Arts and flowers: Gardeners and artists show and tell on the Hadley tour Saturday

By CHERYL B. WILSON Bulletin Contributing Writer

Published on July 17, 2009

Mary Thayer and Sue Russell have been neighbors and gardening friends in the Hockanum section of Hadley for nearly 20 years. Their gardens are featured on the Hadley Garden and Artists' Studios tour Saturday in celebration of the town's 350th anniversary. Thayer cochairs the anniversary committee. Thayers and Russells were among the founders of Hadley in the 17th century.

The friends learned a great deal about gardening from their mentor, Elsa Bakalar of Heath, a well-known area gardener who wrote a book called "A Garden of One's Own." Russell and Thayer took many workshops in Bakalar's hillside garden in the mid-1990s. "She called us her passionate gardeners," Thayer said. Many of their favorite plants were gifts from Bakalar.

"I love to study (the book) and watch the video too. I feel like she is talking to me," Thayer said.

Thayer now lives in the house where her husband, Rick, grew up. "Some of the plants go back generations to his great-grandparents," she said, citing heirloom peonies, Siberian iris and wisteria. "We've added some gardens and renovated some others."

Wisteria that once grew up to the attic rooftops had to be moved several years ago when the Thayers added a breakfast room. "We have pictures of it in 1888," she said.

"This is gardening by backhoe," she said. Rick Thayer dug up the deep-rooted vine with his equipment, divided the antique plants and relocated them next to a newly constructed wooden pergola with a stone floor. Despite being moved, "It had hundreds of blooms right off the bat," she said. The vine proved so hardy that she gave Russell a good-sized division earlier this month.

Russell also has other plants from the Thayer Siberian iris edging her driveway. Dozens of plants came from a single gift clump. "I once cut 2,000 blooms and gave them to Cooley Dickinson Hospital. I kept cutting and cutting them," Russell said.

Russell is known for her cut flowers. She sells peonies and iris in the spring at a roadside cart in front of her house. For many years she did the dramatic onstage floral arrangements for the Musicorda concerts in South Hadley. "My children would help by holding the arrangements in the car," Russell said. She made gold and purple arrangements for the Hopkins Academy graduation ceremonies this year when her son Stuart graduated.

Sunny and shady

The Thayer property is very open, with fields going down to the Connecticut River. An eagle's nest rests in a tree along the river, and the Thayers set up a high-powered telescope in their breakfast room to watch the adults and babies.

"I've been gardening since I was a teenager," Thayer said. "My love is flowers, but we do have vegetables and herbs beside the back door - parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme."

Over the years she has developed gardens with different exposures. On the north side of the house is a stand of tall pine trees, creating a shady oasis with hostas and other shade plants. Next to it is a sunny patio and a water garden created three years ago by Five Star Gardens of Palmer.

A gentle waterfall empties into a small pool that is about two feet deep. Water lilies, water hyacinths, irises and papyrus are planted here and fish find refuge under rock ledges along the edge. A purple thread-leaf Japanese maple is pruned carefully to cascade gracefully over the water. "The sound of the waterfall cuts down on road noise from Route 47," Thayer said.

The adjacent perennial bed has annuals and perennials, including a lovely pink rose, Queen Elizabeth', one of Bakalar's favorites. "It keeps blooming all summer," Thayer said.

A charming heirloom accent is an old birdhouse, painted white. "Rick's father remembers this birdhouse from when he was a young boy," Thayer said.

While Thayer and Russell both patronize local nurseries and garden centers, they also grow plants from seed and exchange with friends. "Some of the annuals I like to grow a lot of, I'll do from seed," Thayer said. "I also grow delphiniums from seed. I belong to the English Delphinium Society," a group to which Bakalar introduced her. "When the seeds arrive I put them in the fridge until planting time. They take two years to bloom."

For most of their vegetable needs the Thayers rely on the nearby Western Massachusetts Food Bank Farm but Thayer said she likes to have tomatoes and cucumbers in quantity in a modest unfenced vegetable garden.

She grows her tomatoes from seed but this year she had a catastrophe. After nursing the seedlings along  "I kept repotting them and burying the stems in large pots"- she finally dug a trench in the garden, laid the plants on their sides and stood back satisfied with her rows of 20 tomatoes. "The next morning I went out and there was not a leaf left on any of them!" She blamed a voracious woodchuck, which devoured her pepper seedlings, too. The good news is that many of them put out new leaves and she hopes they will produce fruit.

In contrast, Sue Russell said, "I just planted one tomato plant. We support our local farmers."

While Thayer amends her soil with compost and rotted manure and sometimes peat moss, Russell said, "I do nothing to my soil. I don't even water." After all, her garden, she said, is the bottom of Lake Hitchcock, referring to the glacial loam for which Hadley is famous.

It is a short walk from the Thayer garden to the Russell garden along a meadow path. En route, in front of the Thayer barn, is a perennial garden, sheltered from the wind, which features a number of shrubs as well as herbaceous plants. Among the treasures here are towering Inula magnifica with yellow daisies on six-foot-tall stems, the shorter Kalimeris integrifolia and variegated Physostegia or obedient plant. A daylily bed holds several varieties including Bakalar's favorite Madame Bellum' with purple markings on the outside of the yellow petals.

To get to Russell's nearby garden, visitors cross a small bridge built by Rick Thayer many years ago. The Thayers were living in a small house adjacent to the family homestead. "Our son Dan was three and he wanted to walk to Gramma and Grampa's all by himself," Thayer explained. The sturdy bridge made a safer passage than going by the road.

Unusual trees and shrubs

Russell's house, built in 1991, is just beyond the small house where the senior Thayer now lives. Russell loves unusual trees as well as flowers.

Planted along the long driveway are a European larch (Larix decidua), a beautifully pruned Sargent crabapple and other unusual trees and shrubs.

Close to the house is a black pussy willow (Salix nigricans) artfully pruned. An amazing sight is an American elm, untouched by the dread Dutch elm disease.

Russell's pride and joy is a 15-year-old dawn redwood or metasequoia. The feathery needles are extremely soft. "I touch it every time I come by," she said. Once it drops its needles in the fall the exfoliating bark and the symmetrical structure of the branches become evident and the tree is a stunning accent in the winter, she said.

Next to the dawn redwood is Russell's cutting garden. There is an impressive row of the peonies created when she successfully divided her original plant at the wrong time of year.

Special tools

Russell uses two special tools in her garden: a hand hoe with a sharp angle and serrated edge and a long serrated ginsu knife, which she uses to divide the heirloom iris. "It has yet to get dull," she said, demonstrating how she uses the knife to edge the garden with ease.

Instead of traditional foundation plantings, Russell's house is surrounded by deciduous shrubs, ornamental grasses and perennials. One wonderful shrub is Neillia sinensis. "Birds love it," she said. "You will find hummingbirds here nonstop."

She got it from Liz Toffey of Conway, who bought small plants at a sale at Sedgewick Gardens at Long Hill, a Trustees of Reservations property in Beverly.

Among the foundation perennials is a tall astilbe with arching white blooms, which Russell said is an heirloom.

In the front yard are more shrubs, birdhouses and a cottage garden leading to the front door. One curiosity is Harry Lauder's walking stick (Corylus avellana Contorta') with twisted stems. Another is a corkscrew willow, beloved by flower arrangers. An ungainly mock orange is a puzzle for Russell. "I want to pull it out," she said. "until it blooms."

Both gardens have katsura trees obtained from Mildred Dickinson of Amherst in the early 1990s. They are children of the original William Smith Clark seedlings from Japan.

Both gardens feature unusual trees and seldom-seen perennials. It is obvious to see why Bakalar called the two women "her passionate gardeners."

Cheryl Wilson can be reached at valleygardens@comcast.net