Great Gardens Summer 2015

SUMMER 2015

GREAT

GARDENS Ideas for Smart Gardeners WITH

Edible Gardening for Small Spaces Best Trees for a Home Orchard Visit America’s Oldest Japanese Garden

MAGAZINE

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Hakone Gardens & Estates

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Postage-Stamp Gardening

20 The Home Orchard

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EDITOR’S NOTE Finding Garden Inspiration

OUR FAVORITE THINGS

Great Gardening Gear

GARDEN DESTINATION Hakone Gardens & Estates

SMALL SPACES

Postage-Stamp Gardening

GROWING

The Home Orchard

Summer is a curious time of the year for me. As I walk around my gardens I enjoy seeing what spring’s efforts have achieved—flowers in full bloom, birds and butterflies feasting on blossoms and a lushness that only comes with summer’s early warmth. But summer also has me dreaming of cooler days, the colors of rust, copper and orange enveloping the garden and fresh fruit that will be ripe for the picking.

While we wait on autumn’s arrival, now

is the perfect time to seek out new ideas for our own plots by exploring gardens outside our neighborhood—perhaps one close to home or across the country. In this issue we visit Hakone Gardens & Estates, where you’ll find ideas that reflect Japanese aesthetics. After a trip to a new garden I am always excited, once I get home, to slip into my wellies and head back into my own plots to see what’s blooming or fruiting. Also in this issue you’ll discover two ways to grow fresh food at home: from a small, postage-stamp garden, and in a home orchard.

It’s a delicious time of the year. Enjoy the

fruits of your labor.

— Jennifer Smith :: MANAGING EDITOR

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EDITORIAL edit@hortmag.com Community Leader Patty Craft Editor Meghan Shinn Managing Editor Jennifer Smith

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FEATURE

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Hakone Gardens, in Saratoga, Calif., dates to 1918. It includes many elements of a traditional Japanese garden, such as its pond and platform from which the scene can be admired.

An authentic and historic Japanese garden persists in California’s Bay Area as a treasure for the public

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by Meghan Shinn photographs by Woodside Images | J Sinclair

ESTLED ON A hillside in California’s Silicon Valley is the oldest existing Japanese garden in the Western Hemisphere. Hakone Gardens, in Saratoga, grew from the enchantment a local couple found in the art of Japanese gardening 100 years ago. Originally created as a private retreat, Hakone changed hands several times throughout the 20th century, but today it belongs to the city of Saratoga as a public garden to be treasured and enjoyed by all.

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In 1915, San Francisco hosted the Panama– Pacific International Exposition, for which 31 nations built exhibit halls, connected by nearly 50 miles of walkways, to showcase their culture and art as well as advancements in technology. Isabel Stine, who with her husband, Oliver, was a great patron of the arts in San Francisco, was taken with the exhibits put forth by Japan, enough to make a journey to the country itself. There she fell deeper in love with the Japanese landscape and garden style, particularly at the Fuji-Hakone-Izu National Park. Upon her return to California Mrs. Stine decided to create a Japanese garden in the hills north of the city, which she would name Hakone, as a personal refuge from the city summers. She and her husband purchased 18 acres of land in Saratoga; work commenced on the property in 1918.

The Stines hired Tsunematsu Shintani to design a structure and Naoharu Aihara to design the gardens, which replicate a traditional samurai or shogun estate garden. Called the Moonviewing House, Shintani’s building perches partway up a hillside fronted by woody plants chosen for their form, texture and color. At the base of this hillside garden lies a shallow pond, populated with koi, with a wooden bridge and border of stones. Known together as the Hill and Pond Garden, this area is considered the heart of Hakone.

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Above: Koi swim beneath the arched bridge. Top right: The Bamboo Garden includes many rare species of bamboo, plus traditional lanterns and gravel paving. This photo: The Moonviewing House perches above the Hill and Pond Garden, with winding paths leading up to it.

IF YOU GO

Hakone Estate & Gardens 21000 Big Basin Way Saratoga CA 95070 408-741-4994 hakone.com Hakone is open to the public yearround, except December 25 and January 1. Check the website for admission prices and open hours when planning your visit. Classes and special events occur throughout the year, with details posted online.

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Other garden areas round out the property, some part of the original design and others added or expanded upon by designer James Sasaki after the Stines sold the estate to financier Major C. I. Tilden in 1932. These include the Zen Garden, which is not to be entered but instead gazed upon in contemplation. A bed of gravel and stones, a patch of moss, black pines and bamboo form this space. There’s also a Tea Garden that serves as the entrance to the rooms where tea ceremonies and demonstrations take place today. Moss and steppingstones and a special hand-washing basin are key features of the Tea Garden. Hakone is home to an impressive collection of bamboos, donated from private local gardens as well as gardens in Japan and the world over.

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JAPANESE GARDENS

Japanese gardens are designed as spaces where art and nature blend seamlessly. The tradition encourages natural scenes to be celebrated and imitated, often in miniature. Some of the elements of Japanese gardens that may be observed at Hakone Gardens: • BORROWED SCENERY (SHAKKEI): using distant natural landscapes as backdrops for the garden or framed views • LANTERNS: traditionally used to mark paths to tea rooms as well as to punctuate locations of water basins and entry points • WATER BASINS: these reflect the Shinto and Buddhist traditions of a ritual cleansing, often of the hands and mouth, before entering a sacred space • GRAVEL PATHS: often curving, these are laid out to direct the visitor through the garden at a slow pace in which they can appreciate key views and scenes • WATER: ponds and shorelines celebrate water’s purity and vitality; waterfalls represent “permanent impermanence," something always present yet always different • STONE: traditionally, stones have a spiritual significance and their placement fell to Shinto priests, with the belief that improper siting could bring illness and other misfortune—MS

Following Tilden's death, the property declined, but it was rescued and restored in 1961 by a partnership of local Chinese-American families, who next sold it to the city of Saratoga. The city enlisted Tanso Isihara and Kiyoshi Yasui to further enhance the gardens’ features, and it became a public space.

Winding paths run throughout the gardens, and carefully placed benches and viewing platforms

ensure that visitors see the connection between art and nature that typifies Japanese garden style.

Meanwhile Hakone's persistence highlights the connection between gardens and community— each needs the other. • MEGHAN SHINN is Horticulture’s editor. JEANETTE SINCLAIR is the owner and lead photographer at Woodside Images in northern California.

This photo: Japanese maples, dwarf conifers and flowering cherries are key plants in the garden's design. Opposite, clockwise from left: Towering bamboo; a path to explore; a stone lantern.

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FEATURE

S PEC IAL

DELIVERY

Postage Stamp gardening brings big harvests out of little spaces

by Karen Newcomb

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I RECOMMENDED READING See The Postage Stamp Vegetable Garden

by Karen Newcomb (Ten Speed Press, 2015) and Karen’s website, postagestamp vegetablegardening.com, for more smallspace practices and garden plans.

F YOU ARE a vegetable gardener, how would you like to produce more vegetables with less work and less space?

Or perhaps you’ve always wanted to grow your own food, but you’re concerned about how much extra time and effort it requires. You may know someone who rushed out and ambitiously planted a grand vegetable garden, then wound up spending every spare moment just keeping up with it. If so, let me introduce you to Postage Stamp Gardening. It’s a method that allows you to pack an enormous amount of vegetables into a very small space, while at the same time doing a whole lot less weeding, watering and work.

To illustrate the principles, I’ve provided a sample six-foot-by-sixfoot garden plan (below), but the Postage Stamp method works for even smaller sizes, such as a fourby-four garden or just a few pots on the patio. With the steps outlined in my book The Postage Stamp Vegeta-

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ble Garden, these beds can produce up to 30 times as many vegetables as a conventional garden.

Although you can’t see it in the illustrated garden plan, one of the most important principles of Postage Stamp Gardening is soil health. The condition of your soil can make or break the productivity of your garden. If you create the initial superboosting organic soil mix from The Postage Stamp Vegetable Garden in the beginning, you won’t need to add extra nutrients during the growing season, and your plants will be stronger, healthier, and more productive.

I have been growing Postage Stamp gardens ever since the 1970s, when my late husband, Duane, first conceived of the idea, and the method has never failed to produce all the vegetables our family needed throughout the growing season and beyond. Postage Stamp gardens are perfect for busy people who want to use less water, eat fresh and save money all the way around.

POSTAGE STAMP PRINCIPLES 1. Forget about spacing vegetables in rows. A Postage Stamp garden uses all available garden space by eliminating rows and growing most vegetables a few inches apart across the entire bed. As shown in the illustration on the previous page, use all the space in your garden by planting in plant groupings. Planting vegetables close together (closer than normally recommended on seed packets) saves space, reduces watering, eliminates weeds and creates a healthier microclimate for your plants.

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2. Plant the tallest vegetables on the north side of your garden and arrange the other vegetables in descending order of height toward the south end of the garden. This arrangement ensures that taller plants do not rob sunshine from shorter plants, therby maximizing the growth and productivity of all.

GREAT GARDENS

3. Use the airspace above your garden as much as possible. Train indeterminate tomatoes, vine cucumbers and other trailing plants up trellises, fences, poles or whatever structure you can create, so these tricky vines won’t be running all over your garden bed and crowding out the other plants. (In the illustration, the squash and melons on the north end of the garden should be grown up trellises or fencing.) On a per-foot basis, a plant growing upward greatly outyields one allowed to sprawl. The better you get at vertical gardening, the more vegetables you’ll be able to pack into your garden.

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4. Try companion planting. That is, certain species of plants aid each other by their mere presence together. For instance, bush beans and beets, planted together in the sample garden plan, grow well together. So do the carrots and green onions. When planted next to radishes, lettuce will make the radishes more tender. With companion planting, there are pairings to avoid as well. For example, if you plant beans and onions too close together, they will stunt the growth of one another.

GREAT GARDENS

5. Consider planting vegetables and herbs that attract beneficial wildlife like bees, butterflies or hummingbirds. It is possible to lure insects that prey on vegetables pests, pollinate plants and build soil. Include flowers and herbs that are rich in pollen and color, and plant in color groupings. In the illustrated garden plan, marigolds are planted throughout the garden to repel bean beetles, nematodes and whitefly. Rosemary and mint, also included in this plan, both attract bees in droves, while repelling many kinds of harmful insects and pests.

6. In general, major vegetables should be surrounded by secondary vegetables and intercropped plants. Intercropping, or interplanting, consists of planting quickto-mature vegetables between those that mature more slowly. In the sample garden plan, you can plant fast-growing radishes, lettuce and green onions underneath the tomatoes and peppers and harvest them four to five weeks before the tomato and pepper plants take over the space. This is getting double duty out of your beds.

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7. Utilize succession planting, which consists of planting a new crop as soon as you take out an early one. For instance, you can harvest spinach and then plant beans, or replace mature broccoli with corn. You can successively plant earlyseason, midseason and late-season varieties of the same kind of vegetable. Any combination of early and late varieties expands the productivity of your garden.

8. Make use of catch cropping, which is planting quick-maturing plants in places where you just harvested larger, slowergrowing vegetables. You can harvest a couple of broccoli plants in late summer, for instance, and then grow radishes or green onions in the same space. Don’t leave bare ground unplanted! •

KAREN NEWCOMB writes books, articles and blog posts about vegetable gardening, with a special emphasis on making the most of space. She resides in northern California.

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Orchard FEATURE

an

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HOME

at

How to choose trees for your grove

P

LANTING AND CARING for my own fruit orchard has been a dream of mine for quite some time. I think I can trace my excitement to one day about eight years ago when I went to a cafe at an orchard in Granchester, just outside Cambridge in England. It was a beautiful summer day and we sat in frayed words and deckchairs underneath old apple trees and photographs by drank tea from china cups. The day was a turnGillian Carson ing point for me. From then on all I could do was think about planting my own orchard.

I wanted to start straight away, but I didn’t have enough space for one fruit tree, let alone a whole orchard. So I planted a lone, selffertile apple tree (‘Queen Cox’) and trained it as an espalier on the only wall I had. It wasn’t quite an orchard, but at least I was eating homegrown apples after about three years. In the coming years I would have to be content with reading books and dreaming until, after two house moves, I was in a position to really plant my orchard.

Apples come in a wide range of varieties, affording a range of textures and tastes that can be produced even in a small orchard.

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FROM DREAM TO LIFE

The space I chose is on the side of the house, a west-facing plot about 32 feet wide and 24 feet long. It was an overgrown mess that hadn’t been tended for about six years.

There were climbing roses growing along the ground! I enlisted some professional help to clear the ground and remove stumps, but once that was done I had a blank canvas all to myself.

Above: A harvest of apples is something to anticipate. Below: The author’s orchard has been in the ground for two years in this photo.

She chose varieties that suit her climate, flower in concert for cross-pollination and, of course, match her family’s tastes and needs.

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Above: A peach is ready to pick when you can gently lift it and it comes free from the tree.

I set about planning my orchard (my process follows below). It took many days of poring over books and nursery catalogs to come up with the final plan. I would plant four apples (three eating and one cooking), two pears, one plum, one cherry and one persimmon. I already had a well-established crabapple in the garden.

My trees arrived in early spring.

I planted them and nurtured them through their first years. I haven’t seen any fruit yet, but I’m already dreaming of sitting underneath them and drinking tea!

PLANNING YOUR ORCHARD

First, choose what fruit you will grow in your orchard. Make a list of the fruit that you like to eat. If you don’t know what cultivars of fruit you like, find your nearest apple-tasting day.

They usually have many cultivars of apple, but also pears, Asian pears and other fruits. Write down the names

of the cultivars that you like and star the ones that are grown locally to you. These are the ones that deal best with your weather conditions and temperatures. Look at what cultivars your local nursery is selling, too, and what kinds of fruit are being sold at farmers markets. These will probably do well in your orchard.

Next, figure out how many trees you can fit on the piece of land designated for the orchard. (Fruit trees need at least six to eight hours of sun daily to grow well. Choose an open, sunny location with easy access and good drainage.) If you opt for dwarfing or semi-dwarfing trees, then you can normally plant one tree every eight to nine feet. That allows the space needed around the whole tree.

Collect your list of favored apple cultivars into pollination groups. A group is made up of those trees that flower at the same time and therefore can transfer pollen to each other. You generally need at least two

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apples from the same group. Your local tree nursery can give you a list of local cultivars and the pollination group in which they fall. Some cultivars in each group are either self-fertile or triploid. Triploid simply means that they have three chromosomes instead of two, but it also indicates that their pollen is sterile and cannot be used to pollinate other apple trees. If you choose a triploid (like ‘Blenheim Orange’, ‘Bramley’s Seedling’ or ‘Jonagold’), you need to plant three trees in all: the triploid, its pollinator and another tree to pollinate the pollinator (this third tree can be self-fertile, like a crabapple). Choosing a triploid may seem like an added complication, but they offer many advantages.

They’re vigorous trees that have a good degree of natural disease resistance. They also produce larger crops and bigger apples in general.

Yet another consideration is whether the tree is a tip-bearer

A SAMPLE ORCHARD The author’s small home orchard includes the following varieties. The apples are paired by flowering group for cross-pollination.

APPLE: ‘Honeycrisp’ and ‘Edward VII’ (for cooking)

APPLE: ‘Liberty’ (triploid) and ‘Egremont Russet’

CRABAPPLE: unknown variety PEAR: ‘Conference’ and ‘Rescue’ PLUM: ‘Stanley’ PERSIMMON: ‘Nikita’s Gift’ CHERRY: ‘BlackGold’

(carrying its fruit on the tips of branches) or a spur-bearer (fruit appears along the side of each branch). The first is fine for an orchard situation, but if you want ornamental trees (e.g., you want to train the tree as a fan, espalier, step-over or oblique cordon), you need to choose spur-bearers.

One more consideration (stay with me; we’re nearly there) is whether the tree bears fruit yearly or biennially. Some cultivars are naturally biennial, so avoid choosing two trees that may flower in different years. Add to that the choice of whether you will be growing eating apples or cooking apples and you have one complex decision to make.

When you’ve finalized your choices, order your trees. Plant them immediately when they arrive. They will need regular watering for the first two years. The best way to accomplish this is to drill a small hole in the side of a five-gallon bucket and place that by the tree. Fill the bucket with water every Monday. The water will drip through and water the tree.

Above: The blossoms of a pear tree. Pears always need another pear to pollinate them, a fact that must be taken into account when planning the number of trees for a home orchard.

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This photo: Crabapple fruit can be made into tasty jelly. A crab in a home orchard will also help pollinate apple trees. Below: Bare-root trees should be ordered to arrive in early spring and then planted as soon as possible.

The close proximity of orchard trees means that they rely on each other for protection from windstorms, but you will need to stake your trees in the early years. Two sturdy stakes about a foot away from the tree on opposite sides is ideal.

Secure the tree between them with purpose-made tree ties that allow for movement.

The trees will take at least three years to start fruiting in earnest. Be patient. The fruit will come. Enjoy your orchard, even in its early stag-

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es. Install a bench, sit among your trees and watch as a dream comes to fruition. • GILLIAN CARSON gardens in Portland, Ore., and blogs at mytinyplot.com.

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