The Author and the Engineer
The Pear Tree, Spirea, and Tulips
March 30, 2021
by Kate Forrest
“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.”
— Margaret Atwood
Hi, all! Welcome back to my garden blog, which finally has a name:
My husband, Tyler, and I have debated doing a blog together for years and the working title for that project was “The Author and the Engineer.” We intended to cover all manner of things that encompassed our interests (travel, historic sites, cathedrals) and my husband’s background in civil engineering, such as sustainable design, ethics, and the impacts of climate change on gardening (both good and bad). Fast forward five years, and that project is still sitting in a folder with three Word documents covering blog topic ideas. While it never went anywhere, I still very much like the title so I took it for this project and have included “Our Garden Stories” to give it a clear scope—this is a blog about gardening—our garden and gardens we visit, namely our neighbors: Colonial Williamsburg.
What did we accomplish this past week? We tackled more spring maintenance, cut down an overgrown cypress tree, planted shrubs, potted bare root plants, and mulched a new bed. Let’s jump in!
Last Thursday, March 25th, we had a sunny warm day, so I took all the plants out of the guest bedroom and sat them out on the deck. In our seed trays, we got germination from the salvia (sown March 18th) and were finally seeing small shoots on the kale and lettuce (sown March 14th). We also got a plant delivery that day: spirea and viburnum. I was so excited!
I have never ordered live plants in the mail before, but I took the plunge for a few reasons. One being, I really wanted spirea (after admiring it for the past two years at Colonial Williamsburg) and I wanted to try viburnum. Often, I go to the garden center with a list and leave with twenty plants, none of which were on my list. I was determined to get what I wanted, so after checking a few local places and coming up empty handed, I made the decision to order online through Home Depot. I placed the order March 23rd and we got the plants two days later. As soon as they were delivered, I immediately opened them and was relieved to find all the spirea were healthy and they weren’t damaged by the shipping process. They were very well packaged.
The Chindo Viburnum was also well packaged and while the shrub looked robust, I was a bit concerned about the leaves, with many on the top layer showing signs of either a fungal infection or cellular damage. The rest of the plant looked hardy and healthy, so I decided to keep it and get it planted, then treat the leaf issue.
Thursday night after work, we got the viburnum planted out in the yard by our dogwood in what I’m calling the future “boomerang bed,” since that’s the shape it’ll make when we finish it. We didn’t get to tackle the spirea Thursday night, so we gave them a good watering and left them on the deck. I did troubleshoot with the supplier on Monday about what’s going on with the viburnum and they assured me it was damage from the cold and that by May, the new growth will be abundant, and the winter damage will be gone. Time will tell.
Heatwave
Friday, the 26th, was a crazy hot day, pushing 86 degrees. We had an appointment in Newport News, so of course, I took it as an opportunity to look at plants. On route home, we stopped at the Ken Matthews Garden Center in Yorktown and it did not disappoint. I was really impressed with the quality and variety of perennials they already had out and I can just imagine how much their offerings will increase in the coming weeks. I was able to pick up a few things on my list, including Catmint, Honey Rose Heucherellas, an Ostrich Fern, and Creeping Phlox (which I’ve been wanting for our rock wall). After that, we had to make a final stop to buy a new chainsaw and I snagged a strawberry plant since they seem to go like hotcakes.
To fell a tree
When we bought our house, we inherited a collection of trees that were at the end of their lives, namely red tips (those popular fast growing screen trees) and cypress trees. I have particularly disliked the cypress because they were right off our front stoop and had become these towering mammoths that were too overgrown for their location. We cut one down last year (an effort with a hand saw) but saved the other one for this year (ya gotta do things in phases). We’d attempted to cut it down last weekend, but we couldn’t get our gas-powered chainsaw to work, so Friday we bought an electric chainsaw. It wasn’t expensive ($60, maybe?), so I don’t see it lasting for years, but I thought, even if it only cuts down one tree, it will have paid for itself several times over because we estimated the cost to have the cypress cut down and removed would be between $300 to $600. Fortunately, the chainsaw started up and my husband was able to saw down the cypress in seconds. Then we set about the hours-long project of cutting up the branches and bagging up the foliage. Which leads me to a new segment that I’m calling “Observations & Rants.”
Observation: Floral scented contractor bags attract bees and this is problematic when trying to bag up yard waste.
Rant: Why do I have floral scented contractor bags? That’s a good question. What’s an even better question is, “Why do they even make floral scented contractor bags?” I never even thought to check if they were scented when I bought them. I had no idea they made perfumed contractor bags. They are so potent that we have to keep them in the shed and, nearly two years after the mistake purchase, they still hold on to that scent as strongly as the day I bought them. I have sensitivities to smells, so I absolutely hate artificial scents, but contractor bags aren’t cheap, so I am determined to use them, even if it means getting swarmed by bees when doing yard work.
When we finished with the tree, we grabbed the spirea and got to planting in what is now known as our “Pear tree bed,” which I’ll explain about next.
Our three shrubs are Double Play Doozie reblooming spirea from Proven Winners. Right now they have these gorgeous green and red leaves and once they start flowering, they should keep on blooming into the autumn. They should grow into 3 ft by 3 ft shrubs, so they won’t block the view from my office window. They are small right now—between 12 to 16 inches tall and wide—but they already have new leaf growth just after three days in the ground.
I didn’t fully appreciate how big the bed is—10 feet deep and, at its widest, 16 feet. It’s an odd shape because we circled out around our pear tree, but it’s basically one big rectangle with a half circle on one end. I imagined it being two levels: spirea in the back with annuals in the front. But I now see we have real estate for a third level, so I’ll be looking at perennial options between the spirea and the annuals; something ideally that grows between 18 and 24 inches tall. In front of the perennials, we’ll do white alyssum. But we before we direct sow the alyssum, we need to address the washout issues in this bed.
To that end, we measured and ordered flagstone retaining wall blocks that are set to be delivered tomorrow, so that will be our Easter weekend project.
Anyway, after we planted and watered in the spirea, we heard thunder a ways off in the distance and the clouds were turning dark. We felt we had a small window to get the mulch on the ground, so we took it because we didn’t want our spirea drying out. We had leftover mulch from last year when we had three cubic yards delivered and couldn’t get it all used. Unfortunately, after sitting all winter in our back yard, it was zig-zagged through with fine roots from our red tip trees. As we spread it, we pulled out as many roots as we could, but I suspect we’ll have to keep an eye on weeds in that bed this summer. We literally finished the task in the rain, but it was just a light sprinkle. We managed to get the tools in the shed by the time the thunderstorm got to town. I made it in the house first and while standing in the kitchen, I saw the back yard light up and heard the loudest crack of thunder I’ve ever experienced in my life—it was right over top of us. I immediately booked it to the back door to see where my husband was. He’s a smart man. He was running for the house. He made it in safely. Then it was time for a cold glass of water as we sat in the dining room (on newspapers, since we were covered in dirt) to watch the storm, knowing all our new plants would be well watered for the day.
We got a pear tree!
Funny thing is, we’ve had it all along. We just always believed it was an apple tree. I thought that because I’ve seen apple trees before and I thought, “Yep. That looks like an apple tree.” We also never got mature fruit from the tree. Last summer, the fruit was eaten when it was only an inch big and frankly, pears and apples, when an inch in size, look remarkedly similar. I really don’t have a good excuse for never investigating; the tree has a tag that plainly says “Kieffer” on it and I just always thought, “That’s our Kieffer apple tree.” I lived in the Finger Lakes of New York where all fourteen counties have apple orchards, so I know there are thousands of varieties of apples and it didn’t surprise me that I’ve never heard of the Kieffer. Turns out, I never heard of it because it doesn’t exist. Long story long, we’ve got a pear tree!
A little tidbit: New York is the second largest apple producing state in the USA, with Washington in the top spot. On trip out west many moons ago, my grandmother brought back bushels of apples after visiting her sister in Washington state and, to this day, my mother tells me they are the best apples she’s ever eaten in her life.
Planting and potting up
Sunday we scrubbed old pots so we could plant out all the roots we got in the mail Saturday. I’d ordered ten bare root hostas, three bleeding hearts, and one dahlia. We got them all into pots and stuck them in our greenhouse on the deck. We also potted up the astilbes that we grew from bare roots. I had planted them all out in a whisky barrel that my husband covered with chicken wire to keep the squirrels at bay. From seven roots, we’ve got seven plants, so I’m very pleased so far with that experiment.
The hosta roots were bone dry, so I’m going to give them a full three to four weeks before expecting to see signs of life. All the bleeding hearts had shoots of new growth, so I think in a week or so, we’ll see those above the soil. I have no idea how long it will take the dahlia tuber to start growing; it was fully dormant when I planted it.
I also planted all the mint we got from Norma’s Produce on St Patrick’s Day. Including the sweet mint that survived the winter, we’ve got four pots of mint on the porch now.
We ran out of time to get the new perennials from Ken’s planted out, but I’m happy to hold off until after this cold snap. We’re due for two 30-degree nights this week, so I think leaving everything in the greenhouse until the weekend is a good idea even though everything is cold hardy.
Seed Tray Update
From all seeds sown on March 18th, we’ve got germination on almost everything: salvia (the first to shoot), coleus (chocolate mint and chocolate cherry), Phlox, and Mexican Feather Grass. The only exception is the lavender. Nothing happening with those seed coins just yet. So far, the salvia has the best success rate with shoots in every single plug. Super thrilled with the results so far and I’ll be starting more seeds out this week.
What’s blooming in our garden, Williamsburg, and Yorktown
Our yard
- Tulips! They just started opening on Friday and they are the gems of our garden right now.
- Lenten roses
- Daffodils (half spent, with other varieties now in peak)
- Camellias are in their glory
- Violas & Pansies
- Hyacinths
- Violets & Buttercups
- Pear tree is blooming and leafing out
- Weeping redbud is covered in fuchsia-colored blossoms (so beautiful!)
Around Williamsburg & Yorktown
- All of the above and…
- Cherry trees galore
- All manner of flowering trees
- Willow trees are leafed out (they’re the ones I’m most worried about with this cold snap coming)
- Understory is greening up and trees are leafing out left and right
- Forsythia is still flowering and, in some cases, turning green
- Tulips are flowering in all the Colonial Williamsburg gardens! *I know I mentioned it above, but it deserves to be repeated… it’s tulip season in Williamsburg, y’all!
- Anemone
- Starflowers are in swaths all over CW
- Periwinkle
- Magnolias (not the Southern variety)
- Redbuds are in peak bloom
What else is doing?
- Our dogwood is budding out and even has some leaves
- Our perennial ferns have new growth
- Astilbes are doing awesome
- Our peas have shoots!
- Perennial Lantana has new growth at its base
- Our pineapple sage (which is not a perennial in our growing zone) survived the winter and has new growth—so excited!!
- Our hiccup of a hydrangea keeps getting bigger
- Our mondo/monkey grass (undecided if those are the same thing or two different plants) has new growth on it; possibly flower shoots? Time will tell.
- The skinks are out and about. These little lizards used to make me squeamish, but then I saw one stuffing its face with earwigs and I thought, “You’re alright.” We have a sizeable earwig population, so I am happy for our rock wall to continue hosting a small skink population.
- Honeybees, bumble bees, and wasps are out in full force. We started seeing activity from the bees back in February, but their numbers have skyrocketed over the last week.
Alright, all. That’s the latest from our garden. I also wanted to share that I’ve started a dedicated Instagram account for this gardening blog. I invite you to follow us there for daily updates at theauthorandtheengineer.
Thanks for following our progress. More next Tuesday, April 6th. Have a Happy Easter!
~Kate