Wreath on East Terrace

How does that go? “The way dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly?”  That’s what it was like in the garden yesterday around noon.  The wind was whipping up dry leaves creating tan heaven-bound spirals.

I hadn’t seen Chris’ recent entry, so didn’t search for that early snowdrop, but I did enjoy a short walk through the Winterthur Garden, soaking up today’s warm weather before the cold front hits with a chilling rain.

A guest asked recently  ”What is there to see in the garden this time of year, anyway?” Well, there isn’t a lot of bloom out there, but what amazing views across the winter landscape! One can see the stone walls and the outline of trees well; the backbones of the garden. For me, it’s relaxing to see the open land and distant hills. Much better for my psyche than the glitter and frenetic movement in a shopping mall. I’m managed to avoid the mall during the entire Christmas shopping season (so far!)

Come, enjoy the winter landscape and let it calm your soul so you can relax and enjoy the season.  Some days, you’ll have the garden almost to yourself.  Let me know how your walks go and where you find beauty this winter.

A Solitary Walk

On a walk with garden staff members today we spotted the first snowdrop (or the last, depending on how you define it). This snowdrop variety, Galanthus ‘Potter’s Prelude’, is the earliest of the minor bulbs to flower in the Winterthur garden.

The arctic blew into Delaware this week bringing unusually cold weather. Then, lo and behold, a light covering of snow this morning!  I rushed to work…not really…I drove like an old lady on ice…in order to get to my camera and catch some scenes before the snow melted.  By the time I was done, my hands were cold but my heart was warm and happy. What a beautiful place this is!  

I met a delightful woman from Sussex County, Delaware, this week. She hadn’t been to Winterthur in about ten years and made a point of telling me how much she had missed seeing this landscape. She exclaimed how beautiful the rolling hills are; how rare to have so much open space. What a gift she gave me that day!  Fresh eyes, seeing things I am lucky enough to see almost every day.  Hope you make your way to Winterthur soon to take in the majesty and peace of this rural landscape.

While you’re here, be sure to take in the Yuletide tour. I spent some of last week putting up Christmas trees in the house. Apparently, tree “wrassling” is my particular gift - the putting up and taking down of artificial trees.  We can’t use real greens inside the house due to conservation concerns and the fire hazard, but they look pretty good, if I do say so myself.  Come and see for yourself…I helped put up and light the big tree in the Port Royal Parlor.

Hope I’m not being too pushy, but you can purchase Yuletide tickets online this year at www.winterthur.org.  I would love to hear about your experience at Yuletide at Winterthur. Enjoy!

Here are more photos from this morning in the Winterthur Garden:

Snow on 11.21.2008

The Winterthur landscape seems to inspire photographic creativity. HF du Pont even tried his hand at taking photographs of the garden. Below is a scan of a rare, early color photograph taken by du Pont in 1916 as he was developing the garden.

Just as it inspired Mr. du Pont, we hope that the garden will encourage contemporary photographers to capture Winterthur on film (or in pixels). This last spring Allen Rokach offered a photography workshop that produced dozens of beautiful student images. With the availability and ease of use of digital photography and the internet, images of Winterthur are beginning to appear on quite a few local web pages. Ed Heaton has taken beautiful images of the garden for his blog and Winterthur has recently appeared in a couple of personal travelogues (another travelogue). If you’ve taken photographs of Winterthur that you would like to share, make a comment on this post and I will get in touch with you about putting your work on our Garden blog.

Does Winterthur recycle?

The short answer to that question is yes. There are many different types of recycling though and the opportunities to conserve natural resources are improving all of the time. Here is what we are currently capturing in our waste stream:

Most departments at Winterthur recycle the specialized items that are used in their daily work. This includes individual department recycling of office paper, used tires, oil, batteries, scrap metal, and toner cartridges. We will soon be instituting a more centralized collection system for these materials to make it more convenient for department representatives to have their recyclables picked up.

For more than a decade Winterthur has recycled organic waste from the garden. Each year, brush becomes 2500–3000 cubic yards of mulch, and 125 tons of leaves become woodland mulch for use in the garden. A cubic yard of medium-weight mulch can weigh from 500 to 800 pounds, which means that we are keeping 875 to 1,325 tons of organic waste (leaves and wood) out of the landfill. In addition, the nature of the Winterthur garden is such that we do not use a lot of fertilizers or herbicides, and we rely on techniques, such as mulch mowing to reduce the amount of waste we produce in the first place.

Winterthur has instituted recycling at its major events, including Point-to-Point, which attracts more than 20,000 visitors a year. At this year’s Point-to-Point, volunteers distributed bags for recycling in an effort to make it more convenient for our guests to recycle.

Our restaurant, managed by Restaurant Associates, has recently implemented recycling. More importantly, for more than a year our food service operation has used materials that are low input, recycled, and compostable. Plates, cups, coffee cups, and bowls are biodegradable. We do not use products, such as plastic “clamshells” and styrofoam plates, that take up space in our trash and that do not biodegrade. At this year’s GardenFair visitors purchased water in bottles that were fully compostable and biodegradable (including caps), one of the first uses of this type of product in the United States.

What other conservation initiatives is Winterthur pursuing?

Conservation Easement – In 2002 Winterthur publicly affirmed its commitment to keep the estate forever free from development by signing a conservation easement on the property.

Bluebird Program – For nearly 30 years Winterthur has maintained a bluebird box program, managed by volunteers, to provide a much needed nesting habitat.

Natural Lands Trust – Winterthur staff worked with a nonprofit group, Natural Lands Trust, to complete an Environmental Management Study for the property. Implementation of the recommendations of this study has resulted in some of the items listed here.

Invasive Removal – For the last two years, Horticulture Department staff members have been engaged in targeted removals of invasive plants (weeds that threaten natural habitat) such as the Norway maple and “tree of heaven.” Thousands of invasive plants have been removed through this effort.

Riparian Buffers – Creation of riparian buffers, dredging of ponds, and stabilization of eroding areas in the garden have resulted in dramatic improvements in water quality. The water at Winterthur leaves the estate in better condition than it enters.

Asphalt Removal – Over the last two years Winterthur has removed significant areas of asphalt and impermeable surface. Turning these areas back to grass and meadow has reduced runoff and thermal pollution in our wetlands. In the last year we removed more than 340 linear feet (more than a football field in length) of asphalt roads and paths.

Meadow Management – Winterthur has adjusted the mowing schedule and management of its meadows to improve habitat for native wildflowers and nesting birds. In some areas mowing has been reduced to once a year and is timed to allow birds to nest and reproduce.

Tree Management – Since the du Pont family moved to Winterthur in 1839, trees have been a treasured part of this landscape. Winterthur’s arborist manages the health and condition of trees throughout the garden and wider estate. As stewards of the woodlands at Winterthur we maintain a diverse canopy (in both species and age) and several trees that are more than three centuries old.

UPDATED: Unforunately, the fall display of the Japanese maple is mostly over, but there are plenty of other beautiful colors in the landscape right now - sourwood, viburnum, beech, for example.

You’ll want to come to the Winterthur Garden this week to see this amazing cut-leaf Japanese Maple at Magnolia Bend. It is at peak color - a brilliant orange-red.  A similar maple lives at the visitor center, right near the shuttle ramp.  What fun!

The fall color seems to be quite amazing this year in Northern Delaware. What is your favorite plant for fall color where you garden?

A selection of colorful autumn fruits from the Winterthur garden.

hardy orange, purple callicarpa, snowberry, Osage orange and white callicarpa

We’ve just completed a successful run of Wednesdays at Winterthur walk/talks/demos for 2008. Thank you for your participation and interest!

Time to begin thinking about next year. What are your ideas for topics?  What interests you? What would you like to learn about? Who would you like to hear from? Any part of the estate or garden you’d like to explore? What challenges do you face in your own garden?  (Sorry…we can’t address problems with human gardening partners!)

Help us plan a fresh, lively and pertinent program in 2009!

(Wednesdays at Winterthur are held each Wednesday, March through October excepting August, at 11:30 a.m. They last about one hour and are open to all ticketed guests and members.)

The following is a list of some simple projects to consider. A couple are “quick hits” that will add some interest to your garden right away; others will take a little longer to yield their results.

Winter Sowing
Fall is a good time to order or gather seed for winter sowing. If you have never raised plants from seed in the winter, it is a far cry from the chore of raising seedlings in the spring. Winter sowing seems almost too easy. The process can be as simple as broadcasting a few handfuls of seed over a garden bed - a technique frequently used here in the Winterthur garden - or it can involve sowing seeds into pots that you leave outside through the winter. Either way, you won’t need to do much with your winter-sown seeds until spring. This technique works best with native plants, perennials, and hardy annuals. For more information about winter sowing there is a winter sowing website and a forum on GardenWeb.

lily-of-the-valley fruit with seed ready to be harvested

Hardwood Cuttings
Some plants are easy to propagate by cuttings, especially hardwood cuttings. Hardwood cuttings are taken in late fall through winter from woody plants such as forsythia, willow, and dogwood. The pencil-thick cuttings should be taken from last season’s growth and should include two sets of buds. Insert the cuttings directly into a nursery bed or plant them in pots that are heeled-in somewhere in your garden where you won’t forget them. The Royal Horticultural Society website explains the process clearly. Your cuttings should begin leafing out the following growing season and yield plants ready for transplanting by next fall.

Plan and Fine Tune Plantings
One of my favorite activities in fall is walking through the garden with a cup of coffee and several rolls of flagging tape. Enough of the garden is left from the growing season for me to remember what was successful and what failed, making it easy to tie flags around the plants that need to be removed, divided, or moved. I also like to put stakes and flags as placeholders in the ground for plants I want to add, which helps me make up my shopping list for next spring. The flags I use are color coded: white for removals (white = trash), green and white striped for divisions (2 colors = divisions), and red for additions and relocations. Fall can be a great time to shift plants to new locations. Most plants look bedraggled and sad in the fall anyway and will recover, for the most part, by the next growing season.

Buy Discount Bulbs and Plants
Fall is an excellent time to find bargains at local nurseries and on-line retailers. Just as the plants in my garden already look bedraggled, but will transplant fine, so too do many of the plants at my local nursery. On-line bulb retailers will often offer deals on overstocks of bulbs; sometimes discounting them up to 50%. This is the time of year I find myself purchasing plants and bulbs for trial purposes. For example, I have often contemplated adding a variety of the poet’s daffodil named ‘Actaea’ to one of my borders and have just found it on sale, on-line, for half the regular price. I’m going to purchase a couple dozen just to see what they will look like in the border next year. If they are successful I’ll order more; if they don’t work I’ll pass them on to a friend or compost them.

You may have discovered other projects or tips for the fall. If you are interested in sharing your ideas or insights, leave a comment on this blog entry and I’ll post it for everyone to use.

“… a mature, healthy tree can have 200,000 leaves. During 60 years of life, such a tree would grow and shed 3,600 pounds of leaves, returning about 70% of their nutrients to the soil.”
Wisconsin County Forests webpage

Think about how many millions of leaves will be gathered here at Winterthur and in the many gardens throughout the Brandywine Valley this autumn. Cleaning up leaves in fall is one of those meditative, seemingly inescapable, chores that come with caring for a garden. Here at Winterthur we still rake and blow millions of leaves, but more and more we are supplementing leaf removal with mulch mowing.

If you hate raking leaves you have a simple alternative - mulch mowing. Mulch mowing is a process that cuts up and macerates the leaves, leaving them in place in your garden to decompose over the winter and following growing season. While not promising a total escape from gathering leaves, it offers gardeners an alternative to dealing with piles of leaves.

Mulch mowing is not terribly complicated. I’ve illustrated the basic steps below with photos and captions.

Set up your mower for mulching; most mowers allow you to run them without a bag and with an insert that closes off the mower deck. This keeps the leaves and grass from being discharged and allows the mower to cut the vegetation into finer pieces.

Wear proper equipment. You should wear safety glasses, hearing protection, and boots when using this equipment. Leaves can conceal rocks, roots, and other obstacles - better to be safe than sorry.

Mow over leaves and any plants ready to be cut back. You don’t need to confine yourself to lawn areas. You can mow over plants, such as hosta, that are going to lose their leaves anyway.

Repeat mowing weekly or as needed. The photographs above were taken 5 minutes apart. You can see how the mower reduced the leaves to finely chopped pieces that will filter down to the surface of the soil. Whole leaves left in the garden tend to mat down and can smother grass, bulbs, and other perennials. The process of mulch mowing chops the leaves into finer pieces, allowing your plants to grow freely as the leaves decompose and return to the soil.