the
washington
post
.thursday,
february
20,
2020Dc
8A feeble Mid-Atlantic winter has unlocked flowering treasures
Recent overnight
freezes brought a
reminder that this
is still winter, but
the prevailing
sentiment among
my gardening
buddies is that we
are trapped in a
sort of twilight
zone autumn that
never ended.
We know this to be wrong —
the crocuses are up, the early
daffodils, too, and the tree buds
are dropping their protective
scales — so we are gliding into
spring. What we’ve experienced
since the new year began is
neither a late fall nor a
precocious spring, but an
unusually mild and snowless
winter that has demonstrated
the value of planting for winter
effect.
The winter that never was
remains an unsettling thing, but
not to revel in its positive effects
would be churlish. If you had in
your garden such hibernal
bloomers as hellebores,
mahonias, sweetbox, Cyclamen
coum, witch hazels, edgeworthia,
daphnes, camellias, violas,
autumn-flowering cherry trees
and wintersweet, to name a few,
you would have hit the jackpot in- Although they are
advanced, they are not
precocious spring bloomers; they
are plants that are programmed
to flower in the winter but are
usually stymied by the volatile
weather of the Mid-Atlantic. This
year, we didn’t see the grudging
blossom sequence of a roller-
coaster winter or the bloom-and-
zap destruction of a sudden deep
freeze or the fleeting flower-and-
fizzle display of 70-degree days.
No, it has been cool but mild,
coaxing a long and measured
display that began early and
endures.
Nowhere is this better
expressed than at Winterthur,
the estate north of Wilmington,
Del., whose garden and grounds
were planted by its consummate
plantsman owner, Henry Francis
du Pont.
Its creator died a long time
ago now — 1969 — but his spirit
lives on in March Bank, named
for its perch on the side of a
stream valley and the month of
its main show (normally). Amid
towering columns of 150-year-
old tulip trees and oaks, the
woodland floor launches the
growing season with tens of
thousands of flowering bulbs
first planted a century ago by
du Pont and since increased by
s elf-seeding.
He planned a sequence of late-
winter, early-spring flowering
effects heavily reliant on bulbs.
Adrian
Higgins
gardeningBank is a timeless evocation of
the woodland idyll and is du
Pont’s faithful replication of the
type of romanticized garden
scenes pushed by the Victorian
tastemaker William Robinson.
The unmediated meeting of
tiny late-winter bulbs and the
pillars of giant trees on a
panoramic scale is powerfully
moving, but the effect is
heightened by the knowledge
that some of the plants are hard
to establish and rare in
commerce today, and that the
scene before you takes decades
to achieve.
Because they are seedlings,
the snowdrops are full of quirky
individual variation in petal size
and display, as well as the
markings of their inner petals.
Strand and Long lead me to
the bank on the other side of the
stream and to a large wooded
pocket where a snowdrop
relative named the spring
snowflake is beginning to
appear. The plant is a little taller
than the snowdrop, the blooms
bigger and more spherical. “This
is starting to come in early,”
Strand said. In a couple of weeks,
“it will be like white marbles
floating in the air.”
One of the reasons the bulbs
thrive here is because the trees
are so tall and the woodland
floor is neither too bright nor too
dark. Another is that they are not
smothered by wood mulch. The
gardeners simply shred the
fallen leaves in fall.
O n the lawn of the East
Te rrace, right by the mansion,
sits three old tulip poplars and a
beech tree. The lawn has the pale
violet haze of thousands of
Crocus tommasinianus, which is
the earliest crocus to appear but
is still three weeks early.
At March Bank, the weeks of
bloom, and the sequencing of it,
are a reminder that you can
achieve astonishing effects with
the tiniest of plants if you plant
enough of them, in layers.
“I wonder if people had this
type of garden,” Long said, “they
would feel differently about
winter.”
[email protected]
@adrian_higgins on Twitter Also at washingtonpost.com
read past columns by higgins at
washingtonpost.com/home.Tip of the Week
electric heat mats, placed under
seed trays, will speed the
germination of vegetables and
annuals and are recommended to
coax slow germinators such as
peppers and eggplants into life.
— Adrian HigginsHome
The first to appear is the winter
aconite, essentially a ground-
hugging buttercup above lacy
green foliage, followed by a
perennial named adonis (here,
an early variety, Fukujukai), with
a showy, golden yellow bloom,
bare at first but then supported
by a growing, feathery tuft of
foliage. Then the snowdrops pop,
starting with the giant snowdrop
and moving to the daintier
common snowdrop. This chorus
builds on itself until at the end of
February and early March, the
woodland floor is awash in pools
of gold and white. Except this
year, the show began in early
February or before, and was
peaking when I was there last
week.
This is followed by March
Bank’s even more popular
progression, when this mix turnsblue with the appearance of
scilla (Alpine and Siberian) and
glory-of-the-snow. “It’s like blue
snow, three to four inches tall,”
said Chris Strand, director of
garden and estate. “It’s very
surreal-looking.” As these
beauties fade, they are succeeded
by carpets of the Italian
windflower. The estate opens to
the public Feb. 29, though
members have garden access
year round.
Given the current trajectory of
the weather, said garden curator
Carol Long, the blue phase will
probably start in a week or two
and will last up to three weeks if
the weather stays cool. Their
lingering foliage offers a week or
so of green respite — and then
spring kicks in with effusions of
dicentra, uvularias, bloodroot
and trilliums, with some Italianwindflowers and Virginia
bluebells joining the party.
Less frenzied, the winter show
is thrilling. This year, it seems
unbeatable.
Linda Eirhart, director of
horticulture, said that in the past
11 seasons, only two — 2 012 and
2013 — matched this year’s
earliness. In the other years, the
current display was delayed as
late as mid-March.
In 2007, I was viewing the
snowdrops on March Bank when
it started sleeting and then
snowing until the nodding
blossoms were blanketed in the
stuff. The snowdrops were
unaffected, but I barely made it
home in one piece.
Most gardens planted a
century or more ago, to the
extent they survive, look as dated
as a Model T Ford, but Marchphotos by bob Leitch/Winterthur
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: Winterthur Museum’s March Bank i s early this year due to the mild winter.
The yellow and white display will shift to blue by early March. Snowdrops carpet the woodland.