Chapter I : High Falls, the Garden

HIGH FALLS GARDEN

This book got its start on a warm spring day, when I was walking through the West Village in New York.  I was thirsty and went into a small shop on Bank Street to get some water.   I only had a $100 bill on me and the shop lady said she had no change for that.  I looked at her and could tell she expected me to put the bottle back but I said: "So now what? You really want me to put it back?"  She raised eye-brows, meaning yes.

And just then, a young guy behind me in cut offs and sleeveless shirt said: "I'll get that."  My first reaction was to refuse but I was really thirsty and I said: "Well that's really nice of you." He paid for my water, took his stuff and left.  After that I went to the West Side Piers and lay in the grass enjoying the spring sun.

It was crowded in the park, looked like everyone was having  a good time, enjoying each other and the midtown and downtown skylines.  And in the middle of all these people I saw the guy in the cut offs.   I still had the $100 bill in my pocket, went up to him and said: "Thank you again for your generosity.  Let me return the favor and buy you a coffee." And he said: "I was actually thinking about a beer. So you have a coffee, and me a beer."

We walked over to one of the waterfront cafes.... What should we talk about? I asked him if he had already seen the park gardens on the waterfront.  "No, are they any good?"  I said: Yes, very nicely done.   And I gave him a bit of the history of the old West Side Highway, the rotting piers and the seedy greasy side streets of the old West Village and how the new waterfront park had cleaned up the neighborhood and spurred new growth with handsome apartment buildings and nice shops.

So we sat and talked.  And we talked about parks and about plants and gardens and about architecture .  And that's what we have been doing ever since:  talking about gardens.

Appears my new friend is from France and his name is David, pronounced Daveed and he is in charge of some public gardens in a small town in Burgundy.  

The next week, I invited him to come and spend some time at my place upstate New York and have a look at my gardens of which I had been telling him so much...

Hanging out in my gardens, he asked me "Have you ever thought about writing a book about your garden and your house?"

"Of course, I would love to but I have no idea if I have it in me or really how to get started."

"But like this, your book will never be written."

"That's true, so why don't we start tonight? "

"You have a tape recorder?" "Of course.  I used to be a lawyer and dictating was second nature."

We poured some cocktails, finished off dinner, got the tape recorder and that's where the book begins.

This book is about having a garden, about working in a garden, about loving a garden.

This book is about being the man in the garden, about spending mornings and evenings bent over pulling weeds, transplanting the plants that need to be moved;  reflecting on what to tackle next, what other beauty to create. 

The garden is the territory you are in charge of.  And my garden is the one I'm the  Master of....... the one I happen to live in.   My garden, my territory where I determine what will happen, how things will look, what is going to live and what is not and what shape it will grow in.

A garden is nature.  A garden is the artificial part of nature.  A garden is the enclosed part of nature, keeping out wilderness and bringing in control.   The word garden derives from the Latin "hortus gardinus" which means "enclosed garden".  The Dutch word, 'tuin' is a small enclosed space, the English word, 'town' a somewhat larger enclosed space, and the German word "Zaun', the enclosure itself.   Early gardens were courtyards or outdoor gardens walled in stone, to protect them from outside elements.  And even these days we still put up deer fences to protect them from the outside.

When you enclose a space, control is easy.  When you are the one in control, the master of the land, you carry the responsibility to make the place as magnificent as you can according to your standards of aesthetics and beauty.  In other words, hard work.  And in return for those efforts, you will reap the height of satisfaction, pride, pleasure, contentedness and what I have come to experience as 'easy happiness'.

This book is about my garden and my house.  This book reflects the musings of a gardener.  Thoughts, worries and concerns mulled over while working in the garden. This is not a didactic piece.  This book is not about telling you what to do with your garden but rather me telling you what I do with mine.

Most of all, the book is about passion. Passion for things that grow. Passion for our distant cousins, plants and flowers. Passion about helping out, feeding, changing, watering, deciding and manipulating, about gardening. Passion about beauty and being happy.

This book is also about the person who is passionate about all those things. Someone who wanders the garden an hour before sunset and who cannot cease to be thrilled by manmade beauty.  Years ago, my 10 year old niece came up to me checking out to see what I was doing. She saw how hard I was working in the garden.  With a vengeance, as usual.  She flapped: "Ahh, you work in the garden all the time. Of course, that's because you don't have anything else to do."

I looked at her and thought: "That's a pretty smart thing to say." And then I thought she might be right. But she was right only in part. It was not because I had nothing else to do, it was because I chose not to do anything else. 

Every time I work in the garden, she's right there with me.

This book is not a didactic one. It does not aim to teach. It does, however, discuss strategy of investment of the money you spend. Investment of all the precious time you spend in your garden.

You may, for instance, want to spend as little time as possible on activities that do not produce visible returns.

What kind of return of investment do you aim for. Any return? Let me mention a few.

A high return on investment is a perennial you plant as a seed in the greenhouse or in situ in the garden where it is to bloom. The plant that emerges from the seed lasts a lifetime, a perennial that will be with you for the remainder of your life.

A high return on investment is straightening the edges of a path, enhancing the architectural lines in the garden. If it is a clean line, the path, it matters little what grows in the border. If a well tended environment matters to you, then straightening edges or raking a path will give you tremendous ROI.

You've earned a high return on investment if you enjoy the results of your work.

What is it you love?

Enjoyment, visual joy. Or sitting back and relaxing. Not having to do anything other than what you really want to do. Reading a book. Talking to a friend. Cook. Walk. Write. Whatever you want to do.

It may be the elation of walking through your garden and seeing what you have done, is good. You've worked a wonderful thing! That is a high return on investment.

Why do I Garden?

Well, the simplest answer to that is because I am outdoors all the time, because of all the things I can do during the day this is what i choose to do.  I can't think of anything I'd rather do.  And often, time in the garden comes at the expense of other things I need to do.    

[Except of course during the winter which I define as "access to garden denied".]  And when you're outside all the time, what better thing to do than get your hands dirty working the soil and beautify.  Really, the oldest profession in the world:  Work the land......

Sometimes, when I walk in my garden, I'll see an area that doesn't look so good any longer or more likely, has never looked good.  It's a wild overgrown area waiting to be tackled with creativity and a strong kind hand.   It is one of those areas that have become visibly unacceptable, a reason for embarrassment for me, a great threshold for a new project.....  I love to imagine what I can make it look like, I love to squint hard and see the imagined end result before I have even lifted a shovel.  That's why I garden, to create something that wasn't there before, to make a new area magnificent.

During the blooming season,  I'll walk into the garden with scissors or secateurs to cut some flowers.  As I walk along the paths I'll imagine what blooms will look best in the vase I am planning and carefully pick them.  For me nothing matches the elation and happiness I experience when I walk back to the house, arms loaded with flowers.  I am rich.  I bring the harvest in.  That's why I garden.

Watch me pull my garden cart filled with 30 shovels of mulch and dirt.  Listen to my heart pound at 120 beats a minute.  Watch my chest heave and fill with clean air.  Look at me squatted down in the middle of a flower bed, get up and squat down again to pull out weeds.  A very serious abs and buttocks workout.   Three times a year the barberry hedges that circle the Oval Garden need trimming.  In the earlier days they reached to my shoulders.  Holding the electric clipper above my shoulders for 2-3 hours proved to be unpleasant and impossible, so I have now lowered the hedges to chest level.   I do work out at my gym regularly but there is nothing as exhilarating as pure exhausting physical labor that serves a purpose other than phys ed.  That's why  I garden?

And the best thing about gardening is that it never ends.  I remember the first day in the garden many years ago right after I bought the house, when I bought a shovel and stuck it in the ground where it hit a multitude of rocks hiding right under the surface.  Upstate New York is built on solid rock about 4 - 5 feet deep, much of which dates back to the Devonian Period (app. 350-400 million years ago).  The soil on top of it is richly sprinkled with loose stones of all dimensions that can be handled only with the muscular bluster of a pick axe.   It was obvious the shovel wasn't going to do.  I got myself a pick axe and I still use it as my most trusted tool. 

I have worked many hours over the seasons and years and am proud of the things I achieved and delighted with the happiness it brought me.  When I look back at older photographs of the garden I smile at the simplicity of the early garden just as I will smirk at the pictures i take today, many years from now.   For the work in the garden will never be finished.

What kind of garden is yours?.

I have never classified my garden.  My High Falls garden doesn't fit any of the garden definitions. It is not a French Formal Garden, although there are some borders that are handsomely defined by trimmed boxwood.  It is not an English Landscape Garden, with winding paths, ponds and temples, bridges and groupings of dignified trees, endless orchard alleys and tall background perennials with smaller ones closer to the path, making it all look rather like a Cottage Garden. 

It is not a Vegetable Garden, although there is a small kitchen yard near the house that hosts lovage, parsley, sweet basilicum, oregano, rosemary, mint, arugula and shallots that come in so handy to give a pinch of herbal taste to dinner.

Not a Fernery, although over the years I have brought in many different kinds of ferns from the woods or catalogs.    They have all thrived and some have morphed into enormous invasive clusters.

It is a Flower garden, an Herb Garden, a Rose Garden, a Shade Garden, a White Garden, a Wildflower Garden and when it is cold, it is a Winter Garden.  But most of all it is a Pleasure Garden, a Garden of Delight, where fragrance, color, shape, architectural lines and structures, topiaries, spewing fountains, mini waterfalls, wisteria structures and bird song, stimulate all of our senses.  And of course, in this garden the birds are happy too.....  

.

When you started out in High Falls, you say there was no garden at all.  So how did you begin?  What were your thoughts and ideas?

In the beginning there was no great design scheme that was the basis for the garden.  I started in a corner somewhat near the house.  After many years of doing basic work, buying delphiniums and other first-time-gardener-plants and discovering the excitement of basic gardening, I began to understand the importance of the lay of the land, the position of the sun on a summer afternoon or the long lines on the grass an hour before sunset, and all the other essential elements that define the locus of the garden, where it nestles in its micro-climates, the windy nooks and the places by the water in the ponds that never freeze and where I dare to plant lower-zoned plants.
  

All these fundamentals which a good and professional landscaper would have taken one afternoon to comprehend, took me five years, i think to grasp.

Have you always loved working in your garden?

When I  was a kid, growing up in a small town in the South of Holland, I remember I was expected to be helping my parents in the garden.  Or, maybe it was me who always volunteered, or who best responded to a "go help your dad" nudge.  I don't recall any of my brothers or sisters spending much time in the garden helping them out.   It was always me who was digging in the garden.

This is 1968.  My dad and I working in the garden.  My father is fully dressed in a suit, including tie.  I have never seen him otherwise....

Growing up in Holland, it's natural that you know the basics of gardening, of setting up borders, of planting, of bulbs, of doing drudge maintenance work, of developing a sense of aesthetics and of developing ideas of what is beautiful.  Everyone has a garden there and everyone takes enormous pride in making it as lovely as they can.   

When I moved to New York, the 22nd floor of an apartment building in Greenwich Village was my home.  I quickly realized that if I was going to get my hands dirty, do some digging and connect with the earth I'd have to get either a very expensive terrace apartment in Manhattan or find a place somewhere out of the city.

So when I got my place upstate with 5 acres of "undeveloped yard",  I had found my pristine canvas and have worked and labored very hard in it for almost 30 years.

Who helps you with all the work in the garden?  Or do you do all the work yourself?

When people visit me in the garden for the first time they invariably ask "who does all this work around here?"   [When people ask a question like that they most often have already reviewed the possible answers and have settled on a credible response. ]

When I tell them I do all the work here, most seem incredulous because of the sheer size of the garden, the acres of lawn that need to be cut in what must be several hours on a tractor and the thousands of weeds that require attention on  a somewhat regular basis.

I realize the size of the garden would frighten any person.  I do admit that some days in May when everything pushes out of the ground, I do stumble back to the house mumbling this has gotten to be too much and I can no longer do this.  But then I had that same feeling 20 years ago or so when the garden was much smaller.

I have learned to take small steps at a time.  While I am fortunate that my time in the garden is not limited to just Saturdays, I have learned to pace my garden labor across large swaths of time.  The lawns are big, but I don't cut all of the grass in  one sitting.  The lawns closest to the house get the most attention, the ones far away, a bit less.   But I will see to it at all times the overall impression of the garden will be a handsome one.

 

Three or four tractor runs a week, filling in small parts of a lazy afternoon of 30 - 45 minutes each, make controlling the expanse of green seem like child's' work.  

And weeding on a somewhat regular basis?   That is not a criterion I apply.   When I walk though the garden my eye will always be aware of the overall impression any corner gives.  If one area has too many weeds to still be aesthetically welcome here, I will zoom in on that corner with and make sure that at the end of an hour it will be weed free and ready for a close-up.  But it is a last ditch effort.  Only if it had become completely unacceptable for visual pleasure will i focus on cleaning it up. 

Which brings me to weeds. 

I was working out at my gym the other day and a lean man next to me was doing hundreds of sit ups on an incline bench.  When he was finished I asked him how many he was doing.    'Hundreds' he replied 'but I have to develop a strong lower back because I am bent over most of the summer'.  With that, he had immediately identified himself as a gardener because no one else will spend the summer bent over unless you are the master of your land and you need to get rid of all things that do not belong there:  weeds, the elephant in the room of gardening, because dealing with them will take up most of your time in the garden.  

It's an unattractive subject but I must give it attention because it is so big.  I spend much time, really most of my time in the garden (trying to) eradicate weeds.

Whether you work with pre-emergent weed control or outright weed killer, the only way your garden will truly be weed free is through your time spent on it.  Not all bad really.  I have learned to enjoy it, working my land and shaping it to my vision.  It gives me much time to think about anything that enters my brain.

If your garden has any size it will never be fully weed free, unless you have a staff of helpers.

ARE ALL WEEDS EQUAL?    

 Let's talk about the sly and the bad.   The slyest of them all is the weed whose foliage or hue mimics that of the plant it stands next to.   It thinks it will be invisible to me and escape my pull.  At times I will look down on it in complete fascination at how similarly it presents itself to the world.  Almost identical coloring and leaf shape, yet only subtle differences that distinguish the prince from the poor relative.  Years of experience have taught me to discern and I smirk when I see the futile attempt at deceiving me.

The worst of the weeds is the one with the strongest root system.  The root snaps off when you pull it or it has knitted a dense matted root system, as has the clover.  So what to do?

Water is the biggest enemy of roots.  Soak the soil around the weed roots till the soils turn to mud and then gently pull it out, by hand by gently jiggling it by its base or with a pitchfork if it is particularly rebellious.  Resistance to mud is futile.

  

A silent pull? 

When you pull the weed out and you hear something snap, you know that part of the root is still intact underground.  A root by itself will not grow a new plant because it requires an outlet into the light.  Depending on how deep the root system broke off underground, it will not have the capacity to start a new plant. 

Water is the biggest enemy of roots.  Soak the soil around the weed roots till the soils turn to mud and then gently pull it out by hand gently jiggling it by its base or with a pitchfork if it is particularly rebellious.  Resistance to mud is futile.  No snap.

So now that you have piles of weeds lying around, I like to use them as local compost, ball them up and toss them under the foliage  of established  perennials.
  

Do you like to weed?

Gardening  and weeding are pretty much the same thing.   Weeding is working on the aesthetics of the garden, making sure you create beauty and maximize your easy happiness because a garden full of weeds is not a garden of visual delight. 

A weedy garden is like a cluttered house.  How much nicer is the house after you have straightened it up and cleaned all the surfaces.   A clutter free garden is the standard I have set.  If I walk around the garden paths with friends, a drink and Duke in tow, i want laughter and calm good looks.

Would I be happier if there weren't any weeds?

I have come to respect unavoidability of weeds.  They show such enthusiasm & power.  It is only I, the boss around here who has determined they have no place here. 

If there were no weeds, much of the challenge of gardening as I have come to know it, would be gone. A weedless environment would be like having a garden on Astroturf.

Stone is the glue of High Falls. 

It is our most natural and abundant building block.  Between 3 to 5 feet beneath the soil, we live on solid bedrock broken up by occasional subterranean streams.   Our land is surrounded by small quarries and shale groves. 

Every wallop with my pick axe produces a small number of flat stones that pop up from the soil.   I use them to build the 'wallettes' that separate the borders from the lawn and paths. 

Stone is everywhere.

I love using big rectangle boulders for big projects.  The treacherous slope on the south side of the house needed some work to prevent more twisted ankles.

A young guy about a mile from the house had solid stones lying in his yard we decided to use.  After he and his friends dropped them off at the top of the slope I set out to install them myself.  Or so I thought. 

The picture above here shows the result of a day's work:   me and my muscle power, tactical intelligence,  metal levers, some wooden slides,  heavy breathing and gravity.   All I managed was to  install the bottom step.

The next day, the three guys were back and finished the job.   Now anyone in even 6-inch high heels  has no problem  ascending the steps.

 Click here for the link to the GARDEN CONSERVANCY OPEN DAYS ON SEPTEMBER 17, 2011