My Tenant House Garden
Many of the flowering plants around my Bedford, New York farm are gone, but there's still a lot of beautiful and interesting foliage to enjoy.
The area behind my Tenant House, where my daughter and grandchildren stay when they visit, is filled with shade-loving plants. A couple of years ago, I had several trees taken down from this garden - six 125-foot trees were leaning dangerously close to the structure and had to be removed for safety reasons. I then planted two 10 to 12-foot Japanese maples in the space that will someday provide a little shade to the specimens below. Several smaller Japanese maples were planted last year. Some of the plants in this garden include hellebores, brunnera, hostas, European wild ginger, Astiboides, ferns, lady's mantle, thalictrum, and syneilesis.
Here are some photos, enjoy.
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- I always look for the most interesting plants to add to my gardens. This is Syneilesis – a tough, drought-tolerant, easy-to-grow woodland garden perennial that prefers moist, well-drained, slightly acid soils. If in the proper environment, syneilesis will slowly spread to form an attractive colony.
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- Syneilesis is commonly called the shredded umbrella plant and describes the narrow, dissected leaves that cascade downward like an umbrella.
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- The hostas are so lush with their varying leaf shape, size, and textures. Hostas have easy care requirements which make them ideal for many areas. I have them all around the farm. Hosta is a genus of plants commonly known as hostas, plantain lilies and occasionally by the Japanese name, giboshi. They are native to northeast Asia and include hundreds of different cultivars.
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- A few anemones are still blooming. Anemone is a genus of flowering plants in the buttercup family Ranunculaceae. Most anemone flowers have a simple, daisy-like shape and lobed foliage that sway in the lightest breezes.
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- Brunnera is one of the prettiest plants to include in any shady garden. Brunnera is an herbaceous perennial with leaves that are glossy green or in variegated hues of gray, silver, or white.
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- These are the dainty leaves of thalictrum. Plants in this genus are native to stream banks, shaded mountains, and moist meadows. It grows best in moist, humus-rich soil in partial shade. Thalictrum has some of the most beautifully textured foliage. The name Thalictrum means “to flourish,” and it does, with elegant, finely cut and rounded compound leaves.
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- When blooming, it produces foam-like sprays that resemble Baby’s Breath in shades of lilac and purple.
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- Astilboides is an interesting plant with huge, bright green leaves that are round and flat and measure up to 24-inches across. The effect is dramatic, and beautiful among other hardy perennials.
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- Asarum europaeum, or European Wild Ginger, is a slowly spreading ground cover that is primarily grown for its glossy, leathery, heart-shaped, dark green leaves.
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- Lungwort plants, Pulmonaria, are most often grown for their interesting leaves, which are green with random white spots. The leaves also have a rough, hairy fuzz covering them.
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- These leaves are from the hellebore. I have many hellebores in my gardens. Hellebores are widely grown for decorative purposes because of their love for shady locations and resistance to frost. They have dark green glossy leaves. The flowering plants bloom early in the spring or even late winter.
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- And this is the ostrich fern – a light green clump-forming, upright to arching, rhizomatous, deciduous fern which typically grows up to six feet tall.
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- Some of the ostrich ferns are already changing.
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- Japanese forest grass is an elegant member of the Hakonechloa family. Japanese forest grass is an attractive, graceful plant that grows slowly and is not invasive. The grass grows 18 to 24 inches tall and has an arching habit with long flat, foliar blades. Japanese forest grass comes in several hues and may be solid or striped.
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- Tricyrtis hirta, the toad lily or hairy toad lily, is a Japanese species of hardy herbaceous perennial plant in the lily family Liliaceae. Toad lilies are hardy perennials native to ravines and woodland edges in India, China, Japan, and other parts of Asia. Toad lily flowers bloom in a range of spotted colors in the axels of the plant.
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- This is lady’s mantle, Alchemilla mollis. It’s a clumping perennial which typically forms a basal foliage mound of long-stalked, circular, scallop-edged, toothed, pleated, soft-hairy, light green leaves.
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- Here is one of the two large Japanese maples we planted in 2019. With more than a thousand varieties and cultivars, the iconic Japanese maple tree is among the most versatile small trees for use in the landscape. They look so pretty with all the green foliage surrounding them. Japanese maples are native to areas of Japan, Korea, China, and Russia. In Japan, the maple is called the “autumn welcoming tree” and is planted in the western portion of gardens – the direction from which fall arrives there.
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- Red-leafed cultivars are the most popular of the Japanese maples. Japanese maple leaves range from about an inch-and-a-half to four-inches long and wide with five, seven, or nine acutely pointed lobes.
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- And here is the other – both are doing excellently. Japanese maples grow well in moist, organically rich, well-drained soil. Their forms can be weeping, rounded, dwarf, mounding, upright, or cascading. Japanese maples typically grow about one-foot per year for the first 50-years, but they can live to be more than a hundred years old.
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- I also planted smaller Japanese maple varieties in this garden. Among them are three varieties of Japanese maple – Acer palmatum var. dissectum ‘Crimson Queen’, Acer palmatum ‘Shaina’, and Acer palmatum var. dissectum ‘Red Dragon’.
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- This garden and the adjacent Stewartia garden are constantly evolving and coming along so beautifully – I am looking forward to watching it flourish for many years. I hope this blog inspires you to do some planting in your garden – there is still time left in the season.
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