The Orangery in progress… Our major project for the winter is slowly coming together!

The gardens have been ready for winter since mid-December. The evergreens and shrubs (all 500+ of them) are wrapped to protect them from deer( who will eat ANYTHING green in the winter if they’re hungry enough) and from the winds which can desiccate the bark.

All plants that we overwinter are now in the east wing of the new Orangery. Those requiring winter light are on display on shelving while plants requiring winter dormancy are in a cooler, dark and window-less room.

During the coming winter we will lay the brick paver floors in the east and west wings and install the ceramic tile dado on the walls to protect them from water spray. Both wings have been completely painted in bright white for high light levels. We have started to prepare the wall sconces for both our tropical plant display wings. Victorian era house brackets have been dipped and stripped ready for new paint. We are presently building custom-designed light fixtures to be attached to the brackets and these will become unique wall sconces.

Christmas is over now so we’ll begin thinking about starting pelargonium cuttings and later, seeds for spring planting, although I’m reminded that it’s just about time to start onion seeds to get them big and strong enough to be planted outdoors in early spring. (Onion seeds appear to be more successful at producing large plants than onion sets, we’ve found).

In the meantime, planning of the new Orangery planting design must begin. Semi-tropical plants must be selected and their contribution to the overall design layout considered, reconsidered, thought through once again, contemplated, revised, relocated and then – tracked down and acquired for planting at the right time in the coming spring.

We have yet to resolve the heating system for the building. We’ve seriously considered geothermal heating similar to the system in our house but it is extremely expensive. We are now looking at propane systems which have a lower capital cost but higher operating costs. At the moment, heat is being provided to all three wings of the building by three temporary electric heaters.

Since we now have an operating well and pressure system for water, we are digging trenches through the Orangery and installing large underground conduits for the water lines which are to be buried under the floor.

When the conduits are buried, we can start installing the brick pavers which will be the finished floor surface. So far about 800 square feet of brick floor has been laid.

Baginning to lay pavement in the Orangery…

November 5, 2012: After two days of on-again off-again rain, I went for a walk through SpindleTree this morning despite the drizzle.

It’s all very well rhapsodising about how beautiful autumn is seen through the windows of our house but the sheer brilliance of the colours compels me to go out to touch them, to walk among them, to feel and smell the last vestiges of autumn before the wind and the rain wash the colours from the land and white winter sets in. The square stemmed burning bush (Euonymous alata) so brilliantly rose-red against the dark green yews, is changing to rusty orange. The witch hazel (Hamamelis virginiana) beside it has bright lemon yellow leaves which light up the gray sky and draw one closer to its glow. And there, finally, as I have been forecasting to everyone touring SpindleTree this past year, are its early winter citrus-fragrant explosions of pale yellow fuzzy catkins.

The Koreanspice viburnums (Viburnum carlesii), so intoxicating in spring with their lovely perfume and pink buds which open to white flower clusters, have now renewed their appeal by transforming their sage green foliage into masses of burgundy coloured leaves across which a clump of silver-grey raspberry bushes scratch their sweeping curves.

The fall asters and tall Michaelmas daisies, until a few days ago still flush with rose, mauve, white and green, have changed to shades of pale gold and brown and bow down towards the ground in a sad obeisance to the passing of summer and the brilliant palette of autumn.

Postscript - November 19: The witch hazel is still in full bloom, casting its own special lemon coloured light into the pallid mist of morning. The bittersweet vine (Celastrus scandens) has lost its leaves; its orange seed casings with red seeds are brilliantly coloured food for the birds. The bright pink seed pods of the spindle trees have faded to a mediaeval purple but the seeds themselves are a soft amber and contrast beautifully with the nearby dwarf blue spruce shrubs. There is still lots of colour everywhere when you look for it.

I know I promised you more on the Orangery – figs, pomegranates and so on – but writing about such things, until we get ourselves sorted out for winter, seems premature.

As usual, we had our first frost on Thanksgiving. The gardens are pretty much finished for the year – onions and carrots in the ground still but they will be harvested soon and some Swiss chard which we are nurturing for as long as possible. Our season for visitors has ended. But not the work!

Now comes a long list of garden tasks including weeding, tidying, bulb planting, leaf raking and piling,mulching, pruning and clipping where needed, sorting out the compost area and so on, not to mention the time consuming job of ‘wrapping’. During the next month and a half over 2,000 wooden stakes will be driven into the ground around more than 500 trees and shrubs which will be covered with a white felt-like fabric. Two cedar hedges, each more than 200 feet long, have to be wrapped with this same resilient, long-lasting material. All this wrapping does three things: protects the plants from the wind which could desiccate them, reflects the sun to prevent freeze/thaw and prevents deer from munching on them in the winter.

Some sections of the garden are already wrapped! We'll need to do this for more than 500 trees and shrubs before the winter sets in.

October is a bit late to be planting daffodils but we had trouble with our order this year which accounts for the lag. We will plant them along with crocus (because we love them even though we know the chipmunks and squirrels will probably dig them up), tulips (ditto) and eremurus (also known as the foxtail lily which can grow up to six feet tall in June. Note: – they hate wet feet so if you have dense or clay soil put a layer of sand under their spidery roots). And in the new, ‘north front’ beds beside the Orangery doors we’re adding scilla, Allium nectaroscordum siculum (Mediterranean bells) and muscari. We also plant next year’s crop of garlic in the walled kitchen garden in October. It will be harvested next August.

Pumps have to be removed from ponds and fountains until spring. This is a really cold job in October because you have to get in the water to retrieve them. And there are several dead elm trees (so sad) that have to be removed. Benches and chairs have to be stored and the new top on the maze tower must be taken down and put into storage along with antique gates and pots and planters that can’t take freezing weather. Pots that remain outside for the winter have to be wrapped in plastic to keep them dry and free from frost damage.

Many non-hardy plants are being moved into our orangery to keep our new fig tree company. We received this welcome gift from neighbour and artist Chris Broadhurst, a keen plantsman and grower of the world’s most delicious figs. Pond plants also come in and water lilies are lowered to the bottom of ponds where possible.

Looking back over the year, it was a challenging time what with March being so warm, April so cold and then the long drought. The trees, shrubs and plants (not to mention the gardeners) were so confused, they didn’t flower at all or they flowered twice or their bloom was half the normal size. In spite of it all, we got a lot done.

The new Jubilee pond, built this year, is almost full of water and ready for winter and its role next year as an irrigation source. The Orangery, while not yet finished inside, is protecting our tender plants. It is weatherproof, waterproof and warm. As always we will be on the lookout for white fly and aphids which seem, no matter how careful you are, to hatch inside over the winter.

The maze continues to amaze us with wonderful growth that after only 3 years has reached seven feet high and required it’s first major haircut. The tower in the maze was completed early this year when its golden, antique fleur-de-lys top was installed – it looks great against the dark pine background.

Finally, the tool and equipment shed built in 1995, has been completely renovated, tarted up and turned into a gorgeous gift shop filled with SpindleTree souvenirs (tee shirts, hats, clothing, aprons), wonderful artisan creations from our local craftspeople and useful items for gardeners hands, fingers, feet and hearts!

We’ll be repairing benches and gates, painting the miniature buildings that act as croquet hoops (they’ve taken a real beating over the years), cleaning equipment and working in the Orangery and greenhouse getting ready for opening day in Spring, 2013. I’ll be resuming the blog in January and will let you know of our progress then. Wish us luck… there’s a long road ahead between now and then!

If you visited us this past year, thank you for coming to SpindleTree. If you missed us in 2012, there is a brand new season just waiting round the corner – we open with our gala Mother’s Day Tea on Sunday, 12 May, 2013. And yes, you can make reservations for this delicious event now…. just give us a call or email. See you then! And our best wishes for happy holidays to you and your family!

Next time: Snowing, blowing and growing….

Eunoymous chinensis in Autumn!

There’s no question that the heat and drought this summer has been relentlessly indifferent to the concerns of farmers and gardeners alike and, as a consequence, caring for the gardens has provoked sleepless nights, deeper frown lines and become, at times, wholly disheartening.

Into each life, however, a little literary rain must fall:  re-reading the late Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (an appropriate book for the past sun-scorched season as it involves much heat and burning  – books,, people, houses, vegetation – indeed, an entire city) I came upon this passage which gave me a welcome affirmation about why we continue to fight the good fight with our gardens and try to come  to terms with whatever Mother Nature chooses to dish out:

“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said.  A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made.  Or a garden planted.  Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there.  It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, as long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away.  The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said.  The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all;  the gardener will be there a lifetime.”

DROUGHT! This year we had no rain (NO RAIN!) from May 30th to the 26th July. None at all.
Generally we try not to water the gardens because it is not good for root growth. We never water the lawns because it takes too long, costs too much and is a waste of our precious water supply.

In the spring of this year, we constructed the Jubilee Pond, a 500,000 litre concrete reservoir. Now I need two things to happen. First, we have been working with Hydro One for several months (!) to get power to run a well pump and second, I’ve been alternately begging and castigating the gods about the catastrophic lack of rain.

In the first week of August, we received just one rainfall which fortunately saved most of the plants (but not all) and our trees including the new black cedars around the Jubilee Pond.

Fast-forward through August to the beginning of September. In the first week of autumn, we have had two torrential rainfalls and have collected 14 inches of water in the Jubilee Pond, virtually all of it off the roof of our new Orangery/greenhouse. That amounts to 100,000 litres of water from two rainfalls!

By sheer coincidence, on the day before our biggest rainfall, I received a newly published book titled Cacti and Succulents for Cold Climates from Susie.

Clearly we are becoming schizophrenic about the future of gardening. Water collecting and water usage are the two faces of the future that we are having to come to terms with.

Surprisingly, the many pots of flowers located throughout the gardens have been a great and beautiful success this year. The lack of general watering has meant focusing more than usual attention on these pots as they have been an absolute must for watering and the water has contained fertilizers that watering from a hose could not provide.

“Hands-on” works best, as usual.

And, finally, as we approach the end of the gardening season and start to get organized for winter, we expect another rather daunting project to occupy us till spring. That project is the completion of the interior of our Orangery and the research into selections of plants, trees and shrubs that will hopefully grow and flourish (as well as over-winter) in that new environment.

It promises to be an exciting, busy winter.

Next time: Figs, pomegranates, banana and citrus…

Back in April, I ended that blog by saying I would talk about ‘Gardens – plus and minus’ but as you know the muskrats got in the way. For the moment, they appear to be gone (fingers still crossed) so here are some thoughts on ‘ Gardens – plus and minus’.

When Susie and I started all this, perennials were the thing. They provide most of the colour in a garden. They reappear every spring. They (generally) are long-lived and require less planting work and, especially, less money than buying new annuals every year. Definitely, a win-win or plus-plus situation.

However, they do require care such as weeding, fertilizing and mulching on a regular basis. Occasionally, they disappear and have to be replaced, so they still require you to spend a lot of time on your knees working with them. As one gets older this is less a plus and more a minus…

Last year, at this time, SpindleTree ordered 285 perennials as part of our spring order. This year the perennial order is only 94 plants. Conversely, the order this year has many more trees and shrubs than last year. And that doesn’t include the 123 Thuja nigra (black cedar) we have ordered for the hedge around the Jubilee pond.

Clearly, we are shifting our gardening emphasis from perennials to shrubs and trees. Once installed, they simply require less maintenance on a daily basis (once they’re established, I should add – a lot of watering until then) and, depending on the selection made, they can have a major impact on a garden all year round, summer or winter. The sizes, textures and colours now available in both deciduous and coniferous varieties can quickly modify a garden both in scale and impact.

Bronzine ninebark (Physcocarpus opulifolius ‘Mindia’ Coppertina) and red or yellow barberry (Berberis thunbergii atropurpurea ‘Rose Glow’ or Berberis thunbergii ‘Bonanza Gold’), for instance, add structure and colour that can compete with perennials yet reduce the day-to-day effort in maintenance required. This year we ordered 3 Acer griseum (Paperbark maple with ornamental, peeling orange-cinnamon bark) which will be featured on the ‘island’ in the Jubilee pond along with three Viburnum carlesii (Koreanspice, a viburnum cultivar with delicate grey-green leaves and a heavenly spring scent).

This simple planting plan in a prominent position will have a major impact, spring through fall, on the SpindleTree tour, especially when viewed over the water and against the surrounding black cedar hedge.

The vicissitudes of dealing with flora and fauna in the country can sometimes be almost overwhelming. At the time of my last blog, as well as working on all our new projects, muskrats rose to an unwelcome prominence in our consciousness.

Last autumn, a family of these critters (pace my wife’s favourite book when she was a child ‘The Wind in the Willows’) invited themselves into Long Pond. “How wonderful” we said. “Nature in its glory” we cried.

To our chagrin the water level in the pond began to drop. And drop. And drop finally by three feet. Winter came and we could only surmise that they had chewed through our thick (and we thought, inedible) rubber pond liner. Finally, in mid May we found a small hole. Then we found another hole, big enough to drive a tractor through. Well, we thought, better check further along the edge of the pond, just in case…. Oh, joy! Now another hole, even bigger than the last one. And then another and another….

It took an entire week for the two of us to discover, uncover, clean and patch the holes (a messy, glue-y job) and restore the bottom edge of the pond, all this while trying not to destroy the beautiful red water lily plants in this particular area of Long Pond.

Filling the pond will take about 70,000 gallons (300,000 litres) of water and take three or four days. We’re praying for rain… (and hoping the muskrats have moved on to better accommodation elsewhere).

Mother Nature can be a very tough task-master when you have to deal with her head-on.

It has been SO busy around here for the last month that it was a shock to realize Mother’s Day had arrived. Especially shocking was the fact that it was our opening day and Susie was having a Jubilee Mother’s Day afternoon tea. Little sandwiches (crusts cut off!) and tea and Victoria sponges, tea breads, cakes and pastries for days! We were saved by the exertions of two friends from Toronto who came to our assistance (no, to our rescue) and with Susie at the helm, worked and baked and decorated and worked some more for three exhausting days that ended in a very successful tea party held amidst Union Jack bunting, the royal coat of arms (immense, in the tea room) and a pretty portrait of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, post-coronation and dewy as a rose.

Since “I-am-not-a-cook”, it must be self evident that for me to be busy something else must have been happening at SpindleTree!

In fact, the second phase of the new curved Orangery (Fr. ‘orangerie’) is well under construction (the first wing was roofed in last autumn) and the 60 (count ‘em – 60) French doors are almost all painted (three coats of paint each side for a total of 360 doors painted!). Thirty-three of them are installed and exterior work has started on the first wing.

Because we ran out of water for the gardens last fall, I have been mulling over whether or not to build a water reservoir. This spring, as well, brought a fairly long period with no rain that finally prompted the design of an elliptical reservoir that will hold 450,000 litres of water. Having designed it and seeing a potential drought coming, we decided to build it. Construction started in mid-April and is almost complete now. It has been dubbed the Jubilee Pond and features a walkway across the water that also happens to have a garden of trees and shrubs halfway across. This small ‘emerald isle set in a silver sea’ is now known as England.

First look at what will be the new Jubilee Pond!

As if that isn’t enough to keep us busy, the old tool shed we built in 1995 has been emptied (the tools are now in the storage areas of the new orangery) and completely renovated into a gift shop for SpindleTree aprons and T-shirts and tea cozies and other interesting and/or useful products and is almost ready for its opening day. Still has to be prettied up a bit with some bright fabric on ceiling and windows.

And another thing – we are now offering a variety of perennials for sale along with specimen spindle trees (the spindle trees add a special, autumnal beauty to your garden).

In between all this work we managed to speak to the Kingston Horticultural Society, the Collins Bay Horticultural Society and the Toronto Garden Club. As well, A week before Mother’s Day, Carola Vyhnak came to visit SpindleTree Gardens from Toronto and interviewed us.   To our considerable gratification, her article, complete with colour photos was published in the Toronto Star on May 15 on the front page of the Life section.  It’s nice to get the recognition – it makes us try even harder!

Enough for now. I’m ready for a bit of a rest. Talk to you again soon.

Welcome to the first SpindleTree Gardens blog. I’ll start with a bit of the history behind SpindleTree.

Susie and I have been working away at this place since we acquired it in 1988. Originally it was supposed to be a way of getting away from work in Toronto; just a weekend place in the country. You know, long walks in the sunshine, looking at birds in the trees and animal tracks on the ground. Peace and quiet. Rest and relaxation…

That first summer was warm and comfortable. We would come down on Friday night and return to town on Sunday evening. In between came visits to Kingston or a local auction to see what could be found to furnish our home-away-from-home. There was time, suddenly, to read a book or do nothing much at all.

And then came winter. Arrive at midnight and find that the water line from the well had frozen from lack of use during the week. Try to thaw it out with a hair dryer. Call a plumber. Call a plumber so many times that winter that he became THE plumber and a good friend for almost twenty years now. “Come spring you should really install a new submersible pump in the well, Tom,” he would say while down on hands and knees. “Get rid of this old fashioned system. Then you won’t have any more problems.”

Winter started to wane, the weather warmed and one Friday night we arrived to find the refrigerator, bought second-hand (or third or fourth-hand, who could tell) had given up the ghost. So we shut the door, left everything in it and trucked it off the following day.

Then it sinks in: the time has come to completely redesign, rebuild and refurnish the kitchen and do it in four months to avoid the oncoming new federal GST. We order the appliances on the day before the tax is inflicted on everyone.

Needless to say, the reconstruction spread like a virus into the dining room, living room and cramped, oddly shaped bedrooms. Finally, a huge, new addition to the house was started. For three years thereafter, two ladders and a window opening were the only way to get from one part of the house to the other.

All of this work came, more or less, to an end in 1994. The ensuing lull soon led to the beginning of the gardens at SpindleTree.

That beginning had actually started during our first month here when we built a cedar snake fence along one side of the driveway emphasizing the entrance route leading up to the house. Up until 2002 when we moved down here permanently, we had driven 350,000 km and that snake fence still means we’re home when we drive past it up to the house.

Next time: Beds, Borders and “how does the garden grow?”