Open Garden at Federal Twist, Saturday, 22 June

OPEN GARDEN - SATURDAY - 22 JUNE - 10am to 4pm

A New Style at Federal Twist (the experiment continues) …

You’re invited to come to my 11th annual Garden Conservancy open garden on Saturday, 22 June. Please register on the Garden Conservancy website at this URL: https://www.gardenconservancy.org/open-days/garden-directory/the-garden-at-federal-twist

The Frenchtown Bookshop will be here all day to sell my book—The View from Federal Twist: A New Way of Thinking About Gardens, Nature and Ourselves—to anyone who wants a copy.

Books will be available thanks to the Frenchtown Bookshop.

Please come to see the changes I’ve been making to adapt the garden to a changing climate, to support wildlife and to increase sustainability and biodiversity. I’ve removed masses of Petasites and Miscanthus, trialed and planted many Carex species, turned what most Americans would call a front yard into a simulacrum of a forest floor by adding dead wood (an engine of biodiversity), ferns, Carex, and understory trees. It’s all still an experiment.

Some rationale for garden changes you may notice: Knowing from the start that my garden would be made on heavy, wet clay (too much water, too many nutrients, no structure and therefore no air), I understood I would need to learn through reading and experimentation what plants I could grow in this challenging bit of woods. I relatively quickly decided I’d probably have most success with some variation of a wet prairie ecotype (post tree removal), using prairie plants from the American midwest, locally native plants, and a good proportion of other grasses, herbaceous perennials and shrubs with origins far from the shores of the United States, but a liking for conditions and a climate similar to my own.

Huge leaves of Petasites were replaced with a Carex planting … (next image)

In the past few years, I’ve gradually started doing something different, in large part listening to the counsel of friend and plant designer Giacomo Guzzon, to books and lectures by the likes of James Hitchmough, Peter Korn, Dan Pearson, Piet Oudolf, Tom Stuart-Smith, Nigel Dunnett, and Cassian Schmidt—Europeans all, I admit—because that’s where I’ve found the most exciting work, at least work with a certain “studied” inflection I seem to like.

To put it an entirely different way, in past years I’d been moving much more to the spirit of the landscape here as a whole, a kind of large-scale, but limited, panaroma if you will, but of late I’ve focused in more closely, and paid more attention to ecological and aesthetic detail at a much smaller scale. Thus, last autumn we pulled out many large Miscanthus—which, though of Japanese origin—thrived with great vigor in my heavy clay. It was a great success for many years, but there was simply too much of it. (And I do still have a lot.) As with the Miscanthus, I had also found Petasites to be very well adapted to my difficult conditions, and an effective plant visually as well as a solution to weed control, so I had let it run, within bounds, for several years. But in spring of 2022, we began to remove it to stop the spread and to make room for plantings of another kind, much smaller in scale and more delicate in design. The opening image above is an example—a groundcover of mixed Carex with contrasting emergents such as Rodgersia, Kirengeshoma palmata, and Royal and Cinnamon ferns (Osmunda regalis and cinnomomea) as a backdrop. (I don’t fool myself; that Petasites removal will continue for many years to come!.)

For several years, I’ve paid a lot more attention to Carex, as its use has become popular and more species become available, but until I started Petasites removal, there simply wasn’t space to do the relatively large-scale groundcover planting I wanted to try. Now that I have a toehold in a wettish area, I intend to at least quadruple the size of that planting toward the end of this year.

Come see what I’m up to.