Serenity Garden Update

It’s been about a year since I planted my new Serenity Garden, so it seems a good time to stop and assess how that flower bed is doing.

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Overall, I am pleased. Some plants have settled in and grown very quickly. The Geranium x cantabrigiense ‘Biokovo’ at the front edge has already formed big clumps, the Solomon’s Seal (Polygonatum odoratum Variegatum) and hellebores (just planted this spring) seem quite happy, and two of the shrubs – Buxus x ‘Green Mountain’ and Pieris x ‘Brouwer’s Beauty’ – are growing and looking healthy. The astrantia moved here from the Deck Border is much happier than it was in its previous location and has bloomed more profusely. Some plants have grown so fast that they are already looking crowded. I made the decision last week to move Amsonia hubrichtii a foot further away from Aruncus dioicus because I know that both these plants will get much larger. This is my first time growing the bleeding heart (Lamprocapnos spectabilis) cultivar ‘Goldheart,’ and I expected it to go dormant in July as my other Lamprocapnos spectabilis plants always have. Instead, while it stopped blooming in early June, ‘Goldheart’ has continued to produce new foliage all summer long, even through our exceptionally warm and rainless July. The result is that Hosta ‘June,’ which was purposely planted close to ‘Goldheart’ so that it could fill the space left when the bleeding heart went dormant, is instead buried beneath it. If ‘Goldheart’ continues to grow throughout the summer, I’ll need to move the beautiful ‘June’ forward a foot or so to give it the visibility it deserves.

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There are, inevitably, some problems in this new flower bed. The first among these is deer damage. I knew when I designed it that deer would probably be an issue in this area at the edge of the woods away from the rest of the garden. So I wasn’t surprised when the deer moved in as soon as I left for Pennsylvania last August and ate the newly-planted hostas. I was surprised by how many other plants the deer ate. The “deer-resistant” (HA!) Viburnum cassinoides took a big hit and is now considerably smaller than it was when I planted it a year ago. I have pruned off the damage and have created a protective cage around this plant to keep the deer away from it. I also didn’t realize that deer would love Poteranthus trifoliata (Bowman’s Root), Anemone hupehensis, and Heuchera. All these plants are still hanging on but are nowhere near the size they should be and had little or no opportunity to bloom this year.

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The good news on the deer front is that the deer stopped frequenting this flower bed as soon as I was here and walking through the garden each day leaving my scent. (My neighborhood still has quite a lot of wild deer habitat, so our deer are not desperate and tend to be quite shy of people.) This means that if I can protect the plants from the deer for one more year, the deer problem might resolve itself when I begin living here full time in 2014.

Other problems may be less tractable. Two of the plants I included in this garden, Actaea ramosa ‘Hillside Black Beauty’ and cinnamon fern (Osmunda cinnamomea) don’t seem to be getting enough moisture. The Actaea turned brown and looked dead within weeks after I planted it last August. I was happily surprised when it returned in the spring with lots of fresh, healthy looking growth. As the leaves of this plant and the fronds of the cinnamon fern have matured however, they have curled up and turned brown (even as new green growth is being sent up at the center of the plant). It may be that the combination of my sandy soil and the presence of tree roots is just too much for these plants and that I will need to replace them with something better suited to my conditions. On the other hand, they may be better able to handle the growing conditions once they have gotten established and sent out more roots. My plan is to give them supplemental hand watering once a week through the summer next year to see if that helps.

There was very little bloom in this flower bed in its first season. Some of the flowering plants were prevented from flowering by the ministrations of the deer; others were only added this spring and weren’t large enough to flower in their first season. Although the primary focus in this garden is on foliage, I hope to see more flowers next year.

Finally, I leave you with one of my favorite features of this garden, my first ever piece of garden art, a “rock spinner” hand-crafted by Andy Lech of Scottish Lion Wrought Iron in Bristol, Maine.