Time to Order Our Seeds
Time to order our seeds. In our last blog we told you about our new night garden on the side. We are still hashing the design out, but if we want to have plants ready for spring, we’d better get some seeds ordered. Not just for the new garden, but for all the gardens.
We have done this for so long it’s become routine. Review our garden journal. Peruse the seed catalogs. Order the best. Plant the seeds and watch them grow. But, this year we’re really excited about the night garden.
Night Garden?
What’s so different about a night garden? As the sunlight fades, retinal dominance switches from our cones to our rods so our eyes are sensitive to different colors. Whites and silvers stand out. Eye doctors call this the Purkinje Shift (remember, the madman is an optometrist by trade).
During the day, our eyes are more sensitive to the bright reds, yellows, oranges, blues and purples (cone vision). Interestingly, these are the same colors that attract our friends, the bees, butterflies and hummingbirds. As twilight begins the Purkinje Shift kicks in and the whites and silvers begin to pop. We will capitalize on this pop.
Early Night Gardens
The idea of night gardens goes back to early India where noble families retired to their pleasure gardens after sweltering all day in the hot sun. Rulers of the Mughal Dynasty, who hailed from Central Asia, added water features and soft lighting to these moonlight gardens.
The first recorded night garden in America was Indian Hill Farm in West Newbury, Massachusetts. In 1833, Benjamin Poore, a well-known publisher, planted two massive beds of white flowers. Seems he was obsessed with white because he also had herds of snow white cows and other white animals and birds. The madman thinks he would have liked to live next door to this guy.
Up and Coming
Night gardens are growing in popularity as a result of our hectic lifestyles. Everyone is busy these days. If you aren’t at work, you are stuck in traffic or you’re chauffeuring the kids from one activity to another. You may spend all your free time working on your garden when, suddenly, the sun goes down. What happened to all those pretty bright flowers? You don’t visit your garden at night because you can’t enjoy it.
Recognizing our busy lifestyles, garden designers are starting to push the concept of night gardens or white gardens or moon gardens. It doesn’t matter what you call them, they all do the same thing – delight our senses after dark.
If you want a garden to enjoy at night, consider these three things: Color, Scent, Lighting. Woven together, these three elements will create an enchanting garden to enjoy in the evenings.
Skip the Color
Let’s start with color. Skip it. Literally, skip it. Your eyes can’t see colors that well at night so don’t bother with it. Stick to whites and silvers which will reflect whatever little bit of light is left out there. There are plenty of flowers with white blooms, but don’t overlook foliage which also comes in various shades of white.
Remember that you aren’t limited to just plants in your color scheme-the night gardens across the river from the Taj Mahal relied on bas relief artwork, sculpture and white walkways to add highlights and reflect the light. Have at it with the white items.
Smell the Flowers
The second component of a night garden is fragrance. A flower’s goal is to be pollinated, and reproduce. During the day insects are attracted by vivid colors, so smelling good isn’t that crucial. At night, when our familiar pollinators are safely tucked away, there’s a whole new bunch out there – bats and moths: the crepuscular pollinators. These evening fliers are attracted by smell. So, although night bloomers emit their pleasing scents for the pollinators, we reap the benefits.
Light it Up
People speak of moon gardens as entities that reflect a glow in moonlight. “All well and good,” says the madman. “But the moon isn’t always there when you need it.” Actually, since the madman enjoys watching the stars, he would prefer no moon most nights. So, if you truly want to enjoy your moon garden, you will need to add mood lighting. In India, they used small oil lamps to line the walkways of the Mehtab Bagh across the river from the Taj Mahal. You may not want to do this, but you will want to incorporate some other type of light. Avoid the 300 watt floodlight that will just annoy the neighbors.
For a while the madman tried stringing white Christmas tree lights in some white pines in the back yard. We loved the effect, but the squirrels developed a taste for electricity and chewed the wires. We are considering this for our new night garden, but are reluctant to feed the squirrels again. Maybe a small solar powered strand?
Moonflowers not Moon Flowers?
Our first exposure to moon gardens came a long time ago during our first trip to Longwood Gardens. We came upon an arch covered with Moonflowers. We were pretty new to this nomenclature business so we thought that Moonflowers was a generic term for night bloomers. Guess we really needed that Master Gardeners’ course. Now we know that Moonflower describes a specific plant, Ipomoea alba, not a class of them that bloom at night. Whatever, this still spurred our desire to have a moon garden.
Our First Night Garden
Sometime later, we ordered a moon garden collection of seeds from Select Seeds in Union, Connecticut. By that time we had built the treehouse and spent many evenings relaxing up there. Our thought was to have the moonflowers grow up to the treehouse deck along with many other vines. We planted the other white flowers from the Select Seeds collection in front of them. What a great idea. But, we found that we spent more time looking up at the stars than we did looking down at the flowers. It was just the wrong place.
Revisiting the Night Garden
Now that we have gotten rid of the Locust trees, we are revisiting the night garden. Hence, our excitement about ordering seeds. It’s not all about hot peppers this year. Sure, he’ll order them and all the other vegetable seeds we need, but this year we’ll be ordering white flower seeds in addition to the reds and yellows that keep our day pollinators happy.
“I got it,” the madman said. “We’ll plant two rows of moonflowers, two rows of white alyssum, put in white stone paths and stick your mother’s white lady statue in the back.” I’m so glad he was joking, but it made us realize that our garden would require some careful planning. As with all our projects, we have divided the garden into two parts. Our first beds go in this year and we’ll expand next year. And our flower list is ready to go so we can start our seeds by Mar. 1. Remember, the personality of the gardener determines the personality of the garden and I am gardening with a madman. Your list may be different from ours, but, our ideas might give you a place to start.
Vines for the Garden
We need some vines. For some reason the madman has decreed this year The Year of The Vine, so I guess we’ll need lots. For the night garden we’ll start with Moonflowers (Ipomoea alba) and White Hyacinth Bean (Dolichos lablab v. Alba). Hopefully we’ll supplement these with Sweet Autumn Clematis (Clematis terniflora) and Silver lace Vine (Polygonum aubertii), but we have to get these as plants.
Scent
King among the fragrant flowers are the tobaccos or nicotiana. We have had good luck with the Jasmine, Woodland and Lime Green varieties (Nicotiana alata, Nicotiana sylvestris and Nicotiana alata “Lime Green”) These will mix well in a border of tall white cosmos (Cosmos bipinnatus “Cupcakes White” and Cosmos bipinnatus “Summer Dreams”) and white Cleomes (Cleome hassleriana “White Queen”). We are taking a calculated risk with the white cleomes. Smell is not great, and fellow master gardener Chantal Foster insists that if you plant cleomes in your garden, you’ll be growing them for the rest of your life. A row of Evening Fragrance Datura (Datura meteloides “Evening Fragrance”) will form the back wall of the garden for now. We’ll see what Year #2 brings.
Texture for the Garden
We can’t forget the foliage plants. The leaves of some of these plants contain tiny hairs that reflect light and conserve moisture. The purpose is to keep the plant cooler, but this makes them welcome additions to the night garden. We are starting small and ordering seeds for Dusty Miller (Senecio cineraria), Candy tuft (Iberis sempervirens), silver sage (Salvia argentea) and white lobelia (Lobelia erinus “White Lady”).
We are also looking at some hostas. The madman was never a big fan of the hostas and we can’t grow them from seed. But, he is looking at some variegated and near white varieties. No rush, for again, they come as plants.
Fill in the Spaces
We’ll fill in the rest of our night garden with white flowers that have done well for us in the past. White alyssum will be joined by white statice (Limonium sinuate “White Iceberg”), white zinnia (Zinnia elegans “Polar Bear”) and lower growing white cosmos (Cosmos bipinnatus “Little Prince”). Of course, we’ll have to find a place for the madman’s Cereus cactus (even though that gorgeous bloom only lasts one night), and perhaps a white Brugmansia or Mandevilla – none of which grow from seed.
If you plan a moon or night garden, your selection of plants will probably be different than ours, just as your site is. So, use our seed selections as a guide and remember there’s a lot of white out there.
The madman is finishing those seed orders: I guess I’ll heat up milk for the hot cocoa.
