Specimen gardens allow for variety in small space

I visited my favorite nursery, Fernwood in Swanville, on the Fourth as a sort of busman’s holiday. After half an hour of commiserating on the rigors of the plant trade, my wife and I strolled through the display gardens, guided by the owners. And at the sight of their main hosta display bed, I was inspired to write this column in which I hope to incite a bit of new thinking in the minds of the gardening public.

Let me paint the picture which set the wheels turning in my horticultural noggin. This bed is perhaps 30 feet across, irregular in outline but more or less isodiametrical. In it one sees a single mature specimen of three or four dozen varieties of hosta, ranging from the rare and expensive to the common and “cheap.” The plants are spaced perhaps 4 feet on centers so that they don’t quite touch each other; a buckwheat hull mulch covers the ground between them.

To look at the bed is to be instantly educated and informed about the genus hosta as the eye rolls from specimen to specimen, indulging in what the eye most likes to indulge in — comparison and the search for perfection. It’s a bit like watching a beauty contest, minus the glitz, of course.

Anyhow, two lessons occurred to me at the sight of those lovely plants. The first is that hostas are most often used in the landscape in ways that hide or inhibit their true beauty. Whether used as an edging or border plant, a foundation plant or ground cover, hostas generally find themselves overcrowded. Being very accommodating plants, they gracefully conform to their allotted space and look spiffy as only hostas can — but their true shape is lost in the squeeze. Hostas are full and round, given the space, and their leaves are so neatly overlapped that neither stem nor ground is visible from any angle. Hostas are woodland plants first and foremost and seem to be uniquely designed to occupy their space on the forest floor with regal beauty, poised to be admired from whichever direction you might happen upon them.

The second lesson is that specimen gardens are uniquely beautiful. I define a specimen garden as any planting that consists of single individuals of each species and variety with the goal being simply to display the plants fully, allowing the more traditional aspects of landscape design to take the back seat.

What I most like about specimen gardens is that they focus my attention on the individual plants which is where the true beauty of any garden resides. The more stylized and designed a garden is, the harder it is to appreciate the perfection of its constituent plants. Using plants the way a painter uses paints is, in a way, rather arrogant since plants are living creatures and each has its own habit of growth and requirements for space and growing conditions.

Also, specimen gardens by their very nature allow the gardener to grow the maximum number of different types of plants in a given space. And since gardening is a bit like investing, the more diversified your portfolio of plants, the better the odds that your garden will be doing something beautiful or at least interesting at any particular time.

So, consider a new way of gardening. Pretend that you are an ardent botanist instead of an aristocratic baron of the landscape. Let your goal be to simply grow as many different types of plants as time and space permit. In the end, you may find yourself less frustrated by designs that fall short of expectations and, at the same time, more engaged and engrossed in the dynamic world of nature’s most beautiful and productive creatures.

Michael Zuck of Bangor is a horticulturist and the NEWS garden columnist. Send inquiries to him at 2106 Essex St., Bangor, Maine 04401.