THE BIG PICTURE
Joan Shaw
North Lawn in Late Spring
Leaning
Out of the Upper Story Window
There's nothing like seeing the DragonGoose Farm
garden from a different aspect.
The above photo is a view of the lawn directly north of the house from
a second
story window. The long beds of iris, separated by a four-foot
wide grass walk, are on the right side of the photo above. They extend
for a hundred feet northwest and are finished blooming in this photo,
but the climbing
rose, 'William Baffin' on the right side of the arbor and 'John
Cabot' on the left are still in bloom. Details are definitely missing
in a long shot like this, but it's impressive to see several beds
at the same time and it's not very easy to do except from a height.
It's also impressive to see the view filled with such thickly massed
trees and shrubs, not only in this direction but all around the place,
since this end of our twenty acres when we first moved here in 1969 was
nearly empty of trees. In fact, except for some lilacs, the old and
very precious boxelder (Acer negundo, also known as
Manitoba Maple) on the east side of the house, two stubbed
Siberian elms (Ulmus
pumilla), and some dying Lombardy poplars (Populus nigra), the place
was as bald as a baby's behind. Tough living, for a while, from a
native East Coaster, and so the view here of what looks like a garden
carved out of a forested hillside gives me great satisfaction.
The window I used for this is on the 1875 side of the house, is close
under the eaves, and is quite small. In fact, the upper
sash hits about at the knees of an ordinary person. I pulled the upper
sash down on this small window and braced the camera on it in
order to
get the photograph. To get a shot from above of the lamium (Lamium maculatum)
and lady
fern (Athurium spp.)
bed underneath the window I had to point the camera downwards and
hope I'd get something useful because there was no room for my head.
Nevertheless, I did get a usable photo of the lamium. It fills the
entire bed directly north of the house and has spread from only a dozen
or so pots that I'd bought from local nurseries a few years ago (photo
below right).
There
is a small patch of lavender-flowered lamium (var.
'Beacon Silver') in the middle of this
photo, but most of the lamium we have scattered around the place is
white (var. 'White Nancy'). Lamium is a nice
choice for a shady garden because of the white
edges of the leaves. The same can be said of the small hosta shown here
and the edge of a patch of Bishop's Weed (Aegopodium
podagraria) on the right.
Bishop's weed, shown in abundance in Garden
Architecture, should be planted with great caution,
particularly in a small garden, because it spreads like a tidal wave.
The good news is that it engulfs all but the most persistent of
weeds. The most persistent of these weeds is the awful Bryony (Bryonia)
whose
turnip-like roots can grow
to the size of a man's head (oh DO
read about this repulsive Utah weed in Cutting Back II: The Terrible Two!) The
bad news, of course, is that Bishop's weed engulfs everything
else – lilies, roses, peonies and so forth.
Beyond the arbor (shown in the large photo
above), which is wide enough to permit
a pickup truck to ease through, is the north copse, the other ends of
the iris walk, a fairly extensive rose bed, and a long mixed shrub and
perennial border encircling the whole thing. Beyond that is the
windbreak
on the east, north, and west boundaries of the garden, made up of
evergreens and elms interspersed with young oak and
maple trees.
On the west side of the house is the cutting garden and on the east
side of the house a smallish lawn and a bed of mixed shrubs and
perennials. I'll show these in a later page.
Looking South
The
middle window in the second story front is satisfyingly tall and wide.
I wanted to catch the profusion of feverfew (Tanacetum parthenium) down there (the
white
dapples visible in the photo) surrounding the emerging lilies, only a
foot or so
high at the time I took the photograph; also
roses, just barely coming into bloom, and other perennials (photo at
left). On the left in the photo and barely visible is a patch of
'Nearly Wild' roses. The touches of pink, also barely visible, are
jupiter's beard or red valerian (Centranthus angustifolius).
Hidden beneath the long row of red twig dogwood on the right is a long,
thick planting of day lilies. Up a few shallow steps and dividing this
part of the front garden from the orchard garden to the right of the
drive coming up the hill is a yew hedge. Back there, directly behind
the yew hedge is the south copse of flowering trees, more roses and
shrubs, and a veritable forest of hollyhocks. Past the copse stretches
another long mixed shrub and perennial border, this time fronted
by a profusion of roses.
The place here is then a series of garden rooms that make a nice
walk-through no matter what the season, but especially at rose-blooming
time. Many of our roses, of course, bloom all season long – the hybrids and
shrubs and the English and landscape roses, but the big
bloom comes from early June to mid July, a period of
about
six weeks.
A closeup of the arrangement around the lamp post visible in
about the center of the photo above is comprised of the pink shrub
rose, 'Marguerite Hilling' and the rose we named "Jenny's
Moss." Some persistent searching eventually led us to believe "Jenny's
Moss" was
almost certainly 'Henri Martin', named in 1863 and also known as Old
Red Moss (see Moss Roses), but
"Jenny's Moss" is what we still call it in the family. 
Jenny Bergeson was the
nurse-midwife who ran a maternity home here from 1939 through 1949,
while shortages of doctors during World War II left rural areas
like Lewiston to shift for themselves. The rose
was on the north side of the house next to
what was, in the late 1800s
to the first third of the 1900s, the front door. The bush was
struggling in the shade there, though courageously putting out a few
blooms each
spring. Since we
planted two rooted cuttings of the rose in the sunny oval bed
directly in front of the house, it's grown strong and upright,
blooming profusely (photo at right) from late spring through June.
Strong
and vigorous now, it conforms more closely to the description of 'Henri
Martin'. I took this photo from the drive on the east.
Kid Update
Remember the photo of our
Landscape Manager's little girl, Madalyn? She's grown like topsy and
now has a little sister, Aubrey. Here they are, sitting in front of the
peonie border in the cutting garden in late spring. Both are little
beauties, and both look to be among those who love both life and
gardens.
Joan Katherine Shaw
June
2006
Children's
photo - Spencer Barzee
All other photos
- Joan Katherine Shaw
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