PLANTING AND CARE

Unless you can control watering (which means keeping the garden out of the rain), make sure that the container has plenty of small holes in the bottom for drainage. And for extra insurance that drainage will be perfect, start out with a layer of pebbles or sand. A covering of burlap or sheet moss will keep soil from sifting down into it.

Soil should be light and porous, capable of holding some moisture but not too much. The standard recipe of one-third garden loam, one-third humus, and one-third sharp sand is a good basic mixture to start with. Add extra sand if the plants are succulent-like, extra humus for woodsy plants, a sprinkling of lime for plants that dislike acid soil. A slow-acting organic fertilizer such as bone meal can be mixed in, but in very small amounts. Run the mixture through a coarse sieve, to remove stones and debris.

As you place the plants, firm the soil gently around the roots. Don’t fill the container so full that the soil is level with the rim; leave an inch or so to hold water while it seeps down to the roots below. Place the ground-cover plants, and those to dangle over the edge, last. Some gardens are finished with a thin mulch of stone chips or sand, some with a carpet of moss.

Location

A sink garden planted in a real trough or sink is a mighty heavy thing, once it’s filled with soil and planted; and so may be many others. If you can place the empty container in its permanent spot and plant it there, you may save someone an aching back.

These gardens are meant to grow out in the open air, but not where searing sun and hot dry winds can dry the soil too fast and burn the plants. If the plants are all of the type that need sunlight, give them only the dappled shade of a high-branched tree or the windbreak and slight noonday shade of a low wall. Woodland plants and others that like shade can be grown in more protected spots. Naturally, the two types are not combined successfully in the same garden.

Don’t place sink gardens where they will receive the drip from eaves or an overhanging tree. Don’t set them tight up against a wall. Newly planted gardens need some special protection—a cheesecloth tent or newspaper on a temporary frame overhead—until plants are well settled in their new home.

Watering

A safe general rule is never to let the soil dry out all the way through, never to water so much that it is soggy and sour. For most plants, you can scratch into the soil surface with your fingers. If it feels moist, don’t water; if it feels dry, do. However, succulent plants should be grown drier, boggy plants more constantly moist. Frequency of watering depends upon type of plant, size and type of container, the soil, the weather—depends, in fact, upon how often each individual sink garden needs water.

Fertilizing

If a fertile soil mixture is used in the first place, and particularly if it is enriched with a slow-acting fertilizer such as bone meal, most gardens will not need extra feeding for many months after planting, often not for the first year. The point is to give the plants just enough food to keep them healthy, not enough to make them grow out of proportion to the garden.

If you see signs of malnutrition—few, small leaves with poor color; failure to bud and flower; sickly, stunted growth—feed quickly but lightly. A weak solution of organic food such as fish emulsion or liquid manure is usually recommended. Established gardens can take this light feeding once in spring when active growth begins, and once or twice during the early summer, without outgrowing their bounds.

Rock garden set in an old wash-boiler lid

Pruning and Grooming

Pick off all faded flowers promptly, so the plants will not exhaust themselves by setting seed. Remove any dried or fallen foliage so it will not rot and invite disease. Pinch the growing tips of plants that threaten to grow too tall and lanky. Shear hedge plants regularly and nip back creepers that spread out too far and strangle other plants. Refresh and renew any mulch or moss carpet as needed. In a garden so small, the least imperfection seems magnified.

Insects and Disease

Once a week, all summer long, my sink gardens get a quick treatment from an all-purpose aerosol bomb, used according to label directions. So far, with one exception (the mysterious plague of “inchworms” we had in the spring of 1961), this has kept insects and disease at a safe distance.

Winter Care

In mild or warm climates, sink gardens should not need any special protection in winter. But in Connecticut, the deep-freeze is so long and severe, I move my gardens to the cold frame. To make sure that the soil does not freeze and crack the container, I sometimes sink it to the rim in the soil. I’ve also packed salt hay tightly around them successfully. Or a garden could be wintered over on an unheated porch.

But most of the hardy plants used in sink gardens should not spend the winter indoors or in a warm greenhouse. They must have a cool rest period for several months to complete their natural growth cycle.

CHAPTER 9
MINIATURE PLANTS, BONSAI-STYLE

Only in the true Oriental bonsai do art and horticulture combine in such an extreme state of perfection—and in miniature to boot. Paintings may be as magnificent, but they’re inanimate. Ancient trees of the forest may have equal artistic virtue, but they’re not shaped by the hand of man. Living bonsai trees, sometimes centuries old, become masterpieces because, says Claude Chidamian, “they’re planted in philosophy, shaped by art, grown with love.”

If that sounds as if I am awed by bonsai—I am. I would never have the talent and patience to prune and shape, trim and train, in minute detail year after year, so that every branch, twig, and tiny needle or leaf would be perfectly placed and proportioned. Even if I were an artist, I doubt that I could create the illusion of grandeur in minuscule scale. Nor would I ever dare assume the responsibility for caring for these priceless, age-old plants.

But that doesn’t mean that bonsai is beyond me, or any other gardener who admires it. Without committing the sacrilege of inept imitation, we can have our own version of these miniature trees and make them artistic and satisfying in our own way.

The original bonsai trees look old and weather-beaten because they are old and weather-beaten. The Japanese adopted this art from the Chinese many centuries ago. Our trees in bonsai-style are not likely to have that venerable age, but they can have character. They can have the lines of trees that have held a precarious footing on the side of a rocky slope, have been bent by the wind or twisted by mighty storms.

Because every part of it is in perfect proportion to every other part, a fine bonsai tree creates an illusion of tremendous size—as if you were looking through the wrong end of a telescope to a giant more than a hundred years old. Our dwarfed trees can be perfectly proportioned and create the same illusion. Although there is no substitute for true antiquity, our dwarfed trees can be artistic in their own way without pretending to be ancient.

By making some concessions (without desecrating the art) we can take suitable trees and turn them into “Orientalized” garden ornaments, and do it in one year, not ten. If the pruning and training is done with care and artistry, the result will be a bonsai which is a distinguished ornament and particularly appropriate for contemporary architecture, and also for landscape architecture.

I have seen a bonsai of Sargent’s juniper set beside a garden pool, its twisting branches swaying out and over the water, and reflected in it. Twin (but not identical) bonsai trees are startlingly effective; for example, one on each side at the top of a set of formal steps. Bonsai can be used as a center of interest on a patio or terrace to accent an entrance, on top of low walls, or against the wall at the end of a path.

Last summer, in our wild garden, my husband dammed up a tiny stream at a point where it began to run down a short but rather steep and shaded slope. This created a small pool from which the water trickles over the dam and drops onto a series of rock ledges below. We planted the banks on both sides with ferns, wild ginger, bloodroot, trillium, and other wildlings. But something was needed at the top, some small tree or shrub that would integrate the dam into the picture and would be in harmony with the woodsy surroundings.

We considered all the dwarf, shade-tolerant evergreens our local nurseries had to offer, but nothing seemed just right. We scoured our woods, but the only low-growing trees (which are mighty few in our area) were too straight and erect. The mountain laurels and other shrubs with interesting lines would eventually grow too large. So we decided to try what, for us, is an experiment.

We found a white pine less than two feet tall with a suggestion of the irregular shape we had been looking for. We lifted it carefully, took it home, root-pruned it, and planted it in the best bonsai tradition, in a sturdy box just large enough to hold the roots but leaving a little room to spare around the edge. Then we took the tree to the top of the dam and planted it by sinking the box in the soil. After some weeks, when the pine showed no sign of ill effects from being moved, and was making new growth, we shaped and pruned it, and then wired it, bonsai-style, along the lines of the tree we had been hunting for.

Streptocarpus—this variety is the delightful little Weismoor hybrid.

With sensible care and winter protection, pruning and root-pruning when it threatens to grow too large, and training in the way we think it should grow, the little pine will, we hope, mature into a gnarled gnome in proportion and harmony with its woodland setting. Of course, we plan to provide a new box at root-pruning time before the old one can rot and set the dwarfed roots free to roam the soil around it.