English Garden Update



Tree Peonies in bloom, May 2019

What's going on in the English garden so far this spring?

Plants in the English Garden are slowly emerging and just a couple early bloomers such as the Rock Cress and some early yellow primrose are showing color. Today the Peony hoops have been installed to hold up the gorgeous blooms we should be seeing in about a month.

The Greenhouse crew was busy growing lots of replacement perennials for the English Garden in the past several months. Some of the plants were started as seed or divisions taken in the fall and others were bought in as bare root. Because our Greenhouse space in so limited and annual production is in full swing, this meant we had to get the perennials out quickly to their new home in the English Garden. To do this so early, we had to slowly transfer perennials grown in a 75 degree greenhouse, to a make shift cold frame, and then lastly outside to get them acclimated to our cold nights.

Thousands of plants in one of our propagation houses, waiting to be bedded out.

With the Ellen Biddle Shipman design in hand, we properly placed the new perennials in their designated location making sure to stay true to the original design. Hundreds of perennials were put in the ground a couple weeks ago. Some of the replacements include tender perennials that we add just about every year in that garden. One example would be the foxtail lily (planted as a bulb). This plant is just barley hardy in our zone and we try our best to give it a chance so we can at least see it bloom once! Other perennial replacements include plants that did not survive our terrible wet spring last year or happened to be around the area we did some arborvitae removals/planting.

April 2020: New plants laid out in the English Garden, per Ellen Biddle Shipman's original planting plan

In general there are always replacements for the English garden. As you know, there are very few Ellen Biddle Shipman gardens that are fully preserved left in the U.S. This could be a big reason why. Beautiful garden- maybe not the easiest to keep up on!

Re-planting, April 2020

Other points of interest at the moment in the EG: Pear trees on the corners of the pool beds were heavily pruned this spring but still put out a decent bloom. Also, we did a semi-hard pruning on the wisteria standards earlier in spring and today I noticed that every single one of them has flower buds forming! So, overall, things are coming along nicely in the English Garden!



PS. We had a rabbit watching us plant all of the nice, new, lushly grown, greenhouse perennials. The rabbit has been safely relocated off property (at least that is what I was told).

Shelley Funai
Grounds Manager


Water Goddess above pink peonies, May 2019.


Comments

  1. Sue FApril 17, 2020 at 8:56 AM

    Loved this post! So excited to see the new plants in bloom!
    Sue F

    ReplyDelete

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