Hellebores in Winter

Looking for a brisk walk through a beautiful space? Come to Elm Bank. Yes, the massive stands of annuals and perennials are a memory, but now is when garden 'structure' comes to the fore in places like the Bressingham and Weezie's gardens.

Autumn flame dogwood

Winter heather

The Boston Flower & Garden Show opens in ten weeks, which may seem like an eternity as winter bears down, but not if you're contemplating entering a plant in the Amateur Horticulture competition. Now is the time to start getting your plant ready for the show. What follows is also an excellent guide to caring for any houseplant that you want to keep at its best.

By now, you've already decided what plant or plants you think will shine for the flower show. You know where you are growing them --in a window, under artificial lights or in a greenhouse. You've decided how you think they should look when entry day arrives. Which all means that now is when you start working toward that look.

Watering is one of the first areas where problems can arise. Keeping a plant properly watered during the winter months in New England requires taking into account the plant's water needs based on many variables. Is it growing in a window with the still-limited light of early winter? Or is it under artificial lights getting the light that it grows best in? Is it in a house made dry by central heating, or a greenhouse where you can control the humidity? Under-watering is quickly and easily spotted (and corrected). Overwatering is often not noticed until the plant is seriously affected.

Brown tips may be a result of over-watering.

Trimming diseased leaves now will leave plenty of time for new growth before spring.

Design Division II

Have you won a blue ribbon for your floral designs? Have you ever wanted to step onto the ‘big stage’ and show your talent?

Division II – the ‘open’ division of Blooms! at the Boston Flower & Garden Show – still has some openings for floral designers. You need not be a member of a garden club, but you should have both experience in designing and have won in competitions.

The payoff for competing is the recognition of your skills and imagination, and the admiration of the 65,000+ attendees at the show.

If you are interested, please contact Julie Pipe at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it You can view the schedule for Division II here.

Loretta Carrigan loves the ocean. She never misses an opportunity to go there and that love is shared by her husband, Mark, and their children. But last year Loretta, who by day runs the floral department for an area supermarket, yielded to her children's demands and she created a tree for the Festival of Trees based on Hot Wheels cars.

Loretta Carrigan of Medfield crafted a tree that shares her love of the sea.

Andrew and Christine, winners of 'The Sea - My Favorite Place to Be'.

The gift of a membership in the Massachusetts Horticultural Society is a year-long invitation to discover, save and to appreciate. It's a gift that won't soon be forgotten.

In March, you'll be sending them to the 2012 Boston Flower & Garden Show for free. Next month they can enjoy an Amaryllis or a pot of paperwhites for indoor forcing with a $25 Gift Certificate from White Flower Farm. Through the winter they'll receive Organic Gardening and Garden Design magazines to let them plan for spring. Next spring they can explore Elm Bank's many gardens and even its extensive library.

In addition to these tangible things, there's an underlying gift that goes beyond anything that can be tied with a bow: the knowledge that they're supporting horticultural education. They're helping children's programs in Weezie's Garden and amateur horticulture at the flower show. And, they're helping to preserve and maintain Elm Bank, one of the great educational 'teaching gardens'.

Mass Hort's Special Gift Membership Offer

Membership is a terrific gift. And, if the recipient has never been a Mass Hort member before, it's an even more attractively priced one.

To introduce new people to the Society, we'll take $15 from the price of an individual or a family membership. That makes the gift of an individual membership just $35; a family membership just $70.

By using our online Gift Membership order form, you can personalize your gift by including a special message to your recipient. For more information, visit our Gift Membership section.

On Wednesday, January 18, the Library of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society will hold the first session of a monthly, gardens and gardening-themed book discussion group.

Called 'Telling Garden Tales', the group will meet from 10:30 a.m. until noon in the Board Room of the Education Building. Its purpose is to encourage participants to read the works of talented authors and to share their thoughts about the books with new friends. Founder Maureen Horn's hope is that, at future meetings, the group will discuss fiction and non-fiction books that are concerned with gardens, plants, and the land.

"Because of the interest in the literature of Eudora Welty generated by Jane Roy Brown's lecture on her book, One Writer's Garden, which studies how Welty reflected the care and love of her gardens in her short stories, it seemed fitting that we look at the stories themselves," Maureen says. "The book chosen to inaugurate the club series is The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, which is available in all Minuteman Library Network public libraries, so there shouldn't be a problem in borrowing it."

Because the initial meeting is just two weeks away, the first assignment will focus on just one story, "A Curtain of Green". "But it may be hard to resist delving further into the book," Maureen says.

Jane Roy Brown notes in One Writer's Garden, was that Eudora Welty's favorite flower was the camellia, and attendees at the session will be put in the proper mood when they enter the Education Building, where camellias are blooming at the entrance.

A small donation to help pay for light refreshments will be appreciated. The discussion group will be limited to twelve participants. To sign up for this first session or to indicate your interest in subsequent meeting, please call or Mass Hort Librarian Maureen Horn at 617-933-4912 or This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .

by Betty Sanders
Lifetime Master Gardener

Think Snow! Gardeners should join skiers now in praying for snow. The bare ground leaves our perennials (and any newly planted trees and shrubs) vulnerable to the freeze and thaw cycle. Without a blanket of snow to keep the ground cold, every warm day that follows a cold night includes the possibility of pushing plant roots up and out of the soil, exposing them to drying winds and freezing temperatures the following night. Cold weather doesn't kill hardy perennials: warm days in winter can. Your Christmas tree is a great source of branches to shade perennial roots from the sun. You can also provide protection to plants with a layer of mulch, compost or chopped leaves. The only good news in the December weather is that heavy rains ensured evergreens a good supply of water as they sunbathe their way into winter.

Branches from our Christmas Tree will help shelter perennials from freeze-thaw cycles.

When we get snow , be careful removing it from walks and driveways. Never throw snow on shrubs or the branches of trees. Gently brush snow off laden branches to help the plant return to its natural form. Try to shovel your way out of the house. Footsteps or tire tracks in even light fluffy snow will create patches of ice where the snow is compacted. Getting rid of ice is more difficult and even more dangerous to your plants. Remember that ice salts do not work instantly. Use minimum amounts of ice melting salts and wait to see if the resulting melt allows you to shovel up the remainder. And don't apply salts when it is too cold for them to work. Calcium chloride is only useful to 15 degrees. The newer ice melts stop working at 5 degrees. Salts will damage both the leaves and needles of plants it lands on, (think about all the dying pines along Routes 128 and 495) and the roots as it seeps into the ground. Where possible use alternatives such as sand or cat litter that will disappear into the garden or lawn in the spring.

Winter moths dancing around your lights in December are not a happy sight-you are probably facing an infestation of winter moth caterpillars in the spring. When they hatch in early Spring - anytime between late March and mid April - the small green caterpillars will tunnel into the leaf buds of oaks, maples, fruit trees and many others. They leave the tree weakened, requiring it to produce a second set of leaves. Most trees can survive one or even two years of this, but eventually the repeated stress will kill them. You can spray small trees now with dormant oil (on days when the temperature is above 45 and no hard frost predicted that night) to smother the egg masses. When the caterpillars hatch a biological product based on spinosad is the best control. For large trees, call an arborist, particularly if your trees suffered last year. (For a longer article on winter moths, click here)

Spray-on commercial deer repellents smell awful for a few hours. They're best applied wearing old clothes.

Spray your plants to save them . Winter is cruel to our plants. Harsh winds dry the leaves of the evergreens and hungry deer, rabbits and other varmints will eat almost anything they find. On warm dry days, you can spray evergreens with an anti-dessicant such as Wilt-pruf that helps the leaves and needles retain moisture. A monthly spraying on another warm day with an animal repellent may prevent leaves and flower buds from disappearing into the stomachs of browsers.

Cyclamen Rescue. First, not all holiday gift plants will be long-lived houseplants. Poinsettias take the patience of Job to re-bloom, amaryllis need at least a year to repeat their glory. But cyclamen can be perennial pleasers. We have one plant that has been with us now for 15 years. It may look ragged at times, but it blooms faithfully every winter.

Cyclamen.

The cyclamen that came into your home was raised in a greenhouse. It was given carefully controlled daily doses of water and fertilizer. Temperatures are adjusted to encourage the optimum growth and artificial lights provide for optimum light for blooming. Then we bring them into our homes where the air is painfully dry from central heating, the light on the table where reside or the mantel they decorate is not likely to be what they have grown used to. So don't be surprised when your beautiful specimen suddenly has yellow leaves and drooping flowers, and don't throw it out. Cut off dead and dying leaves, it had more than it can possibly support in its new home. Place it in the coolest room in the house, even the basement if it can sit next to a window. Cut back watering to once a week. The dying should stop in a couple of weeks and then you may see new leaves or even flower buds. Return it to hot rooms for only short periods of time. In the spring, set it outside in a well shaded location (ours summer under rhododendrons) and return it to the house in the fall. You may well be celebrating Christmas 2012 with it in a place of honor again.

You can explore more of Betty Sanders’ gardening thoughts at www.BettyonGardening.com.

by Neal Sanders
Leaflet Contributor

On the second day of this new year, I plunged into the woods that make up part of our property and sawed a very large tree limb into roughly a dozen pieces. The limb - more accurately, about a third of a tree - fell during our brush with Irene back in late August, and we have a policy that "what falls in the woods stays in the woods" unless it interferes with the sight lines from one of our windows.

I will freely admit that when we first noticed the limb, I made some kind of vague commitment that I would "do something about it, eventually", which is commonly understood to mean that it will still be on my "to do" list in 2030.

That's me on December 27, 2010.

For me, the saving grace of most such promises is the advent of winter. Once there's a foot of snow on the ground, outdoor chores are reduced to one or two bouts of cutting firewood. The wonderful thing about a good, old-fashioned New England winter is that five months of Mother Nature acting on something as ephemeral as a tree limb eliminates the problem without me having to break a sweat. Come next spring, the problem would have mostly solved itself.

But this is - at least so far - the snowless winter, except for a cruel October storm that raised all sorts of false hopes about record snowfalls (and left much of New England without power for a week). All the autumn chores that I put off with the full expectation of getting a pardon once the snow pack was knee deep are still out there, beckoning me. Instead of curling up with a book on New Year's Day, I spent an hour cutting down the ornamental grasses that should, by all rights, have been flattened by now. This is patently unfair.

And, if you remember back just one year, we all spent the week between Christmas and New Years digging out from a pair of back-to-back storms that dumped nearly three feet of the white stuff across the region. Once that snow was in the record books, all I had to do was point to the snow banks and wince a little bit about having pulled a muscle wielding our snow blower, and I was excused from all chores. I got a lot of reading (and writing) done last winter.

This year I walk out to the mailbox and see the pile of branches that really needs to get taken to the town dump. Out back, there is a mat of leaves on walkways that ought to get raked so that moisture can better seep down into the ground. The list of uncompleted autumn chores is endless.

Somewhere out there is an Alberta Clipper that is going to merge with some warm, muggy moisture from the Gulf of Mexico. They're going to collide somewhere over Pennsylvania and shoot northeast. When that happens, we're going to get buried. I, for one, can't wait.

Neal Sanders is a frequent contributor to the Leaflet. Neal's most recent mystery, The Accidental Spy, has just been published and you can learn more about it here . That book, plus his first two mysteries, The Garden Club Gang and Murder Imperfect, can be ordered through Amazon.com .