A Colorful Stroll Through the Winter
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HAMDEN, Conn.
RAIN was drumming so fast and hard on the tin roof of the office at Broken Arrow Nursery here last Friday that the crew practically had to shout as they discussed the crazy weather: the freak snowstorm in October that took down a third of their magnolia collection; Tropical Storm Irene in August, which felled their beloved scarlet maple "swing" tree, with its thick horizontal branch; and the warm winter temperatures that had brought the forsythia into bloom in December, although the witch hazels were right on time.
"Is this the clearing shower?" joked Richard Jaynes, 76, who started the nursery with his wife, Sally, in 1984.
In fact, Broken Arrow put down its first roots 65 years ago, when the young Mr. Jaynes planted a couple hundred spruce seedlings in his father's apple orchard as part of a 4-H project -- selling Christmas trees.
"Dad kept it going while I was in college," said Mr. Jaynes, who went off to Wesleyan University and then Yale, where he earned a doctorate in botany. (And over the years, those Christmas trees have been planted across 20 acres.)
Broken Arrow, which only recently began shipping plants, has long been a gathering point for plant geeks in search of some rare dwarf conifer like Morgan, a tiny hinoki cypress whose upright chartreuse needles turn vermilion with the cold, or Razzle Dazzle, an ornamental raspberry or ghost bramble (Rubus cockburnianus) with arching white canes that can light up the winter garden.
"We grow more than 65 percent of the plants we sell," said Adam Wheeler, 33, the propagation manager, who used to buy plants here when he was in high school.
And many of those plants originated here, from cuttings taken off some sport (a branch with a different shape or variegated leaf or color, often caused by a mutation) found during a walk in the woods or on a country drive.
Mr. Wheeler, for example, created Razzle Dazzle from a wild ghost bramble he spotted in a field five years ago. One of its arching canes, normally covered with fernlike blue-green foliage, had variegated green leaves swirled with pink and cream. It is available ($35) for the first time this spring.
"I like raspberries," said Mr. Wheeler, who has a degree in landscape horticulture from the University of Vermont. "There's been this big push for roses, but to my mind they're one-dimensional. Raspberries have this amazing stem color in winter, wonderful foliage, which turns wine red burgundy in the fall, and respectable flowers." (Razzle Dazzle's single-petal flowers, which open in June, are reddish-purple.)
Once the rain had slowed to a drizzle, we ventured into the gardens, which contain about 1,500 different trees, shrubs and perennials, including Mr. Jaynes's collection of native mountain laurels (Kalmia latifolia), one of the largest in the world.
Raindrops were glistening on the dark green satiny leaves of these graceful broadleaf evergreen shrubs, dozens of which Mr. Jaynes created in his 25 years as a plant breeder for the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, which has an outdoor research station a few miles from here.
"Evergreens and conifers are the bones of the garden," Mr. Wheeler said. And in spring, these mountain laurels and rhododendrons light up the woods with their blooms. (Broken Arrow holds an open house in early June for the mountain laurels, whose flowers range in color from white and pale pink to red and burgundy.)
Dwarf conifers are good for accenting a small yard in winter, especially if they have an unusual shape or color.
In a garden near the office, Andy Brand, the nursery manager, pointed out Little Giant, a dwarf white pine with blue-green needles and a perfect cone shape, no more than a foot tall. He created it from a bristly witch's broom (congested growth on a branch, caused by a virus or mutation) that he spotted while hiking in Sleeping Giant State Park nearby. (These deformities are gold to plantsmen, because they often produce dwarf plants. Mr. Brand took cuttings, grafted them onto white pine rootstock, and voilà, a dwarf white pine.)
Mr. Brand, who has a master's degree in horticulture and tissue culture from the University of Connecticut, is also fond of Morgan, the dwarf Chinese arborvitae. And even in the mist, its orangey-purple needles were striking. But the best part is inside -- the tree's interior needles are a bright lime green -- and the effect is almost electric, as if a light is glowing inside the little shrub.
Our walk through the woods also revealed the beauty of bark with no leaves to distract the eye.
We stared at an old paperbark maple (Acer griseum) with bright cinnamon peeling bark and a Japanese stewartia (Stewartia pseudocamellia) whose trunk was smooth, almost muscled-looking, with bright splotches of creamy white, orange, olive-green and gray.
"If I had to pick a tree that was my favorite for year-round interest, that would be it," Mr. Wheeler said. Not only does the Japanese stewartia stand out in winter, but it also offers camellia-like flowers in summer and brilliant orange or red foliage in fall.
This year, Mr. Wheeler is introducing a cultivar of a related species, Stewartia rostrata Pink Satin, which doesn't have the dramatic bark of pseudocamellia. (Its fragrant flowers, though, are pink rather than white, and they bloom from mid-May to early June, when its Japanese cousin starts flowering. So why not have both?)
Snake bark maples, with their striated bark, can also enliven the winter garden. And their stems are often striped: Acer davidii has purple-and-white-striped stems, Acer tegmentosum, green and white; another yet to be identified has maroon-and-white-striped stems. (Imagine a grove of them against a blue sky, Mr. Wheeler said.)
But the star maple on that rainy day was a little tree whose smooth bark glowed a rosy pink: Acer pensylvanicum Erythrocladum.
"It gets scarlet in the cold," Mr. Wheeler said.
He also pointed out the winterberry hollies (Ilex verticillata), whose colorful berries cling to their bare stems in winter. In addition to the classic red-berried types, the nursery grows a number of orange- and yellow-berried varieties, including Winter Gold and SunSplash, created by Mr. Wheeler, which has orange-red fruit in winter and gold-splashed leaves in summer.
For the witch hazel lover, Broken Arrow offers close to 40 different hamamelis species and hybrids, from the winter-blooming Asian types to the fall-blooming natives. I am still partial to the Chinese fragrant witch hazels, like Imperialis and Wisley Supreme, whose yellow confetti-like flowers bloom in early winter, as well as the hybrids, like Aurora, with its scented orange-red blossoms.
But Broken Arrow opened my eyes to others, like Quasimodo, a dwarf variety with tiny greenish-blue leaves and orange flowers no bigger than the tip of my pinkie. It belongs to the Hamamelis vernalis species, a native from the Ozarks that blooms in winter.
Mr. Wheeler clipped a tiny branch for me to sniff. Its fruity scent packs a wallop. "On a sunny day," he said, "you can smell this 100 feet away."
Maintaining a Garden in Winter
PRUNING can create striking differences in plants, from the sculptural effect of a well-shaped hydrangea to the brilliant stems of a shrub dogwood cut back hard in late winter. Other shrubs, cut to the ground, will produce huge tropical-like leaves for the summer garden.
Adam Wheeler, the propagation and plant development manager at Broken Arrow Nursery in Hamden, Conn., clipped off a few of the graceful dark-brown flower heads of a dwarf peegee hydrangea (Hydrangea paniculata Dharuma), which grows to about five feet tall and wide, and has smaller blossoms than the old-time peegee, which can turn into a small tree, top-heavy with huge flowers.
"We hold off on pruning until just before new growth starts, because we don't want to destroy the winter interest," Mr. Wheeler said.
Pruning this shrub is a matter of clipping off the old flower heads and removing any crisscrossing or rubbing branches. Mr. Wheeler removes some of the young shoots or canes growing up from the base of the plant, and keeps others if he thinks they will add to the overall structure.
"It all depends on the character of the plant, and what your goal is," he said.
If this shrub were overgrown, Mr. Wheeler could cut back the stems aggressively, without sacrificing flowers, "because this is one that blooms on new growth," he said. (Some shrubs, like lilacs, bloom on old growth, or stems that grew the previous summer, so pruning those plants in winter sacrifices the flowers on the cut stems.)
The red osier dogwoods (Cornus sericea) are a fantastic addition to the winter garden, because their slender, leafless stems glow red or yellow or even purple in the landscape.
"But if you don't cut them back hard, the older stems will lose the intensity of color," Mr. Wheeler said. "So every March, after I've enjoyed the stem color for the winter, I cut them to about eight inches tall."
Go ahead, cut them all. "The whole thing," he said. "Then they come back and grow to about four or five feet over the course of the season and have that vibrant color."
Mr. Wheeler likes to mix up the colors, too: Cardinal, which is orange-red, with Balleyi, a deep maroon, and Silver and Gold, which has bright yellow twigs in winter and variegated leaves in summer.
Sometimes he will cut a shrub like nine-bark (Physocarpus), which can grow to be a 15-foot monster, to about a foot from the ground. "It will grow to about eight feet, with great bright purple foliage all season," he said. "It won't develop flowers and seed capsules, because we keep cutting it back every year."
He does the same thing with a golden catalpa tree, cutting back its stems each year to the same little knobby branches on its trunk (pollarding, in the European tradition) to produce huge yellow leaves as wide as six feet across. "It looks kooky," he said. "More tropical-looking."
Broken Arrow's spring workshops include Japanese maple grafting, heirloom apple grafting, planting techniques for the beginner and an illustrated witch hazel lecture, followed by a tour of the collection. The mountain laurel open house will be when the flowers peak, so check with the nursery. Information: (203) 288-1026 or brokenarrownursery.com/ on the Web.
First Published February 9, 2012 12:00 am
