Sonia Uyterhoeven is Gardener for Public Education at The New York Botanical Garden.
The most common Christmas tree you will find on the market is the Balsam fir (Abies balsamea). It makes a great cut tree that has a nice fragrance and possesses the all-important quality of good needle retention. It grows in cold climates—generally Canada and Maine—and is also one of the cheapest Christmas trees you will find.
The Frasier fir (Abies fraseri) is another popular choice. It is slightly more expensive and has a nice blue-green cast to it. It heralds from more southern regions in the Alleghany mountain area. It also has good needle retention and makes an excellent cut tree.
On the West Coast, a traditional choice for Christmas trees is the Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii). Not a true fir, it is generally grown in Montana for the cut-tree trade and sold in the Pacific Northwest.
Firs tend to do well in the home, as do pines. The problem with pines is that they don’t possess the same strong branch structure that you will find in a fir. Spruces tend to loose there needles, although some people are adamant about buying a blue spruce (Picea pungens ‘Glauca’) as their Christmas tree, and it does create a lovely sight.
Measure the area where you will put your tree before you buy it and make sure it is one foot shorter than the ceiling height to compensate for the height of the tree stand. When purchasing a tree, make sure the needles are still supple; shake the tree gently—only a few needles should fall off. Store the tree in a cool garage if you are not yet ready to bring it into your home.
Cut a half-inch off the base of the tree and place it in water. Check the water daily; make sure there is always a good supply so that the tree doesn’t dry out. You will notice that the tree absorbs a great deal of water (up to a gallon) when it is freshly cut. Place the tree in a cool room, away from heat sources, and enjoy!
Sonia Uyterhoeven is Gardener for Public Education at The New York Botanical Garden.
Around the holidays the home feels festive. Creating a holiday centerpiece is a fun way of adding some green into the scene and adorning your home. To start, place a saturated piece of florist foam in a bowl and begin to build your masterpiece.
Suitable materials that you will find at this time of year are: colored dogwood stems, luxuriously shiny magnolia foliage, eucalyptus, holly covered with bright berries, berried juniper, incense cedar, Frazier fir, and white pine. Brighten them up by including roses, chrysanthemum, or South African proteas, and add a finishing touch with bows, pine cones, fruit, cinnamon sticks, or large nuts.
When making centerpieces with pine, remove the sticky sap from your hands and clothing with an oil-based lotion (for your hands) and either rubbing alcohol or witch-hazel for your hands or clothing. The easiest way to clean your tools is to spray them with WD-40.
If you prefer flowers in a vase, all of the materials above will work beautifully. If you are designing an arrangement in a large vase and are worried that the weight will shift to the sides rather than remain evenly spaced, reach in the drawer and pull out your cellophane tape. Create sections or divisions by stretching the tape over the mouth of the vase. This can be done from two sides to create a crisscross pattern.
Instead of filling the bottom of a clear vase with pebbles or marbles, try adding cranberries; the cranberries will last up to a week in water and will add a festive feel to the arrangement.
Protecting Plants Sonia Uyterhoeven is Gardener for Public Education at The New York Botanical Garden.
It is time to think about protecting your plants for the cold winter months. With roses, here we simply “hill them up” with 6-8 inches of mulch. After the temperature drops and the roses go dormant, usually in late November to early December, we pile a small mound of mulch around the base of the plant. This acts as a winter parka, protecting the base of the rose from freezing temperatures. Once the weather warms in March, we pull away the mulch and start preparing for spring.
Some of your shrubs, such as the bigleaf hydrangeas (Hydrangea macrophylla)—mophead and lacecap types—flower on old wood. This means that the plant develops its flower buds on the previous year’s growth. Sometimes cold or variable winter weather (changing from warm to cold) can disrupt the flowering, killing off potential buds for the following season. One way to protect your hydrangeas that are situated in an exposed area and at the mercy of the elements is to provide a wind break. Place 5 or 6 stakes around the plant and wrap with burlap. The top can be kept open so that snow (nature’s greatest natural insulator) can fall in.
If it is containers that you are concerned about, the simplest answer is Bubble Wrap. Garden centers sometimes sell a horticultural version that has a silver foil lining with Bubble Wrap inside. Insulate hardy containers once they freeze; with half-hardy containers, insulate before they freeze. Wrap the container with Bubble Wrap and secure with garden twine. If possible, tie the Bubble Wrap over the top of the container, pulling it up around the base of the plants so that the soil in the container is covered. This will help protect it from the freezing and thawing cycle that usually happens in February. If your container is not hardy, place it in an unheated garage so that it can go dormant for the winter.
Garden Cleanup Sonia Uyterhoeven is Gardener for Public Education at The New York Botanical Garden.
The season is slowly starting to wind down. Many of your annuals and tropical plants that have lived happily through the summer and into the fall are starting to dwindle. Add spent annuals to the compost pile and clean up and store tropical plants that can be either over-wintered on a sunny windowsill or stored in a dormant state in a cool garage.
You will find that you are left with used terra-cotta pots. Rather than being lazy and placing them aside with the unfulfilled promise that you will clean them in the spring, take the time to clean your pots now, while the gardening season is winding down.
By cleaning your pots, your ensure that no disease problems are carried over to the next year. Often, it is as simple as filling the laundry room sink with hot, soapy water (dish soap is fine) and letting them soak. Buy a good, stiff scrub brush for the specific purpose of cleaning your pots, and you will be all set to go.
If you have encountered some serious disease problems over the season, you can sterilize your pots with a 10 percent bleach solution (one part bleach to nine parts warm water). Let them soak for 30 minutes. Gardeners have their own favorite recipes. The important things is that you clean the pots in the fall so that pest and disease problems don’t sit and fester until the spring.
Once you have finished, dry and stack you pots upside down in your garage.
Fall Container Candidates Sonia Uyterhoeven is Gardener for Public Education at The New York Botanical Garden.
The classics for fall containers tend to be mums (Minnesota has come out with a wonderful series of cushion mums) and ornamental grasses. If you would like to spice them up with something new, why not add some Bergenia (pigsqueak) or winter heaths and heathers?
Heathers (Calluna vulgaris) have wonderful foliage that comes in many shades of green, gray, gold, copper and orange. Heathers tend to flower in summer through the late fall and love full sun and good drainage. Winter heaths (Erica carnea)—as the name suggests—flowers in the winter months. The foliage tends not to be as spectacular as heathers but still come in colorful choices. They can handle partial shade but prefer full sun like their counterparts.
A good candidate for bergenias is a cultivar called Bergenia ‘Bressingham Ruby’. It has burgundy fall foliage and fares well in sun or shade. Pair it with a colorful sedge such as Carex oshimensis ‘Evergold’ for a striking container arrangement. If you are looking for some height in the container, Sedum ‘Autumn Fire’ is a slightly more compact version of the ubiquitous Sedum ‘Autumn Joy’, whose spent blooms remain standing for most of the winter for great late-season interest.
Mum Madness Sonia Uyterhoeven is Gardener for Public Education at The New York Botanical Garden.
One of my favorite perennials in the garden is Chrysanthemum ‘Sheffield Pink’. It is dependable, requires very little care, and gets along beautifully with every perennial or shrub it encounters—bringing out the best in everyone.
In October, ‘Sheffield Pink’ is covered with pale apricot-pink daisy-like flowers. It combines wonderfully with Sedum ‘Matrona’, Aster tartaricus ‘Jin dai’, mophead hydrangeas such as Hydrangea ‘Preziosa’, and ornamental grasses.
In the Garden we have placed ‘Sheffield Pink’ in front of a Kousa dogwood (Cornus kousa) and a drift of Aster tartaricus ‘Jin dai’. As the season progresses, the foliage of the Kousa dogwood changes to a fiery red and picks up all the tints of red and pink in the ray petals of the chrysanthemum. The purple-blue of the aster adds a colorful edge to the design.
Migrating monarchs flock to ‘Sheffield Pink’ to be joined by bees for a late-season snack. I cut this mum back by half in mid-June to encourage good branching and to restrain its height so that I don’t have to go out and stake it once the stems are laden with flowers.
Bulbous Pleasures Sonia Uyterhoeven is Gardener for Public Education at The New York Botanical Garden.
September through November is a busy time in the garden for planting bulbs. Daffodils are generally the first to go in the ground while tulips are the last—going in from late October all the way up to Thanksgiving.
Some years the squirrels do their best to sabotage our plans for a beautiful early season display. That’s when the plastic netting comes out and is pinned down over the area. Hot pepper sauce is sprayed as an additional warning for any curious critter to stay away. Generally, however, these defensive tactics are not needed. Once the bulbs are planted, usually to a depth of three times their diameter, the soil is tamped down with an iron rake and that is usually enough to discourage squirrels, who rather dig in freshly turned soil.
Most bulbs are left to naturalize in the garden. Tulips are the exception; for the most part these short-lived bulbs are used as annuals in the garden. In the past year, the late-flowering double tulips have been causing a stir. ‘Uncle Tom’ is a vibrant red, while ‘Angelique’ is a pale pink that pairs beautifully with ‘Lilac Perfection’.
If you are looking for a longer-lasting display, species tulips and Darwin hybrids tend to be the best for perennial displays. Plant them two inches deeper than you would other tulips to give them the best chance. Try ‘Banja Luka’ with its jumbo-sized yellow and red flower or ‘Gudoshnik’ with its variable dappled patterns.
If you are plagued by deer, don’t bother with tulips—you will just end up frustrated. Your best bet is daffodils (Narcissus) and ornamental onions (Allium); however you are not limited in these two choices. On the ornamental onion front, Allium sphaerocephalon, Allium christophii, and ‘Purple Sensation’ are the best choices for mingling in an early summer perennial border. If you are in the market for daffodils, my best advice is to come to the Garden in the spring and select your favorites from our collections.
Autumnal Beauties Sonia Uyterhoeven is Gardener for Public Education at The New York Botanical Garden.
Beauties come in all shapes and sizes in the fall.
Some foliage turns from green to a brilliant scarlet as the cold nights trap sugars inside the leaves and trigger the production of the pigment anthocyanin. Two of my favorites are Virginia sweetspire (Itea virginica), which is engulfed in a burgundy flame in the fall, and the high bush blueberry (Vaccinium corymbosum), which morphs from yellow to orange to red.
Once the Kousa dogwoods (Cornus kousa) have finished feeding the birds with plump raspberry-shaped berries, the foliage turns a beautiful scarlet. This serves as a splendid backdrop to the statuesque Aster tartaricus ‘Jin dai’ that sends up tall spires covered with purple-blue daisylike flowers.
The best flower power in the garden undoubtedly comes from the perennial sunflowers and the hardy hibiscus. The dinner plate-sized flowers of the hardy hibiscus come in a beautiful array of pinks, mauves, and whites—often larger than the breadth of my hand. My two favorites this year is an impressive white named Hibiscus ‘Blue River II’ and a crinkled mauve named ‘Fantasia’.
The perennial sunflowers are covered with bright yellow flowers late in the season. Helianthus salicifolius ‘First Light’ opens up in late September. It is a shorter cultivar, reaching only 4 feet tall. This generally means no staking, a gift for the low-maintenance gardener. My favorite is the double flowering Helianthus decapetalus ‘Plenus’. This perennial sunflower blooms a month earlier than most of it compatriots, opening mid-August and extending into September.
Birds Love Coneflower Seed Heads Sonia Uyterhoeven is Gardener for Public Education at The New York Botanical Garden. The other day I watched goldfinches fight each other for a chance to sit on the ripe seed heads of my coneflowers (Echinacea). Once the birds get a foothold, they perch precariously on the spiky seed heads and feast. This ability to attract birds is why I leave the seed heads on Echinacea, unlike most of my perennials, which I constantly deadhead to encourage more bloom.
The magenta flowers of Echinacea always bring a smile to my face. One of my favorite coneflowers is a cultivar called ‘Rubinstern’, sometimes touted as ‘Ruby Star’. It possesses a vibrant shade of magenta that flowers dependably and continuously from late summer into early autumn in my garden.
My favorite fragrant coneflower is a pure white cultivar called ‘Fragrant Angel’. On a sunny day the fragrance is delicious. Recently, I was swept off my feet by an orange-flowered cultivar named ‘Sundown’ or ‘Evan Saul’. I was impressed by its sturdy stems and beautiful flower—a brilliant rust-colored cone and iridescent flowers of orange streaked with yellow.
Regardless of your predilection, a good coneflower is not hard to find, and it will certainly please the birds if you leave the seed heads on to ripen. Just tug off the ray flowers once they have faded and have turned brown and leave the cone intact.
Sonia Uyterhoeven is Gardener for Public Education at The New York Botanical Garden.
The most common Christmas tree you will find on the market is the Balsam fir (Abies balsamea). It makes a great cut tree that has a nice fragrance and possesses the all-important quality of good needle retention. It grows in cold climates—generally Canada and Maine—and is also one of the cheapest Christmas trees you will find.
