As the weather turns colder, it's easy to feel greenhouse envy
By Thanksgiving, chances are that even the most protected yard will face a mauling from the first frost. You wake up one morning and see that the coleus, cosmos and impatiens didn't make it through the night. The dahlias and sweet potatoes give up their foliage, though the underlying tubers are all right for a while.
Anticipation of the blackened foliage clouds even the clearest October days. For those of us without a greenhouse or a decent conservatory, the idea of the inevitable freeze forces uncomfortable choices: what to discard, what to save, how to save.
Plants that have been with me for years or have sentimental associations are dragged inside and kept either in an unhappy state of semi-dormancy near a dim basement window or in the brightest room in the house, still too dark, too winter-hot and dry for anybody's liking. I kept citrus trees until they got too big (and prickly in a sneaky way) as well as a cycad that was brazenly spiky until it gave up the ghost. I had a snail vine that grew quite woody after three years. In the winter basement, it dropped its leaves until mid-February, when it would send up forlorn expeditionary shoots once the day lengths got noticeably longer, even when the soil was bone-dry. That died, too.
This pre-frost scramble surely has become more pressing in recent years as we have integrated lots of tropical and subtropical plants into our summer gardens, a list that includes leafy plants we once thought of solely as houseplants. These include Boston ivy, philodendrons, begonias, bromeliads and palms.
People who have cut their gardening teeth in Florida, in particular, are destined to confront this dilemma after they have moved to colder states, because to such folk gardening without tropicals seems like eating hash browns without the ketchup.
Mark Schroeter is that way. His garden is full of tropical fare slotted amid the more common hardy stuff, proving that you can fill nooks and receding corners with far more exotica than you can imagine and proving, too, that this can be done without making the landscape seem out of place or weird. "His garden" in this respect consists of the 4 1/2-acre formal garden at Oatlands Plantation south of Leesburg, Va., where he is the head gardener. Since he came to the historic house museum five years ago, he has worked on a plan of garden rejuvenation - gradually bringing boxwood hedging back into shape, defining plant beds, creating perennial borders and establishing a balance of lushness amid the crisp formality of ornamental terraces.
As a young man, he fled Wisconsin winters and decamped to Florida, a state named for its floral lushness.
In one niche in the Oatlands garden, a place once used as an outdoor kitchen, you will find citrus trees - lemon, lime, kumquat and calamondin - and one dominant container plant, a plumeria tree grown from a cutting he picked up at garden show 24 years ago. Nearby, he tends a mango plant started from a seed saved from a supermarket fruit.
A few yards along this terrace, you see a magenta bougainvillea flowering its head off in a clay pot. Now kept about three feet high, it once climbed two floors of Schroeter's home in Florida. It took him two weeks to cut back the vine, in stages, and when he dug and potted it, "it went into shock a little bit, but about a month later it started growing again," he said. "That was in 2004."
Farther along, three leafy plants dominate the scene. They are five-year-old red Abyssinian banana "trees" rising to 12 feet or more. This is not as odd a plant as it used to be, but unlike the hardy banana (Musa basjoo), it is not root-hardy in the mid-Atlantic and must be overwintered inside. The conventional method is to cut back most of the fleshy leaves and stalks - the banana is a gigantic herbaceous monocot, not a woody plant - and store the lower "trunk" and roots in a bag or tarp. Schroeter will lift and move the bananas whole and in leaf because he has the luxury of a greenhouse.
It is not just any greenhouse, but the second-oldest in the United States, restored a few years ago and looking for a bigger role until Schroeter came along. Built in the early 1800s, it is essentially two buildings in one, a lean-to greenhouse attached to a brick barn, the latter used originally for housing the greenhouse heating apparatus and for housing people. After the Civil War, it was used as a boardinghouse. (Before, Oatlands had been Loudoun County's largest slave plantation.)
The glazed structure stretches about 40 feet long and 18 feet deep and is vacant now, but it will fill up in the coming weeks as the garden staff haul stuff in for the season, with the most tender plants coming in first.
This greenhouse has none of the sophisticated climate controls of modern versions; one end is warmer than the other, and the venting panes must be hand-cranked. But it works for a green-fingered tropical plant guy like Schroeter, and in a month or so there will be just one narrow aisle on the bluestone floor through pots of flora that will still look lush.
Most domestic greenhouses become virtually unusable around here from May to September. Even professional ones with swamp coolers and shades are too hot for most people and many plants. But for the rest of the year, the greenhouse can be a blessed retreat for tender flora and tender souls alike.
Two questions dance in my head: How will this lush retreat look and feel a month from now? And why don't I have one?