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Browse published articles attributed to Francis Rosenfeld, with full-archive search.
A perennial garden is an aggregate entity, not a discrete collection of plants. There is a surprising amount of inter-dependency that needs to develop between the neighboring plants, an adjustment that takes years and happens mostly underground.
The quintessence of romantic imagery, the Bourbon rose! There is an unspoken consensus among rosarians that roses are the crowning glory of botanical creation. No other plant was capable of achieving this status and no one ever will, even though many classic perennials, such as peonies, clematis and chrysanthemums have their fair share of fans.
People ask gardeners all the time why they waste so much time and effort on a pursuit that at any scale smaller than a farm yields so little benefit? Green thumbs may be blindsided by the question, shrug their shoulders and keep on with the activity they were engaged in, for how can one quantify that feeling of achievement, that inner knowing that one's own hands have helped, even if in a very small way, bring out life from the depths of the earth?
I woke up this morning to a wispy snow flurry, the thin and icy kind that comes about when temperatures drop too low. Eighteen degrees, to be precise. It settled, unsure, in a thin, powdery layer that still lets the ground show through. I almost hesitated to disturb the pristine cover when I went out into the back yard to put seed in the bird feeder. It doesn’t feel cold, though, I don’t know why, just eerily quiet and still, like it is in winter sometimes, as if the thin layer of snow absorbed all the sounds.
Today was one of those rainy summer days when lighting is diminished and one derives a sense of well being from hearing the rolling boom of the far away thunder as rain raps heavily on the roof. I had picked herbs before the rain started, large bunches of herbs, opal basil and bee balm and parsley and flowering mint, and hung them to dry in the kitchen. The whole house was filled with a spicy aroma dominated by notes of basil and accented with mint.
Being vague in gardening often yields hilarious results. I will apply myself to relea ing horticulture basics next season, and heed the experts' advice to be specific about what I'm planning to plant. Here are a few lessons I learned this year. Paying attention to the correct Latin designation of Saint John's Wort (Hypericum perforatum) makes the difference between getting the familiar medicinal plant and getting a gangly bog native (Hypericum pyramidatum) that keeps its flowers open for all of five minutes.
When you plant bulbs, whether that happens in fall or spring, don’t forget to mix in a good measure of bone meal into the dirt, to help them set in and give them some food for the first year. Other than that, bulbs don’t need a lot of care. Because they are usually sprinkled among other perennials, they benefit from the regular feedings and waterings that happen throughout the summer. Don’t cut off their unsightly yellowing leaves after their bloom is spent, they still need them to feed the roots for the following season.
It seems fitting, on Saint Patrick's Day, to make a list of plants that bring luck, you know, just in case. Let’s start with the classics: lavender and roses. No garden should be without them - lavender for luck, roses for love. Honesty and sage attract prosperity to the household. It is said that if sage grows well in your garden, you’ll never lack for anything. Honesty specifically pertains to the increase of money, because of its round seed pods that look like coins.
My son had to stay home from school. Since the reason was a tummy ache he was required to rest for the day and not engage in his regular activities, all of which involve some kind of computerized device. After a long drawn discussion about being unfairly deprived of the activities he had been accustomed to guess what he rediscovered? It is fun to roast marshmallows in the fireplace and roasted marshmallows taste very yummy. And at the age of nine you can do it all by yourself because you are so grown up and responsible.
I always thought of goldenrod as a dyer's plant and was surprised to learn that it has medicinal properties. Its Latin name, Solidago, literally means "to make whole", and puts goldenrod squarely in the wound healing category. It has other medicinal properties, too, mostly related to improving the kidney and circulatory functions. Apparently it is edible, but I wouldn't know about that and will refrain from testing this hypothesis on my long suffering stomach.r
Aromatics come in two flavors: kitchen herbs and medicinals. A few herbs cross over from one category to the other, rosemary and lavender would be good examples of that, although using lavender for cooking is a bit of an acquired taste. Almost everybody has grown kitchen herbs on a sunny kitchen sill or in a pot on the patio at some point: parsley and dill, oregano and marjoram,tarragon and chives, basil and sage.r
I plant scarlet runner beans for their flowers - all the beauty of sweet peas with none of the high maintenance. Of course they are not fragrant, but nothing in this life is perfect. If you plant them as a crop, and during favorable years they do produce, don’t pick them green, you are not doing yourself or the beans any favors. There are three types of beans, based on their use: snap, shell and dry.
The shade border rests at the end of summer, when it gets too warm and too dry for its taste. Since last summer was cool and rainy, the plants maintained the exuberant growth of early spring. The hostas were lush and full, the begonias were in full bloom and the toad lilies doubled in size. What to grow in the shade? Flowers. White, if you would, they stand out in low light.
If only a little late in the season, here are a few things for the fall gardener’s schedule. I haven’t even started most of mine yet, sadly. Mid-fall is the best time to move, divide or plant spring and summer blooming perennials. Fall perennials can be moved and divided at this time too, if you really feel like you must, but as a rule, this is an activity best left for spring.
If you are a dedicated green thumb, all you do after winter begins is sit around and wait for it to be over. Two long months of dreary weather later, the sight of spring catalogs gracing your mailbox is a hopeful sign of better days to come. Some people go by the buds on the trees, others by the first crocuses, I go by the arrival of spring catalogs. Be happy and joyful, my fellow gardeners, I already have six of them, spring is nigh!r
It’s not summer until the day lilies bloom and they usually do so before the fourth of July in anticipation of the joyous celebration. For a few weeks the whole garden turns blazing orange and after the flowers fade, their foliage slowly dies down to the ground to make room to the late summer bloomers. Not all day lilies bloom all summer, for instance these, a triploid variety called “Kwanso”, do not.
If you want to create drama in your garden, by all means, pick all white flowers. People don’t usually crave intensity in a cottage garden, which is a care free collection of gregarious annuals and perennials suited to comfort the spirit rather than stir it up. Most of the cottage garden staples do come in white however, and you certainly can get the look if you find it appealing. Here is a list of perennials that will carry the white flower theme through all the seasons.r
If you ever drove by a flower meadow in the middle of summer, you must have realized that plants handle themselves very well without human assistance, as they’ve always done. The gardener is only there to cheer them along. A plant needs three things to thrive: sunlight, water and a proper balance of nutrients. From here on the details of what that means for each species vary wildly.
Getting from the aromatic plant in the garden to the home made health or beauty product involves a couple of preliminary steps - preserving the herbs for long term storage and transferring their active ingredients into a medium easy to work with, usually oil.
For the less romantically inclined among us, who don't get misty eyed over nature's autumnal carnival of color but would like to know why the leaves turn, here is the full prose version of it.
The summer is officially over, both in the garden and on the calendar, we just passed he point when the day becomes shorter than the night. The light shifted, a soft but impossible to miss change that always precedes the beginning of fall. As usual at the end of September I'm excited to welcome the stars of the fall garden, the toad lilies. I can't get over how understated and sophisticated these flowers are, both at the same time, you have to get really close to capture the charm of their northern orchid countenance.r
Stem, root or leaf cuttings are the nursery standard for the propagation of perennials, especially those whose clumps grow woody with time. The benefit of this method is that the young plants are true clones of their parents.
One of the myths of gardening is that once you planted a perennial border it is set in stone and it will come back, year after year, exactly the same. That is not true at all, I look through pictures of my garden through the last few seasons and it is almost unrecognizable from one year to the next. Just because a plant is labeled perennial it doesn’t mean it will be there forever. Some, like delphiniums and columbines, will only live four or five years, even in ideal conditions, while others, like hostas, garden phlox, hellebores and cone flowers will be with you for decades.
I plant morning glory every year. Always in the same spot, always the same variety - Heavenly Blue. I forget about it after I plant it, it is slow to start in spring and its foliage gets lost in the jumble when the mid-summer growth takes over the flower beds. Come August, its growth accelerates enthusiastically, especially if summer rains have been plentiful, and it swallows up its supports, clambering eagerly to the highest point it can find, and only there it starts to bloom.r
The difference between planting and landscape design comes from paying attention to seemingly unimportant details and one of them is texture. Its impact is even greater in the shade, where very few plants bloom. A well balanced shade border will have all of the following: Broad leaved plants, both deciduous and evergreen. If the leaves are variegated and have different indentations, that is even better. A few good examples are hostas, elephant ears, hellebores, rhubarb and chards. Succulents.
When you start looking into its qualities, rosemary can be quite intimidating, it seems to be good for everything: it makes hair grow strong and shiny, rejuvenates skin, boosts memory and concentration, sharpens eyesight, thins the blood and helps lower the risk of cancer. This impressive resume is due to the fact that rosemary is rich in iron, calcium, phosphorus, vitamins A, C and B6, folate, and some other plant specific compounds that act synergistically.
Where I grew up, roses belonged in the pantry. Between the rose preserves, the rose syrups, and the rose water in pastry dough, the aristocratic flowers doubled up as bona fide cooking ingredients.
Somebody who is fated to live a linear life can’t easily grasp the cycles of nature; I’m envious, almost, of the way the garden gets to reshuffle the deck at the end of each year and start fresh in spring, one level up from where it was before. Sometimes this cycle skips like a record with a scratched groove and the plants go back a month or two, to the gardener’s delight. I don’t know what enticed yarrow into its second flush of bloom, but I’m going to enjoy it, even though it looks a little strange in the company of stonecrops and ripe pampas grasses.
And here I thought that crocuses didn’t like my garden! To be fair, I never tried the yellow ones before, but I also thought the lack of acidity in the soil didn’t agree with them. Apparently I was wrong. I’ll take the opportunity to clear up a few misconceptions about spring bulbs. Shade tolerance
The fountain at the center of the garden was a staple of medieval landscape design. Its simple yet powerful symbolism was derived from necessity, but speaks to that part of the soul that envisions water as healing and life giving. Nowhere is a tiny fountain more at home than at the center of a medicinal herb wheel.r
Have you ever had this sinking feeling, when you want to try a plant you’ve never grown before and you look at the beautiful photos on the seed packet, that there is absolutely no way this botanical wonder will ever grow in your garden? I’m not one to dismiss instinct, it is usually based on a lot of fast logical reasoning and processing of already stored information that goes on in the back of your brain while you’re minding your daily routine, but that doesn’t mean it’s always right. Fortunately for me, it wasn’t this time, because they did sprout, and root, and grow big and strong.
It seems fitting, now at the end of the year, to make a list of plants that bring luck, you know, just in case. Let’s start with the classics: lavender and roses. No garden should be without them - lavender for luck, roses for love. Honesty and sage attract prosperity to the household. It is said that if sage grows well in your garden, you’ll never lack for anything. Honesty specifically pertains to the increase of money, because of its round seed pods that look like coins.
The planters get a little tired and overgrown by the end of the summer, when the ideal combination of colors, heights and textures or their original design gives in to the whims of nature. There is beauty in that disarray, the beauty of the natural hierarchy that establishes itself outside of human intervention. The plant in the picture is a Canadian variety of tuberous begonia called “Illumination”. It put up a spectacular performance last summer but was a little shy this year, like all the other shade lovers. A few things about container care.
One of the best things about winter is that one doesn’t feel guilty about indulging in a little pampering. After all, the weather is god-awful, there isn’t a lot of activity in the garden, and dry winter skin gives one every justification for a well needed home spa session.
Usually by this time I’m already overtaken by cabin fever and dreaming of beautiful summer days, but this year, with the exception of a few days of brutal cold at the beginning of the month, it seems weather forgot winter exists. I hesitate to mention this because I don’t want to jinx it; for sure the second I write the words another freeze from a place that will remain unmentioned is going to be upon us, but so far the temperatures have been in the fifties and sixties, mostly accompanied by rain.
If you were wondering what happens to your perennials during their winter hibe ation, here goes. At the approach of winter they transform the sugars developed through photosynthesis into starch, which they can store inside their roots long term and use during the winter in the same way hibe ating animals use stored fat.r
The middle of July brought its favorites - the lilies, the phlox, the daisies. I'm not sure whether cone flowers really are supposed to grow five foot tall. There is fierce competition in the sunny border for the land and the light. I can barely make my way through the bee balms and the cosmos, not even the weeds manage to keep up with the perennials' enthusiasm.
Today I was out in the garden before dawn and I watched the crescent moon fade slowly into daylight as carpets of clouds moved very fast across the sky. Slowly the birds and the moths started to emerge from their nightly hideouts, eager to catch an early meal before the morning rush.
If you love root division you’ll be happy to know that it works for bulbs too, via scaling, slicing, scooping and scoring. Scaling is a propagation method that seems almost custom designed for lilies, whose bulbs “bloom” naturally, turning them into tiny clusters that look like artichokes. Scaling lily bulbs is the easiest propagation method available, you just dig them up, tease the scales gently apart and replant them in the desired location.
Container gardening sneaks up on you. You start with one potted plant and pretty soon the entire patio or balcony is covered in them, looking almost indistinguishable from the adjacent flower bed. If you have lots of plants in pots, keep them grouped. That way the containers get some protection from drying out and they are easier to water if they are all in one spot.
Harvesting the rain doesn’t stop at installing rain barrels, it involves the entire garden and its principal goal is to keep the water from running off the plot onto paved areas, only to eventually end up in the storm drains.r
A resilient weed, native to the northern hemisphere, yarrow grows wild in open fields and along the sides of the roads, and had only recently gained the privilege to be cultivated in flower gardens. Don't judge this humble herb to be ordinary, Achillea millefolium is a well documented medicinal plant, astringent, anti inflammatory and tonic, but above all it has a special gift: it is a hemostatic agent.r
The difference between planting and landscape design comes from paying attention to seemingly unimportant details and one of them is texture. Its impact is even greater in the shade, where very few plants bloom. A well balanced shade border will have all of the following: Broad leaved plants, both deciduous and evergreen. If the leaves are variegated and have different indentations, that is even better. A few good examples are hostas, elephant ears, hellebores, rhubarb and chards. Succulents.
I was browsing through past years’ gardening articles and I got overtaken by this feeling of certainty and permanence. It is extraordinary how consistent nature’s cycles are, almost down to day for the first bloom, the last frost, the unavoidable late freeze. Keeping a gardening journal makes this pattern obvious and somewhat discomforting, this truth that all things green abide by a gigantic cosmic timepiece of uncanny precision.
The most common harmonies in the garden are derived straight from art color theory: monochrome, complementary, triadic, and analogous. The monochrome scheme is pretty straight forward. Same color, same hue. Everywhere.
The first time I saw an herb garden in a public park I asked myself what was the point of it? The fact that it occupied a small nook in the middle of the rose garden, at a time when all the roses were in bloom, didn’t help its cause very much. I know better now. Of course, I selected the herbs for my own garden according to their flowering habits, unfair as it may seem; nobody grows herbs for their blooming prowess. The one good thing about herbs is that they pretty much take care of themselves. They weather drought, heat, freezes, they’re the ultimate “set it and forget it plant”.
Two autumns ago I started a lot of perennials from divisions: irises, daisies, garden phlox, daylilies, and this is the year for them to start blooming. Of course, this fall I forgot to move the beautiful Pink Sorbet peony, which means it’s going to spend another spring trying to dig itself out from under the rugosa rose, and let me tell you, that’s not an easy feat.
After a streak of sunny days, mother nature decided to bring the gloom, and I never pass the opportunity gloom provides to indulge in relaxation and pampering, isn’t this what rainy days were created for? The flower buds are on the brink of opening, but it looks like they decided to wait for the sunshine before doing that. Back to the pampering, what better plant to chose to represent all things indulgent for skin care than the geranium? Well, maybe not this specific variety.
The best way to describe the September garden is a charming mess. The summer plants don’t know whether it makes sense for them to keep going, and when they do bloom they do so in bursts and spurts that have a jarring effect on the fall landscape, which is of a completely different breed.
You would think that hostas, like the shade plants with broad foliage that they are, would love nothing more than a rainy summer, right? Partially. They developed luxurious foliage, and yes, the large fragrant ones did bloom, but not as abundantly as they usually do. You are looking at a picture of very early variety here, I guess that’s the one that likes the rain.