FOG
The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
- Carl Sandberg
With the weather remaining so very calm, wet and mild, this early spring season is settling in around us just as Carl Sandburg's perfect description of fog.
The snowdrops extend their reach, the early specie crocus also grows taller, and both have been joined by the emerging blooms of witch hazels, Linderas, Sarcocca, Daphnes, Edgeworthia, Camellias, bergenias, early azaleas, forsythia and heathers.
The forsythia shrubs are now only seen in older, somewhat abandoned gardens. The shrub form does not enchant the eye, but the yellow blooms, at their peak, become golden orbs of sunshine in these low-lit late winter days. As the older gardens become transformed by new owners, the shrub will continue to become an even scarcer element in our landscapes, until some dedicated hybridizers will go to work with their talents and produce exciting and exotic cultivars. This has happened to the old-fashioned bergenia plant.
I grew up with the plain bergenia cordifolia. The leaves were coarse and leathery and often thoroughly chewed by snails, cutworms, or root weevils. The leaves lay flat to the ground, and in the early spring a few clusters of non-descript pink flowers would rise above the dull green leaves.
Now the hybridizers have produced an exciting new array of bergenia cultivars. The 'Purpurea' selection produces magenta flowers on tall magenta-colored stems, and the leaves can be flushed with purple tones in the summer, changing to red in autumn, and then in winter a burnished purple color. A newer cultivar, 'Rosa Zeiten,' has soft pink flowers set off by the bronzy winter foliage.
A few years ago, I discovered Bergenia emeiensis with its tall sprays of large, pure white flowers rising above the slightly bronze paddle-shaped leaves. There is nothing dull or thuggish about this elegant plant. What a surprise, for I really had come to loathe and totally dismiss anything called 'bergenia'. Now I am planting Bergenia "Eric Smith," known for its upright and striking foliage. I have interspersed these plants with the 6-foot tall summer Oriental lilies.
May exotica reign supreme with this "old-fashioned" plant while we await the hybridizers' work on the forsythia shrub.
Another awkward spring shrub is hamamelis, known as witch hazel. However, this shrub has exceptional fall color, and again it has been extensively hybridized so that its fragrant, early spring, spider-like flowers now come in a full assortment of red, coppery-orange and yellow colors.
The fragrance is wonderfully elusive in contrast to the thundering perfume of the Daphne odora shrub. My small daphne shrub makes itself known these days 60 feet from my front gate! It speaks to the full scents that will be coming later in the year. Yes, it will get warmer, and there will be the joy of that first fully-scented rose.
Meanwhile, the camellias are stuffed with blooms. Often, with this incessantly damp rainy weather, the blooms turn brown with rot. This can be avoided by removing all but one bud in the groupings. The English are famous for their beautiful groves of camellias in their woodland gardens.
They always de-bud their plants in the fall. It always surprises me that this is a little known horticultural practice here in the States. Once you have had a season with rot-free camellia flowers, the tedium of the job in the fall is erased.
As the early spring garden continues to unfold and enchant us with its treasures, the time has come to start the vegetable seeds indoors! All this unfurling and unfolding going on around us really starts to erase from memory the cold emptiness of deep winter.[[In-content Ad]]
