Snow Falling on Spruces

After a light coating of snow fell, the sun came out today.  I decided it was high time I took a walk around the gardens with my camera in honor of this, the first full day of meteorological winter.  I will admit that winter is not my favorite season, as there is a starkness and loss of vibrancy this time of year that I find harder on the soul than mere cold.  However, even for one such as me, this starkness does have an undeniable, unfettered beauty.  One of the tests of any garden is how good it looks in winter, and I mean real winter, not an early snow in October when the last flowers are still hanging on, or in early spring when the first have returned.  I often joke that unlike places like Seattle or London that can hope for a few flowers even at the darkest time of the year, “winter interest” in New England is simply stuff covered in snow. As my walk revealed, though, at Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens there is much more to meet the eye than snow at this time of year.

Don’t mow the grass

We cut back many of our perennials in the fall to give us a head start in the spring and to prevent rampant self-sowing of plants like black-eyed Susan’s.  However, we do leave the grasses alone until March.  Allowing them to remain unshorn for the winter does have some risk, as voles seek their cover and can do a number on their roots:  overall, the risk is very worthwhile. Today, the little bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium) in the Founders Grove of spire-like pin oaks (Quercus palustris ‘Green Pillar’) was particularly effective.  Little bluestem is slow to get started in the spring, but its fall and winter aspect is stunning.  The stems keep their tawny brown color and the bristled masses of pewter seeds give the whole a kinetic immediacy that contrasts with the static verticality of the seven oaks that honor the families who founded this garden.

Mexican feather grass (Nassella tenuissima) is a species from the Southwest US as well as Mexico.  It is not reliably winter hardy here, but no matter, as it is easily started again each year.  Nassella is remarkably fine-textured, and mixing it with just about any other plant transforms the design and lifts it above the ordinary as if lifted on a cloud. Though the tufts turn pale tan in midsummer, they hang on surprisingly well and look good even at Christmas and beyond.  The key with this grass is to plant it early in the spring so it can get some size before it flowers and enters quiescence during the summer.  The softness of grasses in death is a pleasing counterpart to the dried flower heads of such things as hydrangea, and the whiteness of snow is a more effective background for such subtle textural interplay than soil or mulch.  The sweeps of Hydrangea arborescens ‘Annabelle’ mixed with the dried stalks of maiden grass (Miscanthus sinensis ‘Morning Light ‘and ‘Dixieland’) on the bank below the Cleaver Event Lawn were particularly interesting this morning.  The scene reminded me of a crowd huddled amongst the grass.  Snow emphasizes form and it also emphasizies shadows.  This last characteristic of the fluffy white stuff can make photography challenging.  Sometimes, though, the interplay is quite beautiful.  A case in point is one of Wendy Klemperer’s deer sculptures (Wendy’s Installation will remain here through the winter).  As I approached, it looked like the steel deer was nuzzling a secret shadow companion painted on the snow.  Wendy’s sculptures are miraculous transformations of the most mundane castoff steel.  She takes rebar, flat stock, and all manner of other junk metal and welds, bends and grinds them into lithe wild creatures that are a true essence of their living counterparts.  Today the fox was especially vibrant in the wan winter sun as was the large elk that has stubbornly pawed the Great Lawn all summer in preparation for  an attack by some  imagined adversary.  I am glad that Wendy was able to leave her show up this winter. Her pieces add so much to our winter landscape.

Our gardens are so impossibly colorful during the growing season that when I go elsewhere everything seems drab in comparison.  I do think one of the things that makes this place so compelling for visitors is the great, pleasing wash of color that spills from the gardens from spring until well into the fall.  In winter, the color wheel is replaced with snow tires, and my eye searches out the briefest glimpse of brighter hues amidst all the white, brown, and grey.  One thing that hit me my first winter here on the Maine coast was how much more I prefer its evergreen forest of spruce, pine, and fir over the deciduous woodlands in southern New England where everything is decidely grey this time of year.  Looking up into the canopy of conifers, it seems as green and alive as it does in summer. There are a few bright spots in the garden, as well.  Mats of lowbush blueberry (Vaccinium angustifolium) glow red and burgundy as the leafless stems blush in the cold.  Red pigment helps protect plants against frost, and in the case of Brouwer’s Beauty andromeda (Pieris x ‘Brouwer’s Beauty’) it is the dormant flower buds that glow effectively in winter.

Trees are not the only evergreens in the Maine woods.  Polypody fern (Polypodium virginianum) is small but resolute.  When temperatures fall below freezing this little fern of ledges and outcrops rolls up its fronds somewhat like rhododendrons do.  As they curl, they reveal rusty red sori that shed their crops of spores a few months earlier.

Though human visitors on skis or snowshoes pack down our trails in the winter, after a new snow the wild residents are the first to walk our woods.  We have a healthy population of foxes, fisher, mink and American marten out hunting mice, voles, hares and squirrels this time of year and today their tracks are everywhere evident.  The foxes are particularly apparent.  They prefer to use our paths and trails so I felt as though I was constantly following them as I walked down the Haney Hillside Garden to the water and the hiking trails beyond.  The sheer distance a fox can travel in a day or two is quite impressive.  Voles, mice, and squirrels have been active as well.  Here a fox has crossed paths with a little shuffling vole after the vole headed for some precious bulb or stem.  Hopefully the fox catches up with it soon. The new trails we have opened up recently – while too narrow for skis – will make excellent snowshoeing tracks.  This light snow makes snowshoes unnecessary, but once we get a more sizable dump I will give them a try.  There is no doubt that a jaunt through the woods and shore on a sunny winter morning is a potent antidote to seasonal affective disorder.  If you are in town, please drop by.  Admission to the gardens is free through March. – Bill Cullina