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Gourmet Garden
by Mary Jasch
Despite the deer, mice, voles and moles, spider mites and scale, Linda Singer's garden in Tenafly is lush among grand trees, and gorgeous, even now. Hers is a verdant garden whose many-bedded plantings rely on variations of green, texture, shape, and character, and a voluptuousness that only blooming shrubs can bring.
Critters love it too.
Singer is a strategist who believes in choosing her battles, studying her foes to understand how to outwit and when to appease and still retain the integrity of her garden.
Deer, who sail over the four-foot fence that separates her backyard from the preserve behind her, have eaten her 60-year-old azaleas and rhododendron, and her leatherleaf viburnum. So she retaliated with hollies with thorns. But they ate them too.
Singer obeys town ordinances that say she can't raise the fence, a situation that offers the gourmet grazers easy access to her cultivated goodies. So, instead, she wires garden stakes to its top, hoping it'll fool them.
They eat her garden mostly in winter. She never sees them in summer. “They sleep in my backyard,"¯ she says. “They look like light brown, big boulders. It's like a Bed & Breakfast here. They wake up in the morning and have breakfast on the lower rhododendron leaves. But I respect them. They have to do their deer thing. And I have to do my human thing."¯
And what exactly is Singer's thing?
Well, she believes in garden economy. She uses “things that I harvest and transplant from our garden." Things that already grow in her micro-climate and soil, like the Kerria japonica suckers that have withstood deer and drought better than any newly planted balled and burlapped shrub she's tried. "I just plant a lot of everything," says Linda Singer.
“You never used to be able to see the fence at all. The two-year old Kerria transplants are doing ok, but right next to them the deer ate the holly. The variegated forsythia is doing great. Deer don't like it or boxwood," she says of shrubs that remain untouched by the hoofed herbivores for three years now. And they don't like the rustling of bamboo either, she says, or “smelly plants or grey plants."
Singer has learned to use things that flower on new wood, such as Hydrangea 'Annabelle.' “That way it doesn't matter if the deer eat it in winter." In March she cuts it down to two sets of buds.
Little animals abound in her garden too, like moles that she describes as having big, funny, oversized, light-colored hands. “They are the clowns of the animal world,"¯ she says. You can tell them by the volcano-like entrance to their tunnels.
Moles eat grubs, worms, and insects. White grubs and beetles are their favorites. As they burrow through soil it becomes aerated and mixed, allowing organic material to incorporate deeper into the soil. But their tunnels can disturb plant roots.
"I stamp out their burrows when I find them. I follow the burrows because they often lead to the entrance where I put artemisia or any dead animal I can find. They don't like the smell."
Voles eat roots and love hostas, says Singer, who has watched hosta leaves disappear into a hole. Extension specialists say there's not much to do about voles except trap them like rats and toss them away. But Singer likes to go the gentler route. Because voles like to dig in mulch, she doesn't put mulch next to plants. She also stamps out their tunnels when she sees them.
On the other critterhand, Singer used to depend on a certain groundhog who pruned her Boltonia and other asters in June, but he didn't come back this year. And usually a family of rabbits dines on the mixed-leaf lawn in her yard. “ I like a varied lawn. I like clover. I like a lawn that looks alive, not a lawn that looks like a green carpet in the house. The rabbits eat a lot of clover, so they eat less of my plants."
She does plant a lot to make up for what the animals take. She looks for volunteers among the nearby weeds. “One of the best qualities a gardener can have is observation,"¯ she says.
But insects have no barriers and so feast in this luscious garden. Wooly scale infests the rhododendron; white scale hunkers down on pachysandra, and mites are on the euonymous. Singer taps a leaf over a small piece of white paper with lines, the better to see the mites walk. And they do. At the danger point, she calls in the pros to spray.
“First we had a cold wet spring, then prolonged heat and drought. Plants like even moisture and this has been a roller coaster summer," she says almost in the bugs' defense.
The eye follows textures and shapes of leaves and colors of green in an easy, pleasant way all around Singer's landscape. In front, a circular forest-like oasis occupies most of this suburban yard. Flowering shrubs and perennials surround tall blue spruce.
Around back, softly-lined beds weave under the trees. Singer plants them by foliage types with three to four feet of each cultivar. Carex 'Bowl's Golden,' a narrow-leafed chartreuse sedge planted among geraniums, does well, for the deer don't like it.
Singer avoids needy plants, like thirsty annuals, for urns and window boxes. Instead, she fills them with volunteers or cuttings from her garden. Cement urns contain variegated grass, geranium, and lamium.
Recent flooding has eroded soil from the garden near the fence, exposing roots and causing water stress. “But before the rhododendron shows moisture stress, I will look at the andromeda," she says. “People should find their marker plant for drought so you can water things before you realize they're in desperate need. In my garden they're the andromeda."
Front Yard Island
Blue spruce
Rhododendron catawbiense
Virginia sweetspire - Itea virginica Red leaves until January, fragrant
Deutzia
Polygonum fallopia japonica rubrum Shrub w/red cascading panicles in October.
Lilac sp.
Winterberry - Ilex verticillata
Yellow twig dogwood - Cornus sericea 'Lutea'
Smoke bush - Continus coggygria 'Young Lady'
Chastetree - Vitex agnus castus Zone 7, but grows in Singer's Zone 6 yard.
Potentilla
Buddleia sp.
Rose-of-Sharon
Rosa glauca Orange hips and blueish leaves
Kerria japonica You need 2 sets of leaves to transplant. Yellow powderpuffs.
Bridal wreath spirea - Spiraea thunbergii
Lace shrub - Stephanandra incisa 'Crispa'
Clethra alnifolia 'Ruby Fruit' Disease resistant, fragrant
Hydrangea arborescens 'Annabelle'
Helleborus fetoides Chartreuse flowers in January/February for 5 months
Seven sons tree - Heptacodium micinioides Blooms in September, exfoliating bark
Spicebush - Lindera benzoin Native, fragrant
Bottlebrush buckeye - Aesculus parviflora
Russian sage - Perovskia atriplicifolia
Coreopsis verticillata 'Moonbeam' "Shear it."
Nepeta
Glossy abelia - Abelia grandiflora Zone 7, but grows in Singer's Zone 6 yard.
Blue star - Amsonia hubrichtii
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published October 27, 2005
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