How Does Your Garden Grow? It Depends Where You Put Down Roots

By Nancy K. Crevier

“Mary, Mary, Quite contrary. How does your garden grow?”

“With snips, and snails, and puppy dog tails, and pretty maids all in a row.”

We have neither snips nor snails nor puppy dog tails in New England gardens; nor are pretty maidens a standard blossom in Newtown parks. But we do have lilacs and forsythia, tulips, daffodils, and peonies that bloom in the spring; rhododendrons and azaleas that color the landscape; trillium and crocus; crab apples, ferns, and hydrangea; and a wide variety of hardwood trees that burst forth in the famous autumnal colors. And for those residents who have been “transplanted” here from warmer climates, those plants are a treat to the senses. 

“What I missed most about New England gardens when we moved from Massachusetts to Florida was the forsythia and lilacs,” said Mary Anderson, who lived in Florida for 15 years before returning to the northeast three years ago. “Florida has beautiful flowers everywhere. There are magnolias with huge, white flowers and oleander that grows like a weed. The trees in St Augustine just reach over the street like a cathedral. But I missed the lilacs,” she said.

The first time her three children ever saw daffodils was the spring that she and her husband, Bruce, came north to house hunt in Newtown. “They thought it was just amazing. Ram Pasture looked so beautiful, and they could not believe the daffodils just growing along the roads.”

In a turnaround, former Newtown Bee Associate Editor Kaaren Valenta migrated to Florida from Newtown and has found gardening there to be profoundly different. “When my husband, Jerry, and I lived in a wooded, four-acre property on the shady side of a hill in Sandy Hook for 21 years, we found that the only things that grew were ferns, hosta, bleeding heart, moss, and other forest plants.”

The hot, humid climate of Zone 9b, where she has settled in Florida, caught her entirely off guard, she said. “I didn’t even recognize many of the trees and plants, except poinsettias, which grow outside in abundance all winter long,” said Ms Valenta. Because the deer in Sandy Hook always had the opportunity to enjoy the tulips and lilacs before she could, she has hardly missed those northern spring bloomers.

After years of shady gardening in a short growing season, the Valentas have embraced the new environment, planting palms, live oak, pentas, ixoras, Indian Hawthorne, and lilies that grow three feet high.

“I’ve learned there are microzones here, each with different requirements, depending on their proximity to the ocean. It is certainly a learning experience,” she added.

Don’t Lie On The Lawn

Way down south in Texas is where Robert and Judi Feldman and daughter, Vanessa, found themselves last year after a lifetime of living in New England.

“In order for [plants] to thrive down here,” said Ms Feldman, “it has to be heat tolerant. The sun is scorching.”

The grass, the crape myrtle trees, and the wildflowers were the most obvious differences between northern and southern gardens that the Feldmans noticed right off the bat after relocating to Texas. “St Augustine and Bermuda grasses are the usual choices for lawns and feel almost crunchy underfoot. It is not the type of lawn you want to lie on,” she commented.

There is a beauty to the Texas wildflowers along the roadsides that draws people to pull over to take pictures, she said, and she has already designated the Texas bluebonnet as her new favorite flower. “You see a blanket of blue wherever you go,” said Ms Feldman.

But crocus and daffodils cannot flourish in the Texas heat, so the Feldmans were not able to enjoy the swaths of spring color they had always witnessed in New England. “It seems like we have springlike weather most months of the year, so there is no obvious transition to a new season. Rob really misses the fall foliage,” she said.

But Texas gardening is minus one big pest that she really does not miss, added Ms Feldman — the deer. “[The deer] stick to the really woody areas. They also seem a lot smaller and scrawnier…. Newtown definitely offers a better ‘deer diet!’”

In Los Alamos, N.M., where Newtown gardener Sarah Middeleer grew up, the mountainous area produced vegetation very different from what she knows as a New Englander. “I do miss the Chimisa shrub. It has lovely yellow flowers that attract butterflies. It would just never grow here, though. Another one that I loved was the quaking aspen. In the fall, the hills are yellow with the aspen, and it was so beautiful,” recalled Ms Middeleer.

In returning to her hometown, Ms Middeleer is always taken with the potentillas, lavender, and larkspur that spread across the western landscape. “It is so obvious to me that good gardening has to do with understanding the soil type, and having the right plant for the right climate,” she said.

One plant that has thrived from northern New York to northern New Mexico to northern Fairfield County is Ms Middeleer’s very special dark blue, bearded iris. “My mom brought it from Buffalo to New Mexico, and then she gave some of the rhizomes to me and I brought it here. It is my favorite flower,” Ms Middeleer said.

Geraniums As Weeds

For Kim Weber, the years she spent in Modesto, Calif., awakened her to a very different type of gardening than she had grown up with in Connecticut. “I missed the dogwoods and I couldn’t do any bulbs there. When we first moved to Modesto, I would try to grow things my mom had always grown and the nurseries there just didn’t carry those plants.” Lilacs, such a favorite that she now grows eight different varieties in her Newtown yard, were just a memory when she lived in California.

Her neighbors found it amusing that she thought geraniums were potted plants. “There, they were so common, almost like weeds, that putting geraniums in pots would be like New Englanders putting out a pot of pachysandra,” she laughed.

What she could grow in central California that do not thrive so well here, were the fruit trees. “We had a persimmon tree, an orange tree, a lemon tree, an almond, apple, and plum tree all in our little yard. In January, the citrus trees are blooming and it smells so good,” she said.

“It was very different gardening in California,” said Ms Weber, who has “repotted” herself to New England for many years now, with a stopover in Minnesota. “What I love here is that it is dripping with greenness.”

Peter and Linda Lubinsky have wandered a bit further afield from their Newtown residence. They have lived in Japan, England, and France at various times during the past 15 years, each of which offered plantings that were a big contrast to their homeland gardens.

“We think we have pretty azaleas here,” said Ms Lubinsky, “but the azaleas in Japan were just spectacular. At the Azalea Temple outside of Tokyo, 40 to 50 feet on either side of the hill going up the temple stairs was carpeted in azaleas.” Nor is it merely the quantity that differentiates the Japanese azaleas from those grown stateside. “The blossoms are enormous and the plants themselves are huge. I think it is just that being at a little more of a southern latitude than Newtown is what makes the difference,” she said.

Pink Snow

In April, as happens in our nation’s capitol, cherry blossoms burst into color in Japan, she recalled. “The Japanese call it ‘pink snow’ because the streets are covered in the blossoms, there are so many.” Even before the cherry blossoms burst forth, though, March was the month when people there bundled up against the chill spring winds to view the ume plum blossoms. “The Japanese really paid homage to the plum and cherry blossoms and enjoyed them so much,” Ms Lubinsky said.

“When we returned to Newtown, we missed the cherry trees of Japan so much that we planted seven cherry trees along our driveway here,” she added. Though not so spectacular as their counterparts in Japan, the trees burst forth each spring to remind them of their time in Tokyo.

While living in southern England in the late 1990s, Ms Lubinsky said she became enamored of another sight that is not to be seen here in Newtown. “England is famous for its bluebells. You go into the woods [in England] and the floors of the forest would be carpeted in blue in the springtime. It was lovely.”

In France, where the Lubinsky’s also spent time, the spectacular formal gardens were memorable, but it was the vegetable gardens there that stood out. “When you buy your produce in France, it is like going to the ultimate farmer’s market. Everything was so fresh, and the variety was incredible. I had one guest who took pictures of the tomatoes and strawberries, they were so beautiful.”

The plethora of farmers’ markets in Europe was not only beneficial to daily menu, but, “It encourages people to cook seasonally,” Ms Lubinsky stated, “which, of course, reduces the carbon footprint.”

Traveling to the Netherlands gave her the chance to compare apples to apples, or rather, tulips to tulips. “Here, the deer usually get to the tulips before they really get going. In Keukenhof, Holland, though, the tulip farms were spectacular. When you fly over the fields, it’s like someone took a big paintbrush and painted a big stripe of purple, a big stripe of yellow, a big stripe of red, and on and on. We just don’t see that here,” she said.

The snips and snails and puppy dog tails of gardens may vary from coast to coast and shore to shore, but one thing does not waver: the appreciation gardeners have for the many beautiful faces of nature.