Leaflet Header

Leaflet eNewsletter
June 2014 Edition
In This Issue
185 Years
Elm Bank's Classic Car Show Returns June 22
Don't Forget Dad
Educational Summer
Book Review- Planting: A New Perspective
Garden to Table: First Harvest
June Hort Hints
The Mystery of the Plant Tags
Upcoming Lectures and Events at the Hort

 

Garden Tours Every Tuesday beginning April 29th through October
10:00 am
Members: free, 
Non-members: $10. 
Group meets at the Welcome Garden 
 

 


 


 

 

Thu, Jun 19th, @12:00pm - 03:00PM 
Perennial Garden Design 

 

 

Thu, Jun 19th, @7:00pm - 08:30PM 
Biology and Control of Common Exotic Invasive Plants 

 

 

Tue, Jun 24th, @10:00am - 04:00PM 
Art in the Garden: Impressions of the Garden En Plein Air 

 

 

Wed, Jun 25th, @10:00am - 04:00PM 
Art in the Garden: Impressions of the Garden En Plein Air 

 

 

Thu, Jun 26th, @12:00pm - 03:00PM 
Perennial Garden Design 

 

 

Thu, Jun 26th, @7:00pm - 08:30PM 
Honeybees: Imagine a World without Them 

 

 

Thu, Jul 3rd, @12:00pm - 03:00PM 
Perennial Garden Design 

 

 

Thu, Jul 3rd, @12:00pm - 03:00PM 
Perennial Garden Design 

 

 

Tue, Jul 8th, @10:00am - 04:00PM 
Art in the Garden: Capturing the Landscape and Architecture in the Garden with Watercolor (Day 1) 

 

 

Wed, Jul 9th, @10:00am - 04:00PM 
Art in the Garden: Capturing the Landscape and Architecture in the Garden with Watercolor (Day 2) 

 

 

Thu, Jul 10th, @9:30am - 12:30PM 
Introduction to Site Construction for Garden Design 

 

 

Thu, Jul 10th, @12:00pm - 03:00PM 
Perennial Garden Design 

 

 

Thu, Jul 10th, @7:00pm - 08:30PM 
H Is for Daylily 

 

 

Sun, Jul 13th, @9:30am - 12:30PM 
Perennial & Shrub Planting Design for Seasonal Color 

 

 

Wed, Jul 16th, @9:00am - 12:00PM 
Art in the Garden: Garden Landscapes 

 

 

Thu, Jul 17th, @9:30am - 12:30PM 
Introduction to Site Construction for Garden Design 

 

 

Thu, Jul 17th, @12:00pm - 03:00PM 
Perennial Garden Design 

 

 

Thu, Jul 17th, @7:00pm - 08:30PM 
Flowers that Fly: Habitat Gardening for Butterflies  

 

 

Sun, Jul 20th, @9:30am - 12:30PM 
Perennial & Shrub Planting Design for Seasonal Color 

 

 

Wed, Jul 23rd, @9:00am - 12:00PM 
Art in the Garden: Color and Light in the Garden  

 

 

Thu, Jul 24th, @9:30am - 12:30PM 
Introduction to Site Construction for Garden Design 

 

 

Thu, Jul 24th, @12:00pm - 03:00PM 
Perennial Garden Design 

 

 

Sun, Jul 27th, @9:30am - 12:30PM 
Perennial & Shrub Planting Design for Seasonal Color 

 

 

Wed, Jul 30th, @9:00am - 12:00PM 
Art in the Garden: Floral Portraits, Up Close and Personal 

 


Join Mass Hort
 Join Mass Hort 

For exceptional benefits to help you in the garden-

Join Today!

 

If you are a Mass Hort member- please recommend membership to a friend! Forward this newsletter.

 

CLICK HERE TO JOIN

Amazon Smile
 
You Shop - Amazon gives to Massachusetts Horticultural Society!

Amazon will donate 0.5% of the price of your eligible AmazonSmile purchases to Massachusetts Horticultural Society whenever you shop on AmazonSmile. 

AmazonSmile is the same Amazon you know. Same products, same prices, same service. 
Begin shopping at  www.smile.amazon.com

 Letter from the President


 

  
Dear Friends,
  
The Gardens at Elm Bank are ablaze with color and activity. The peonies outside of Weezie's Garden are fragrant and beautiful. Lisa, Weezie's Garden Keeper, has just added   goldfish to the pond. The first crops have been harvested from the Garden to Table Garden and are headed to two food pantries.
  
June is a wonderful time to visit The Gardens at Elm Bank.  Bring a picnic and enjoy the grounds of this beautiful estate. Join us on Tuesdays at 10 am for a group garden tour, which departs from the main gate. Join a lecture at Thursday Night at the Hort, or an Art Class with one of the many Art in the Garden classes listed to the left.
  
Caterpillar Club (Mondays at 10 am) and Story Time (Wednesday at 10 am) are welcoming our youngest garden enthusiasts. Drop in and have fun!
  
June offers some great events. The Elm Bank Antique Fair returns this weekend, June 14 and 15. The Elm Bank Classic Car Show is June 22. 
  
Thank you again for your support.
  
Happy Summer!
  
Kathy
  
  

185 Years: Massachusetts Horticultural Society's Legacy Lives On

By Maureen Horn, Librarian  

One of the advantages of living in an old city like Boston is being able to stand and admire ancient buildings, all the while recalling centuries of a changing society. One such ancient edifice is the Market Street Building near Faneuil Hall. Here, on June 12, 1829 the first officers of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society endorsed its Act of Incorporation, which had been signed by Governor Levi Lincoln. The new charter established the Society "for the purpose of encouraging and improving the science and practice of Horticulture, and promoting the amelioration of various species of trees, forests, plants, and vegetables, and the introduction of new species and varieties".

Quincy Marketplace

The building still stands and so does the Society. Its ambitions were lofty, and it accomplished many of them. Less than two decades later, its list of introductions was long, and in 1847, it commissioned several paintings by William Sharp: Camellia Wilderii, the Baldwin Apple, the Dearborn Seedling Pear, and Downers Late Red Cherry are a few.

 

At first, the Society was humbly housed, holding its meetings over John B. Russell's seed store. As publisher of the New England Farmer, he was one of its most influential founders.  

John B. Russell

The founders knew that to achieve their goals, members needed to keep learning, so they formed the library, "to comprise all works on Horticulture, as well as various periodical publications devoted to the subject, now published in Europe and the United States". And they had a practical approach as they looked for the most up-to-date tools, soliciting "models of new implements of use in Horticulture". All these should be consigned to the care of John B. Russell, the Agent for the Society.

 

The members acknowledged from the beginning that the best way to excite enthusiasm for the products of horticulture was to display them. Their first show was a few months after incorporation, on September 18, 1829 at the Exchange Coffee House. The press of the crowd made them wish that they had hired larger accommodations, and all agreed that "the show of fruits and flowers ... was probably never surpassed in New-England".

 

By 1842, a growing list of exhibitions crowded the calendars of Boston's most prominent citizens.

1842 Entrant's Ticket

 

To celebrate the shows' popularity, the members presented a lavish dinner at the Concert Hall. During the occasion, Governor Lincoln declared that the visible and ever extending evidence of Society's work had influenced the whole country. He said that though he had been present at its first meeting, he could not "attempt to compare that day of small things with this of great ones."

 

To observe our 185th anniversary, a group of today's members took a tour on June 12 to the house and grounds of Founding Member William Kenrick in Newton.  One can envision many opportunities in the future to visit sites in Boston and its suburbs where the Massachusetts Horticultural Society left its mark. 

Elm Bank's Classic Car Show  
Returns June 22
 
1965 Mustang
1958 Fury 

Who doesn't love classic cars? Who can resist breaking into a smile at the sight of an immaculately restored 1965 Mustang, a Triumph complete with a wicker picnic basket strapped to its boot, or a showroom-fresh 1958 Plymouth Fury with foot-high tail fins? Be prepared to do a lot of smiling on Sunday, June 22 because that's the date of the twelfth annual Elm Bank Estate Antique, Classic and Custom Auto Show.

             

More than 700 vehicles are expected to be on display, all against the Gardens of Elm Bank at the height of their June glory. In addition to the traditional focus on classic cars, hot rods and muscle cars, this year's event will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Mustang and GTO. There's also a 'car show within the car show': the Concours d'Elegance. It is a display of the region's most beautiful and accurately restored classic vehicles.

 

Open from 9 a.m. - 3:30 p.m., the event includes live music (oldies, naturally) and food. Admission is $7, children under 12 are free.

 

The featured cars for 2014 will be Mustangs and GTOs from 1964 onward, but visitors will encounter everything from Model T's to microcars. Muscle cars are always in evidence along with vintage Corvettes and classic American touring sedans. Best of all, the owners of these vehicles are always nearby. They're ready to explain the intricacies of a split-window '63 Sting Ray or the way to spot the difference between a Triumph TR3 and a Spitfire.

 

The Concours d'Elegance will make its second appearance this year. Included in the admission price, this is an invitation-only display of extremely rare vehicles in mint condition. Last year, show goers got to view a 1936 Cord 810, a 1910 Oakland, and a 1953 Arnolt Bristol. The cars on display were produced in very limited numbers and all have been restored to factory-new specifications.

Triumph Spitfire

 

 More than anything else, it's an opportunity to experience a vanished era; a time when the automobile was more than just a means of getting from Point A to Point B. It was a time when new cars went on display on Labor Day and each year brought a fresh look and new features.  

 

It's also a prime time to explore the beautiful Gardens at Elm Bank. The Massachusetts Horticultural Society's gardens are at their early summer peak, and your family can take in the stunning Bressingham Garden or the child-friendly Weezie's Garden. Take a walk through the trial garden with a sneak peek of next year's flowers for the home garden, and experience the Garden-to-Table garden where you can see vegetables in an entirely new light.

 

If you're an owner of a classic car and you'd like to display it, contact Charlie Harris at 774-420-8811 or email him at [email protected].

 

Don't Forget Dad! 

 

Give the gift of membership for Father's Day! 

Special Offer!

 

father-daughter-grass.jpg  

 

Father's Day is Sunday, June 15th

 

Give your Dad or loved one the gift of membership to the Massachusetts Horticultural Society! He will enjoy benefits to help him in the garden and keep him immersed in horticulture all year! And your gift helps us to continue to deliver our mission and care for our beautiful gardens at Elm Bank! To learn more, click here 

 

$10 off regular rates!* 

 

Individual Membership $40 (regularly $50)

Family Membership $75 (regularly $85)

Supporter Membership $165 (regularly $175)

 

Click here to give a gift and enter the promo code: Dad

Or call 617-933-4961

 

Or forward this email to a friend and help us grow membership!

 

*Offer valid through June 18th. Offer applies to new and rejoining members only - does not apply to renewing members.


Educational Summer                           

 

Summer Children's Programs have begun at Elm Bank! Kathi Gariepy is with us again, leading fun activities at Caterpillar Club on Mondays 10-11am, for children pre-K to 2nd grade. On Wednesdays, staff from Mass Hort, Dover Town Library and Wellesley Free Library will be leading Story Hour. Come for stories, songs and activities, 10-11am, for children of all ages! These are wonderful opportunities to enjoy Weezie's Children's Garden.

 

Activities run from June through September and are by donation. Pre-registration is not required.

   

It's a beautiful summer in the garden- capture your time with watercolor. The New England Watercolor Society has partnered with Mass Hort to offer a summer of programs that will expand your knowledge of watercolor. Learn to paint en plein air or focus on the details of floral art. Classes are for all abilities and interests. Find out more and register online at our Art in the Garden page.

 


Book Review

Planting: A New Perspective

Piet Oudolf & Noel Kingsbury

Timber Press 2013

                       

 

 

Reviewed by Pamela Hartford

 

As gardeners, we all know that interest in perennials has not abated over the past forty years. The publishing record reveals many trends. So what's new about this planting perspective?

 

As author Noel Kingsbury explains, "The zeitgeist of contemporary planting design is a slow move away from precise individual plant placement to combinations of species, designing and planting something which is greater than the sum of the parts, developing a vegetation rather than planting a group of individuals."

 

Kingsbury, an English horticulturist and contributor to the literature on "new perennial design" in his own right, is collaborating here on his third book with Piet Oudolf. One of the most influential plantsmen of the 20th, and now 21st centuries, Dutchman Oudolf pioneered the 'new perennial' movement - combing bold drifts of herbaceous perennials with grasses, with a focus on plant structure over color. The planting of New York City's High Line is one of Oudolf's most visible demonstrations of this approach to planting in the United States.

 

The 'new planting' described here moves the agenda toward a highly constructed exercise, netting a more long-lasting, self-sustaining and consequently lower maintenance type of gardening.

 

Kingsbury points out that the use of perennials and ornamental grasses in the construction of a vegetation requires greater access to technical information about plant establishment and management, and to ideas about the visual aspects of this approach. This book focuses on understanding longevity and the survival strategies of plants, and characterizes them relative to their role in a design as either 'primary,' 'matrix,' or 'scatter' plants. There are numerous plans showing strategies for planning and implementing successful combinations.  

 

Examples are drawn largely from installations in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, as well as many of Oudolf's designs. And they are stunning. Over 150 images provide mouthwatering displays of incredibly beautiful plant combinations, replete with captions citing specific plants with their botanical names. A chart offers a reference guide.

 

Prepare to have your fantasies fueled. After reading this book, you will never look at your garden the same way again.

 

Pamela Hartford is a landscape historian and designer living in Salem, MA.

  

First Harvest
By Susan Hammond

 

May in a vegetable garden is often the month when you first start to see the fruits of your work.  

 

In the Garden to Table garden, we've weathered a difficult spring. We had snow several days after we planted our lettuce, followed by 80+ degree temperatures later in the month, and then nights in the 40's again.

 

Despite these challenges, we have been able to start harvesting for our food pantries!   Right now, we are producing lettuce, radishes, cress, and rhubarb, and sending several crates a week to both Wellesley and Natick food pantries.

 

We are also finding lots of opportunities for education. During the Gardeners' Fair on May 18th we welcomed visitors to the garden, offering tours and vegetable gardening advice.  On May 29th, we started planting our tomato beds for the year, teaching our volunteers about different growing techniques for this most popular vegetable.   We will plant over 125 tomatoes, and over 20 varieties, before the season is over.

 

Would you like to see the garden?   If you come on non-holiday Mondays or Thursdays from 9-1, you'll be there during our harvest times, when we also do work in the garden. You can watch, or volunteer to help and learn.  We're also happy to give tours and answer questions. If you have a large group and are interested in a special tour of the garden, or a group volunteer effort, please contact Lisa Kamer at 617-933-4943 or [email protected]   .  

 

Come and learn with us!

 

June Horticultural Hints                    

 

by Betty Sanders

www.BettyOnGardening.com

 

In the garden. We've cleaned up flower and shrub beds, laid mulch and now, while they're still small, it's time to go back and remove the weeds that popped up. Weeds steal light and water from your plants and can act as host plants for disease and bad insects. Kill them while they are young because a mature weed can release up to a million seeds in a year!

 

Shearing back late summer and fall blooming perennials now, such as mums, asters, sedums and Joe Pye weed (Eupatorium purpureum), will make them shorter, but bushier with more flowers. Always cut down the stalk to a leaf node, never in mid-stalk. Re-blooming perennials such as salvia, coreopsis and all annuals should be pruned back after blooming to facilitate the next bloom and prevent the plant from wasting energy producing seeds.

A tick check

Summer is also tick season and Massachusetts ticks now host a variety of diseases from Lyme to Babesiosis to Ehrlichiosis. Ticks migrate into your garden not just on deer but almost any warm-blooded animal. To protect your health, perform a thorough tick check every time you come in from the garden and never assume that a shower or bath will remove them. And don't forget to check any pets that venture outdoors for unwanted passengers.

* * * * *

A cold wet spring is reluctantly giving way to summer in the vegetable garden. Waiting to plant your hot weather crops like tomatoes, peppers, melons and squash does not mean a later crop and prevents them from being stunted by cold temperatures in May.   But they should all be in the ground now. Replant lettuce, carrots, beans and corn to keep the harvest going through the summer.

 

Native to the Mediterranean area, most herbs like it dry and lean. (Basil is the exception) Don't overfeed or overwater them, but do remember to cut them back regularly to use in the kitchen and to promote new growth.

* * * * *

Do you have pines that are getting too big for their allotted space or too lanky for your taste? The bright green candles (see photo) are the new growth and the source of new branches. You can keep pine trees or shrubs small and bushier by cutting the candles in half now.

 

The effects of last winter's extreme cold continues to show up on trees and shrubs. Any branch that has not leafed out is almost certainly dead. Pruning back the winter kill allows the plant to get on with the business of growing new leaves and branches that should fill in any gaps in the next year or two. Use sharp pruners (for cuts up to one-half inch and hand saws for anything larger.) Anything that cannot be cut from the ground should be left to professionals.

* * * * *

Look for garden tours sponsored by garden clubs in your area. Garden clubs are responsible for many of the civic plantings throughout Massachusetts. They use the profits from plant sales and garden tours to help pay to beautify their towns.

You can read more of Betty's gardening advice at www.BettyOnGardening.com

 

The Mystery of the Plant Tags

By Neil Sanders
Leaflet Contributor


Every year in late May, I lay the soaker hoses for our hosta garden. There's a narrow window of time when all the hostas have emerged, but are not so large that I can't wend two hoses close enough to each hosta's roots to provide water for the inevitable summer dry spells.

 

It's a time-consuming process because the hoses are buried about an inch into the soil and mulch rather than just placed along the surface.  And, to answer the inevitable question, the hoses are taken up each fall because they'd rot after a year or two if they were left in the ground over the winter.  The hoses I buried yesterday are in their tenth season.  So, yes, it's worth a morning's labor to both make the hosta garden look great and to exercise some Yankee frugality by not having to replace $60 worth of hoses.

 

But that's not the purpose of this essay.  Rather, I write this morning to wonder why on earth the animals in the woods around our property find our plant tags so fascinating.  You see, last week I engaged in not one but two spring rituals.  The first was the burying of the soaker hoses.  The second was the annual matching of hosta plant markers with the shoots coming out of the ground.

 

Fact: No one has walked in the hosta garden since late October when our final task of the season in that part of the property was to firmly push the steel and aluminum markers into the soil next to the remnants of the plants. We were conscientious in our efforts because we have a lot of different hostas in our garden - more than a hundred named varieties. Each plant has a marker and each marker has one of those labels with the variety printed out on clear plastic tape. (I know what you're thinking: I need a hobby. Well, this is my hobby.)

 

Exactly why we go to the trouble of making labels is unclear, except that now, when we visit a nursery, we can resist buying a hosta 'Lakeside Cupcake' because we already have one. We know we have one because we made a label for one last year. Except unless we think what we have back at home is 'Lakeside Cupid's Cup' or 'Lakeside Cup Up'. Which means we may well go home with the hosta anyway because it's so darn cute.

 

Fact: Back in October, every hosta marker was in exactly the right spot. Fact: For much of this past winter, the hosta garden was under two or more feet of snow. So, please explain to me why, yesterday morning, there were dozens of plant markers lying loose in the hosta beds?


Betty says the rational explanation is that the ground freezes and thaws and pushes the markers out of the ground. I could buy that theory if the markers were adjacent to the plants to which they belong. I happen to know for a fact, though, that hosta 'Mohegan' is a giant brute of a plant that hugs the foundation of the house (and may yet push the house out of the way in order to accommodate its version of Manifest Destiny). Why, then, is the marker for hosta 'Mohegan' in among the ones for the cute little miniatures twenty feet away? And why is there a pile of five markers?

Personally, I blame the squirrels and the raccoons. ("Hey, neat plant marker. I think I'll pull it out and put it in this pile.") More likely, knowing the raccoons in our neighborhood, the markers are used in lieu of poker chips. ("I see your 'Francee' and raise you a 'Kabitan' and a 'Whirlwind'.) That might explain the piles of them - raccoons abandoning poker night when they're called home for dinner and to do their homework. Their homework being their endless but fruitless efforts to break into our composter.


There are also hosta markers that have either lost that clear plastic label over the course of the winter or - and this is the scary part - returned to our garden from some parallel universe. Once upon a time (when we had only twenty or so named hostas), we were content to identify our cultivars with a black pen on a metal tag. I would swear, though, on a thousand-page Hostas A-Z reference tome that every single marker has been 'upgraded' to clear plastic tape during the past two years.

 

Why, then, do I have two warped and mangled handwritten tags for hosta 'Golden Tiara'? Betty ejected all of the 'Golden Tiaras' from the formal hosta garden four or five years ago because they multiply like rabbits and she hasn't bothered to make a tag for one in the better part of a decade. Where did these tags come from?

 

Once again, Betty's rational explanation is frost heaves. The tags were buried in the soil. The ground froze and thawed and, one day, belched up a 'Golden Tiara' tag or two. I like the parallel universe theory a lot better.

 

With the hoses now safely buried, my task now is to dig out our diagrams of the hosta beds and match loose tags with last known locations of plants. Now that's what I call a spring ritual.

Neal Sanders is the author of eight mysteries. His newest, A Murder at the Flower Show, is now available at book stores and at Amazon.com.