Margaritaville

 

My garden is divided into two countries, north and south. They’re separated by the mason line, a stone walkway.

In the north, the garden rises sedately toward the woods, interspersed by stretches of stone  ledge.  It’s a quiet space. The plants are harmonious, the colors subdued - white, pale rose, mauve: lambs’ ears, a pale pink anemone, the white cloud of calamintha. The floating spires of cimicifuga, misty-topped artemisia. The boldest color is the deep purple of heliotrope, the most dramatic shape the towering nicotiana sylvestris. The stone steps are threaded with creeping thyme. It’s a pretty New England garden; Sissinghurst is clearly an ancestor.

In the south, everything is different. Just past the stone walk the ground drops steeply into a rough ravine, a  dry watercourse running through it. At the end of the ravine is a rustic wooden bridge;  beyond that, the meadow.  This garden is not well-bred or decorous: the reverse. Native blue lobelias have colonised it, thrusting their bright, bold spires everywhere – among the ostrich ferns and Russian sage and valerian. This harsh lobelia blue is actually the mildest color down here in the south: I’ve let in the cardinal flower, the native red lobelia, with its six-foot spires of  dense, saturated red.  “A bit showy,” one of my gardening friends said tactfully. She’s wrong: it’s not a bit showy, it’s completely over the top, and it’s spreading fast, popping up wherever the blue has not. That’s not all. Another gardening friend handed me two small potted annuals last spring. “You can put them anywhere,” she said. “They’re Mexican sunflowers, bright orange, about six feet tall.” In the north they’d look shockingly out of place, but down here in the south, with all those pushy lobelias, they strike a triumphant chord. My Mexican sunflower friend also gave me two vines, which I planted at either end of the bridge: now scarlet-orange blooms  clamber along the railings. Red salvia makes a fine scarlet mist, threading along the banks . On either side of the bridge is the tall elegant native milkweed, asclepia incarnata, whose soft pink flower strikes a muted counter-tone to all the brassy hot notes. Creamy clethra blossoms makes thick swathes through the rioting parade.        

The point of all this is the visitors: lots of these bright-hued plants are native, which makes the southern garden a destination, a flight hub. Butterflies flutter through all day: on the milkweed are clouds of amber-colored monarchs, yellow tiger-swallowtails, russet great spangled fritillaries and iridescent pipe-vine swallowtails. The butterflies hover absent-mindedly, then alight. They breathe with their wings, inhaling, exhaling, lifting dreamily off. Zillions of bees,  focused and serious, climb in and out of the clethra. Cadres of hummingbirds, those tiny avian helicopters, swoop up and down the  cardinal flower spires. Fat striped monarch caterpillars march lumpily along the bridge, on their way somewhere else.  It’s a thriving community.

The northern garden - so decorous, so pretty, so polite! - has bees among the calamintha, not much more. Everyone else has gone to Margaritaville.     

 

                                                                                                                  August 8, 2011