Jenny's Garden

The Perennial Garden

This garden is in Western Massachusetts in Zone 5a (the colder part of Zone 5) just south of where New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts all come together. Because we are on a hill, we are always a few days behind the gardens at the base of the hill, and we get a bit more snow.

This is my first serious garden. We bought the house new in 2003. The site had been blasted out of rock and then covered with a foot of wood mulch.

Because our leachfield and large septic tank lies under the lawn, it turns out that the only area I could put a garden is on the side of the house, up a slope. It turned out to have very thin soil with solid rock beneath it. What soil there is was mixed with ugly, crumbly red rocks. I dug out about 8 wheelbarrow loads of rock and added a bunch of soil, but the soil is still thin.

There are tall oak trees shading the garden from every angle, too, so there is only a very small area that gets full sun.

I'm pretty proud about what I've been able to achieve with such unpromising materials.

The Rock Outcropping

Behind our house is a cliff about 12 feet high. Last year I came home to find a gaggle of geologists from the University of Massachusetts examining it. They told me it was a rare geological formation that includes a very clear fault line.

This area was river bed back when this area (the Connecticut River Valley) was part of a huge lake, called Lake Hitchcock. Our rock is mostly red sand, with lots of bigger rocks embedded in it. It crumbles very easily, but is something like 40 million years old.

There is a spring that flows from a crack in the rock in the spring, which limits what can be planted below it. There also isn't much soil. I've added what I can, but it washes away.

I've planted all sorts of things and finally some are starting to take. Trailing ground covers like Arabis, Aubrieta and Oxymoides Saponica (Soapwort) do well. In the summer because of the shading from the surrounding trees, it's a great place for impatiens and chinese forget-me-nots.

The Foundation Plantings
We did the landscaping ourselves. Unfortunately, the front of the house faces northwest, so there are only a couple hours of sun every day. Even worse, we are on a hill. So in the winter we get damaging winds that suck the life out of the azaleas and rhododendrons which are among the few shrubs that can live in such low light conditions.

I put in a lot of annuals to brighten it up the foundation in the summer. But the bushes are never very happy. Fortunately, the house isn't visible from the street, so the only one who notices is me.

My next house is going to have real soil. It's also going to have room for a glass house, because I love propagating things, but there isn't any place to put a glass house here. I start all my seedlings in the kitchen and move them out into the deck and then bring them in at night for months until the last freeze!

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