To host Beacon Hill garden tour, plant, prune, and cross fingers
Members of the Beacon Hill Garden Club, of which I am one, have been inviting visitors to their secluded gardens for 76 years. The money the club raises from the tour goes to environmental and conservation organizations. Only residents who have hidden gardens can be members, and they must agree to open their gardens to the public about every three years. This is the third time our garden has been included.
September: I'm having breakfast in the garden when it dawns on me: I will probably be asked to open my garden next spring. I am overdue, since construction in our building interfered with our garden the last two years. I get online and order 100 China Town tulips, so pretty with white-edged leaves and pink and white flowers. The description says they will bloom in May. I'm hoping for May 19, the day of the tour.
October: The sweet autumn clematis has finished blooming, but its feathery seed heads sparkle in the sun. For five years, this vine has survived tough, city-garden conditions: soil that must continually be refreshed, ice falling from neighbors' roofs, little sun or, if there is sun, a brick wall that reflects the heat and bakes the plants.
I clean up the garden, plant the tulips, and stow my garden tools. .
December: We look at the planters on either side of the walkway that leads to our front door and decide to fix their barren look with moss rather than greenery for the winter.
Late January: I hope the deep snow cover means we won't have to replace the hardy boxwood --an expensive proposition when you have to do it every few years. These six boxwoods were new last year, replacing two-year-old Japanese ilex that couldn't contend with more than one New England winter, even though they were supposed to.
I get the call and, yes, I will open our garden for the tour.
March: Easter is early this year, and the garden, still covered in patches of ice and snow, is in no condition for Easter egg hunting. When we do venture out, we find a rhododendron between our house and the steps up to the garden crushed by snow falling off the roof. We will have to replace it.
April: Finally things get going. My husband sweeps the brick and the bluestone and picks up the winter debris. We see tiny tips of tulips -- the squirrels didn't get them after all. The boxwood is in good shape.
My husband gets dozens of yellow pansies and we plant them in the walkway and in our window boxes. He also installs daffodils for height. The moss in the walkway planters has thrived. We'll keep it through the spring and not plant flowers in those boxes. It will be less work for me and those who visit the garden on tour day will probably like it.
April 11: I confess to other garden club members that I'm worried my tulips will bloom too early. I get advice: pour ice cubes around the plants to slow their growth. Cover the heads with buckets to reduce the sun's heat. I worry that I'll have to be out in the garden several hours a day to effectively slow them down. I can't. I have a full-time job. I leave the tulips in nature's hands.
May 4: Our little densely planted line of earth is exploding with plants that have made it through another winter. Lilies, astilbes, Solomon's seals, ferns, herbs, barrenwort, shooting stars, ginger, and finally trilliums and jack in the pulpits poke through and begin to unfurl. My guy comes. He prunes the crabapple trees. He trims and stakes up the climbing hydrangea. He tidies up the boxwood. I have him plant three spring- and summer-blooming clematis, since, except for the autumn variety, every clematis my husband or I have planted has died. In our garden, which gets good sun only a couple of months a year, clematis sometimes just can't get a toehold.
We get our windows washed. It's what you do when a lot of company is coming.
May 7: It is cold in the 40s and rainy today. That's good for the garden on all counts. Those tulip heads are swollen. Some are beginning to open. Unlike most New Englanders, I'm hoping for 10 more days like today.
May 8: The crabapple blossoms are fat and ready to unfold. We planted those trees five years ago because the description said they'd bloom in mid-May. But global warming has speeded their timetable. I have already come to terms with the fact that these lovely small trees will probably lose all those blossoms by tour day.
We go to work in earnest for the tour. I like to get any additions into the garden a couple of weeks early so they look more settled. We're planting in the rain, which is good for the plants and fine with me. We transplant all the yellow pansies from the garden into the walkway planters. I look for white roses to fill two wire urns. If I find them, the garden will contain only shades of green and white with pale pink touches. It is my favorite combination with all the brick.
I type a letter to neighbors, letting them know our garden is on the tour. I ask them for forbearance, since 3,000 people will be traipsing past their front doors. I hope they will sweep their sidewalks and finish their window boxes.
May 12: I type up a cheat sheet of the plants in the garden for the friends and relatives who will be watching over the garden during the tour. I e-mail my garden sitters to remind them when they are supposed to arrive.
Monday: Over the weekend we went to several flower or garden shops. We find no white roses big enough to fit in those urns. Reluctantly, we settle for white geraniums. My husband plants them early in the morning. They are pretty enough, but common.
Friends come for dinner. Normally I would be disappointed that it is too cold to eat outside. But I'm not, since these conditions are perfect for holding those tulips. A few blossoms might even stay on the crabapples.
Tuesday: There's little to do now but sweep up crabapple blossoms. I have in reserve a couple of big pots of annuals to plunk down on any tulips that go past their prime. We are a little more particular in the years in which our garden is shown to the public, but we enjoy the garden ourselves so much that we would probably do the same thing to it even if it weren't on the tour.
Today: I'll be up at 6 a.m. and I won't go to work all day. We hope for 70 degrees and sun.
Taylor is executive editor and publisher of The Beacon Hill Times and The Charlestown Bridge. Her garden, at 1 Lindall Court, is one of 14 on the ''Hidden Gardens of Beacon Hill" tour, which is today from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tickets, $30, are available at booths on the corners of Charles and Mt. Vernon and Charles and Chestnut streets.
