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At LongHouse Reserve we spend the quieter time of the year to re-focus and plan ahead for the next season. Plant orders and seed orders are being placed and we start thinking about new plantings. Now that the leaves have come down, it is also easier to evaluate individual structures of shrubs and to make corrections with the hand pruners, by removing deadwood, ingrown branches, rubbing branches. Removing water-shoots that resulted from previous pruning and balancing out the entire appearance of a tree or shrub is also on the list. On certain shrubs with multiple stems growing from the ground, we might want to remove one or two of the oldest stems for rejuvenation. Raking leaves, shredding them with the push-mower in six-inch layers on a lawn area nearby, and then spreading the fine leaves in a not-toothick layer back onto planting beds or under shrubs, supplies a great winter mulch and recycles large amounts of leaves without needing a large area for composting. It appears that a thin layer of shredded leaves does not encourage voles to move in, but it needs to be monitored throughout the winter. It is great fun to utilize the pruned branches of our own evergreens as holiday decoration. Hollies with red berries, yews for wreaths, and cypresses to fill the emptied-out summer pots.
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Pentagon: We Concealed Contamination At Sites
Why is winter the best time to prepare your springtime garden?
Independent/Ty Wenzel
VOL 27 NO 13 DECEMBER 4 2019
You began your love of horticulture at a very young age! How did this transpire for you? I spent a lot of time in my early childhood and my teenage summer vacations in my great uncle’s nursery, and witnessed when he created some of his new plants, which are now available in many nurseries worldwide.
Holger Winenga: LongHouse Walks And The Winter Garden
Carly Haffner: In The Woods
You are hosting three walks coming up this winter and spring. What differences can participants expect to see among them with the season changes?
FIVE TOWNS ONE NEWSPAPER
Some helleborus foetidus will already have their flowers on show. And then the flowering season of the new year begins with a walk featuring the earliest blooming witch hazels in February, followed by the earliest spring bulbs, the winter aconite and galanthus elwesii, helleborus niger, and the later blooming hybrids of helleborus orientalis.
LongHouse has launched a series of walks called “The Seven Seasons of the LongHouse,” each walk emphasizing plants that are in bloom at the time of year. It adds up to seven, because we count the extended seasons. For visitors, it is a chance to see the garden even during the off-season when we are officially closed. We have something in bloom almost year-round. This season finished with a walk called “Bark and Branches.” The cinnamon color of our maturing crape myrtle walk, of the variety “Natchez,” and the beautiful multicolor bark on older Stewartia pseudocamellia are examples. The idea to feature tours through the entire season was inspired by the fact that there is something in bloom in the garden almost throughout the entire year. Even now, several mature fallblooming witch hazels are at their best. The first one of them started blooming with its leaves still green, but the latest one just opened and should be in bloom at least until Christmas or the new year.
HolgerINDYEASTEND.COM Winenga: LongHouse Walks & The Winter Garden By Ty Wenzel ty@indyeastend.com
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erman expat Holger Winenga moved to the U.S. to work in landscape design, renovations, and installations in New York and Virginia. He is one of the most well-known horticulturists on the
East End which is not a surprise since he comes from a world-famous line of horticulturists. Indy caught up with him to learn how to deal with our gardens at this time of year, just when we think there is very little we can possibly do.
Hybridizing plants is a tricky business. How did your uncle come to be known as the most successful hybridizer of the 20th Century?
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Former East End Athletes Give Back As Coaches
I think the most influential time in the early life for Ernst Pagels was when he worked for the great plantsman and garden writer Karl Foerster in Bornim, near Berlin in the 1950s. When Pagels decided to start his own nursery in 1958, Foerster gave him a seed package on his way and said, “See if you can find something in there.” He indeed found one seedling in this package that performed much better than all the others, and it was named salvia nemorosa, “East Friesland.” Until the end of his life, Pagels hybridized and named more than 200 perennials and ornamental grasses. Many of them achieved the highest possible marks in evaluation. Even 10 years after his death, the perennial plant of the year chosen by the Perennial Plant Association was one of his own: stachys densiflora, “Humelo.” Pagels hated all the fuss about plant patenting and copyrights of plants. He never patented a single plant.
What are some of Pagels’s most successful hybrids of note?
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His work on salvias resulted in about 15 named varieties, bluehills, snowhills, amethyst, wesuwe, ruegen. His most groundbreaking work was on miscanthus grass. He was the first person to intercross different miscanthus species with the purpose of having them bloom earlier and more prolifically. (In a northern part of Germany, it was not warm enough for the common miscanthus to bloom before frost). A caution: Out here, miscanthus can become quite a nuisance, since they seed a lot and can take over whole roadsides and meadows.
Tis The Season p. 20
Independent/Justin Meinken
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