Garden show spurs thoughts of spring

During the recent school break, as the wind packed snow against the front door of my Eastport rental, my workday residence on Passamaquoddy Bay, and the white blanket covering the garden in Ellsworth grew deeper, Marjorie and I traveled to Pittsfield, Mass., to visit her mother. Toward the end of the week, Joan treated us to a day at the annual Rhode Island Spring Flower and Garden Show in Providence. It was just what a couple of winter-weary gardeners needed, the promise of a coming spring.

The theme was Fairy Tales and the elaborate displays were whimsical. Among our favorites was a red-cloaked figure strolling through white-barked birches toward Grandma’s house and the bedroom where the wolf lay in waiting, its ears poking out from beneath an elaborate quilt of real flowers. We also took several trips through a landscape filled with Dr. Seuss characters playing in fields of colorful chrysanthemums, and we marveled at the bigger-than-life sand sculptures of characters from “Alice in Wonderland.”

Drifts of daffodils and tulips were everywhere, as were woody plants forced into bloom well ahead of their natural flowering season. It was a delight to see an emphasis on regionally native species such as chokeberry (Aronia arbutifolia), witch-hazel (Hamamelis virginiana), and serviceberry (Amelanchier sp.), and equally gratifying not to see displays of invasive non-native species such as Japanese barberry or burning-bush. The Rhode Island nursery and landscape industry seems sensitive to the need for regionally native landscapes.

Of course, not every featured plant was native to Rhode Island. This seems to be the year of the fothergilla, or witch-alder, not only in Rhode Island but throughout New England. While there are two species, the large fothergilla (Fothergilla major) and the dwarf fothergilla (F. gardenia), both blooming in spring before the leaves with bottle-brush clusters of white flowers that smell of honey, it was the larger of the two that was prominently displayed at the show.

The large fothergilla is native to the ridge tops, riverbanks, and dry slopes of the southern Appalachians, where it grows to 15 feet in height and nearly as wide. Despite its preference for drier sites in the wild, it seems adaptable to moist, well-drained, acidic garden soils. It has a colonizing growth habit, forming large patches from root sprouts that arise from the fringes of the clump. Bill Cullina of the New England Wildflower Society writes of a patch at their Garden in the Woods (Framingham, Mass.) that covers about 500 square feet and is still spreading.

In northern gardens, fothergillas need a minimum of two to three hours of direct sun for best bloom. Given enough light, they will also develop handsome fall foliage in shades of apricot, orange, maroon and crimson.

Among those of us who advocate for creation of regionally native landscapes, the purists will insist that there is no room in a Maine landscape for fothergillas. They are not native to Maine. On the other hand, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, in its recent publication, “Native Alternatives to Invasive Plants,” recommends the use of fothergillas as a North American alternative to Japanese barberry, currently listed as an invasive species in Maine. Each of us will have to decide where we stand in this ongoing debate.

Garden shows across New England stimulate such thinking about our gardens while reminding us that spring is indeed near. The Bangor Garden Show is April 4-6 (go to www.bangorgardenshow.com/ for information). It is a great way to start the gardening year.

Send queries to Gardening Questions, P.O. Box 418, Ellsworth 04605, or to rmanley@ptc-me.net. Include name, address and telephone number.