Small-space gardening

We’ve all seen photos of grand mixed and perennials borders on old country estates (Gertrude Jekyll, Vita Sackville-West, Beatrix Farrand),

Vita Sackville-West, Sissinghurst White Garden. Photo by bestfor/Richard on Flickr.

and of sweeps of perennials, grasses and shrubs by the contemporary designer Piet Oudolf and landscape architects Wolfgang Oehme and James van Sweden.

They’re dramatic and luxurious-looking, and it’s easy to envision being right there, surrounded on all sides by space and uninterrupted swathes of glorious texture and color.
Sometimes the only space available is quite a bit smaller and more constrained. This past weekend I was walking down a suburban Boston street and found this planting, in which a narrow bed — bounded by fence on one side, driveway on the other — hosts a garden that shows off in every season.

This plant bed can't be any more than three feet wide, but there is a lot going on in it.

In this climate, plantings that flank a driveway have to be tough. Snow gets shoveled and plowed on top of them, and sometimes it’s best to stick to herbaceous perennials that will die back to the ground and be unharmed by wayward plows.
This garden has a fairly simple palette — Hydrangea, ‘The Fairy’ Roses, Korean Chrysanthemums, Sedum ‘Autumn Joy’, and a carefully pruned collection of crabapples — that works well here. Even if the hydrangeas and roses get clobbered by the plow they’re likely to recover; the sedums and chrysanthemums can be cut back to the ground, and the crabapples are trained to hug the fence, out of the way, making what could have been a winter drawback into a fine asset.
It’s refreshing to see this kind of resourcefulness in what often seem only to be incidental places on a property. This strip isn’t a place in which you’d want to (or could) lounge away the hours, but it shows how varied and texturally exciting even a small space can be.

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Hedging

I’m looking out at the corner of a yard that once was filled with Norway maple saplings.  Most of the saplings are now gone — felled by saw, Roundup, and hatchet — and the few that remain lie in a thick horizontal bundle, their stems cut almost all the way through.  This bundle, which should leaf out in a week or two, will then sport a lush, dense cloak of leaves, and will provide cover for birds, squirrels, and chipmunks.  

Sapling hedges like this have been used in Europe for centuries; the National Hedgelaying Society of Britain tells us that Julius Caesar mentioned laid hedges (sapling trunks are partially cut and bent over, or laid, in a row, and then staked and woven together) in 55 BC Flanders.  England’s Enclosure Acts of the 18th century, which legislated the development of private property from what once had been common lands, spurred the use of laid hedges in that country, and the laying of hedges became an art.  A well-laid hedge will keep cattle and sheep enclosed in a field, will provide cover for all sorts of small animals and birds, and will define clear, unmistakable, and impenetrable boundaries to a property.

This Norway maple hedge doesn’t have the intricate weaving of a professionally laid English hedge, but it does harness the plants’ own vigor and arboricultural properties in the same way.  Cutting each trunk channels the tree’s energy; tipping back the tree’s leaders and laying their trunks down horizontally changes the flow of growth-suppressive hormones and growth-supportive sugars so that the now-vertical side shoots can develop.  Maintenance now involves my going out once or twice a season and tipping back the side shoots that want to grow higher than the others, a task that takes all of five minutes for this twenty-foot long hedge.

I laid this hedge to see what the effect would be on this invasive-tree riddled area, and on the invasives themselves.  What I’ve learned is that a laid hedge makes an effective barrier (this one screens the compost heap from view quite nicely), that the trunk-cutting reduces vigor enough to keep the plants thriving but not taking over, and that — so far — I can maintain the trees in a juvenile state, and so prevent further seeding of the species.  

We don’t see much hedging in this country.  Perhaps it has to do with the abundant availability of wood for fence-making when the first settlers arrived from Europe, or the need to use up in stone walls the generous supply of fieldstone that pushes up from New England soil every spring.  A neat hedge usually requires the planting of saplings in a line, and then two to five years of waiting for the saplings to reach hedging size.  Fencing and stone walls are faster means of enclosure. 

It does seem to me, though, that with the march of invasive species, and in this case, invasive tree species, through the landscape, we would do well to come up with ways not just of eradicating those species, but in some instances, of managing them.  In this instance, the Norway maples in the yard were outcompeting everything else.  By removing some, and then enlisting others to make a small hedge, we’re able to redirect the nature of this particular corner of the yard to a more useful end.  Although the Mother Norway Maple just feet away still shades that corner (and still showers it with seeds), I’m hopeful that I’ll soon be able to plant some shade-tolerant species there that can deal with those stresses.

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