s gardens. Walk the gardens and view herbs, flowers, and other beautiful flora as you meet puppets, theater artists and musicians around each corner and behind every bush. This community event and Sandglass benefit is a local favorite. Food and refreshments add to the delight of a beautiful day. Click here for more info.

These Beautiful Garden Pots Will Quickly Urn Your Respect

Photo by French Garden House

Anduze urns, or the vase d'anduze, have to be my favorite garden planters.  They have been around since the 16th-century and originated in the small town of Anduze in the south of France.  I love the form and shape of these wonderful garden ornaments and the color and patina on the unglazed pair in the photo above is just about perfect!

Join Us On The Big Book of Faces

The layers of color in Gordon and Mary Hayward's Vermont garden would lend themselves well to the artist's brush.

Don't forget to join us on Facebook at Notes From Juniper Hill, where you'll find daily postings of what's going on here at the farm, as well as original photos of gardens and interiors, links to important events in the world of gardening, art, shares from other gardeners, new and unusual plants, and comments and interactions from friends near and far.  You can find us on Facebook by clicking here.  We would love to have you join us!  Here's a sample of some postings from just the last 24 hours.

Don't Have Any Shade In Your Garden? No Problem!

Have you always wanted a little shade garden but have nothing to work with except glaring sun?  Well, maybe the answer is to build a little shade house like this one at Bourton House Gardens, in Bourton-On-The-Hill, England (www.bourtonhouse.com).  I simply loved this little structure from the first moment I saw it.  It's built almost  entirely of "slatted" lumber, which seems to provide just the right combination of sun and shade inside.  It has a little mulched path that runs right down the center so that plants are visible on two sides.  And, in addition to providing shade for the array of plants inside, the structure itself is handsome and serves as great 'ornamentation' in the garden. Here are a few more views…

Crabapple Season

It's crabapple season here at Juniper Hill.  Crabapples are usually grown for their ornamental value, although they are often used as 'polinizers' in apple orchards.  Because of the plentiful blossoms on crabapples, they are particularly attractive to bees and many orchardists will intersperse a few crabapple trees among a row of orchard apples in order to encourage pollination.

The fruit of the crabapple is extremely sour to taste but this doesn't seem to bother the birds who find it to be especially palatable in the early spring when food is scarce and when many varieties of crabapples are still holding their fruit from the previous season.

In our gardens here, the pink and white blossoms of the crapapples provide the first real flower color of the season as they light up the landscape and get the bees stirring.

Staddle Stones

How a toadstool-shaped stone transformed itself from utilitarian farm object to coveted garden ornament.

 

The Gallery- Art and Nature

During the depths of winter a gardener can find himself with too much time on his hands.  And if you don't believe me... well, you will after you read this post.  But let me back up a bit. The other day I was looking at a painting by Braque that reminded me of an image I saw just a day earlier on Flickr's Horticultural Art photostream.  Do you know about Flickr's Horticultural Art?  If not, you need to take a look at some of the beautiful natural images there.

The painting on the left, by Georges Braque, is Trees At Estaque and the photo on the right, that I saw earlier, is of Syringa vulgaris (Lilac) leaves from Horticultural Art.  I was struck by the similarities I saw in these two images--one a painting from 1908 and the other a photograph from 2011.  Both, of course, are works of art but the common thread that holds them together is clearly the attempt to depict nature in a new and different way.

Friends of mine are fed up to their transcendental back teeth with me quoting Thoreau but it seems appropriate here so I'll do it one more time.  Thoreau once said that..."Art is not tame, and Nature is not wild, in the ordinary sense. A perfect work of man's art would also be wild or natural in a good sense."  With Thoreau's quote in mind, and the lilac leaves reminding me of the Braque painting, I wondered what some of the most famous artists felt about the relationship between art and nature and so I went digging for a few of their thoughts.  I also went back to the Horticultural Art photostream to see if I could come up with a few more examples of "nature's art" that I thought might resonate with some of the artist's "fine art," like the lilac leaves did for me with the Braque painting. And so, a few of the pairings I put together, along with some artist's musings on art and nature, appear below.  I hope you enjoy them.  You can click on any of the images to see a slide-show of all of them in larger format.

Gardening? Are you serious?

Maggie Smith has had some great lines in Downton Abbey as the inimitable Violet, Dowager Countess of Grantham and she didn't disappoint us this past week in episode 3 of the third season.  The gardener in me loved a scene in this episode when the Dowager Countess sat down with her granddaughter, Lady Edith who, shortly after being jilted at the altar, was not at all sure what to do with the rest of her life:

Lady Edith:  There's nothing to do at the house, except when we entertain.

Dowager Countess:  There must be something you can put your mind to.

Lady Edith:  Like, what?  Gardening?

Dowager Countess:  Well, you can't be as desperate as that.

Maybe this explains why, as a gardener, I suffer from bouts of desperation. Nevertheless, even though the Dowager Countess couldn't begin to imagine her granddaughter's hands in the dirt, I'm sure that among those in service at Downton, she must have held the gardeners in fairly high regard.

Guest Blogger- Gordon Hayward

Woodcutters by Thomas Hart Benton, 1948

Firewood

When we bought our 200 year old farmhouse here in southern Vermont we knew we wanted to heat with wood. It was a New England tradition; it was cheaper than oil or propane; any house heated with wood seems to feel warmer than those heated by oil, electricity or propane; it felt like the right thing to do ecologically; and then there was simply the romance of the thing.  An old place like this deserves wood heat.

The Gardens of Mount Desert Island- Thuya Garden

The Thuya Garden, in Northeast Harbor, Maine, was created by landscape designer Charles K. Savage in 1958, shortly after he created nearby Asticou Azalea Garden (see this earlier post).  However, where Asticou Azalea Garden is styled after a Japanese stroll garden, Thuya has a completely different feel.  Here, Savage gave a nod to the English style of gardening when he created an artful blend of semi-formal herbaceous borders framed by native eastern woodlands.  Like Asticou, some of the impetus to create Thuya can be attributed to Savage's efforts to save a part of the collection of plants belonging to landscape architect, Beatrix Farrand when her Reef Point estate in Bar Harbor, Maine was dismantled in 1956. Many of the original trees and plants in Thuya today were purchased from Reef Point and when you walk through the garden you can feel the influence of Beatrix Farrand as well as Gertrude Jekyll, the English gardener she most admired.

Guest Blogger- Tovah Martin

Think Snow

All gardens are created equal under snow. A dusting doesn’t do it, but when we really get dumped on—hallelujah. Because there’s nothing between my garden and Juniper Hill that three feet of white fluffy stuff won’t obliterate.