greenhouse diaries – In the Vintage Kitchen: Where History Comes To Eat

Growing a Fragrant Year: February’s Helpful Hazel and the Greenhouse Diaries

Published on February 29, 2024February 29, 2024 by In The Vintage Kitchen7 Comments

Witch hazel illustration by Leonie Bell circa 1960s

With a scent ranging from sweet yeasted bread to bubblegum, the centuries-old Hamamelis virginiana (aka the common witch hazel) kicks off Month #1 in this year’s Greenhouse Diaries series. In case you missed our introductory post last month, our theme for 2024 is a Fragrant Year, where we’ll be sharing twelve months of perfumed plants, flowers, and trees that have the power to add a calming, aromatic atmosphere to gardens big and small.

Inspired by the 1967 book, The Fragrant Year by Helen Van Pelt Wilson and Leonie Bell and their idea that planting a scented garden benefits not only one garden but many surrounding it, it’s an exciting project that I hope will bring some discussions and awareness about the power of plants and the perfume they provide.

Acting as guinea pigs and testing fields, the greenhouse and gardens of 1750 House are the experiment stations to see how Helen and Leonie’s suggestions work in our northern landscape. Although we are gardening in New England (Zone 6) and striving for a natural and historical outdoor environment appropriate to the history of the house, it’s my goal with this series to feature fragrant specimens that will grow in other parts of the country too, in case you are looking to augment your own green space with some pretty aromatics.

As I write this, the last of our 11″ inches of snow has just melted and signs of spring are stirring in the daffodils poking through in the front corner bed. Planted long before we ever moved in, I’ve come to rely on those flowers as little time clocks signaling that a new season is close at hand even though nighttime temps are still in the 20s and 30s. Spring, indeed, is happening. Soon.

In the beginning chapters of The Fragrant Year, Helen and Leonie write about the “optimistically planned” winter garden, which if done correctly should “offer us flowers with various shrubs to brighten the dull months.” One of their suggestions for wintertime color and scent is one of the oldest medicinal plants in the New World and a resident of the entire eastern half of the country from Canada to Florida.

Although technically considered a shrub or a small tree, when left to its own devices, common witch hazel can grow up to 30 feet tall, and is one of just a few plants that blooms in the dormant stages of winter. Brightening up the landscape with fringe-like ribbons of golden flowers, it adds bright color to the garden, shelter for birds, and a food source for winter pollinators like the dagger moth that shivers and shudders its way through the cold season.

The common witch hazel in winter. Photo courtesy of TN Nursery

Requiring moist soil, sun to partial shade, and an acidic to neutral PH level, witch hazel is an easy-going, practically carefree planting that grows one to two feet in height each year. Ideal for sunny spots, woodland edges or sloping hills where soil erosion is a concern, the helpful hazel compliments a variety of different landscapes in a variety of different states.

Last year, we had to make the tough decision to bring a tree service in to cut down two trees that were precariously leaning in the backyard. The salve for having to cut down two old trees was knowing that we would plant at least two new ones in their place.

Surrounded by woodlands on two sides and facing a community garden in front, 1750 House is tucked in between acres of beautiful naturally-kept trees, including five elms and two cedars that are over 100 years old. While we have no shortage of very tall trees, we do have a bit of haphazard mid-range tree coverage that reflects over 270 years of garden endeavors executed by previous 1750 House residents. Privet, fruit trees, ornamental shrubs, wild natives, ornamental grasses and a few invasive species all compete for attention to the eye. We are on a mission to corral all these growers into a more cohesive vista so that they can work together to provide interesting layers at different heights to create a unique blend of shapes and colors throughout the year.

The appeal of planting a witch hazel shrub in the backyard is the pretty array of color it will add at eye level in the winter when most of the woodlands boast shades of grey, snowy whites, evergreen, berry reds and blacks. I also love the medicinal factor that witch hazel offers and the future opportunities it will bring later down the road to explore some homeopathic recipes.

Humphrey’s Witch Hazel Oil was made in New Hampshire in the 1870s. Image courtesy of the Boston Public Library.

Befitting a proper and useful kitchen garden of a house built in the 18th century, witch hazel in all its forms, from leaf to stem to flower, has been cultivated for hundreds of years for use in poultices, anti-inflammatory salves, and skincare maintenance. In New England, we have the area’s indigenous tribes to thank for teaching early settlers how to boil the bark for medicinal tinctures to heal coughs, colds, and inflammatory ailments. The leaves were used in wound care. The wood for making bows for hunting. By the 19th century, witch hazel became a key ingredient in the first mass-marketed skincare product – Pond’s Cold Cream – which debuted in 1846 under the name Golden Treasure.

Helen and Leonie offered another use too… clipping a few branches of witch hazel in winter and adding them to a vase along with some balsam sprigs for some invigorating indoor aromatherapy. Even though it can take up to six years for the first blooms of witch hazel to appear, I can already imagine such a bouquet.

Young fruit of the witch hazel shrub. Photo: Katja Schulz

While I have ordered plenty of garden seeds online before, ordering a shrub off the internet was an entirely new experience. As I learned, live agricultural specimens like this one are shipped in timing with the appropriate planting season. So the witch-hazel shrub I selected from Tenesssee won’t arrive until spring even though it was ordered in late winter. That’s a handy system that sets you up for success from the beginning.

So the first month of our Fragrant Year series starts off with a to-be continued. We’ll check back in on our witch hazel planting adventures in spring when the shrubling arrives. In the meantime, if anyone else has any experience working with witch hazel, your thoughts are greatly appreciated. Please share them in the comments section.

Cheers to Helen and Leonie for their advice on adding winter color to the landscape and for the aromatic start to showcasing historic plants in the gardens at 1750 House. Until next month, happy gardening.

Other sights from the February greenhouse…

Not to be upstaged by the witch hazel, and just in time for our first Fragrant Year post, Liz Lemon is blooming and filling the greenhouse with her lovely citrus scents.

The Greenhouse Diaries Entry #5: Seed Starting, The Blushing Bell Pepper and What We Learned from a Veggie Burger

Published on January 29, 2023January 29, 2023 by In The Vintage Kitchen2 Comments

Valentine’s Day is still two weeks away, but in the greenhouse love and joy and lessons are in abundance these days. From the deep red petals of the geraniums to the blushing bell pepper to a big bowl of an aphrodisiac growing on the second-tier shelf, it seems like every plant is offering up a bit of romance and wisdom in one way or another. Is this what the winter harvest season looks like? Or does this mean spring might be coming early? I don’t know. Since it’s our first year, we can only take note and appreciate what’s happening right now in the greenhouse at this end-of-January date. Let’s look…

The sun gold cherry tomato branch produced another foursome…

The nasturtiums and geranium flowers are stretching their leaves and spreading so much cheer both in color and scent…

Growing like gangbusters, the chives and the collard greens, are each overflowing from their containers…

The arugula and the parsley are keeping pace with our daily kitchen needs by enthusiastically providing continuous greens for every meal…

One of our favorite recipes we tried this week was this new veggie burger from Jenny Rosenstrach’s cookbook The Weekday Vegetarians. We modified it a bit by adding a fried egg on top and stuffing the buns with our own greenhouse-grown arugula and parsley but otherwise followed the recipe exactly.

These burgers don’t require any baking in the oven – just stovetop cooking (or hot plate, in our case) in a cast-iron pan, so it’s an especially great recipe for under-construction cooking, small space meal-making, or college dorm food. Soft and light, as opposed to many veggie burger recipes that can sometimes tend to become dry and dense, Jenny’s recipe has the consistency of crab cakes and a delicate flavor combination of mushrooms, brown rice and pinto beans. Jenny suggested sliced avocado and a spicy mayo mixture for a topper, but because of our greenhouse abundance, we substituted those two with our own version of similar flavors and textures via the creamy egg and peppery parsley and arugula. It was delicious.

Nowadays, arugula is such a common salad staple that it’s easy to forget that it was once considered a gourmet green and talked about in haughty tones. Although British and Italian immigrants are credited with bringing it to America in the 19th century, it wasn’t really until the 1980s, that it started making a more regular appearance in American cookbooks.

Paula Peck was one of the very few who mentioned it in her 1960s-era book, The Art of Good Cooking, grouping it together with “very expensive” bibb lettuce and James Beard, our favorite gourmand, described it with a sense of reverent curiosity in his 1970s American Cookery book. But none of our favorite 20th-century chefs featured it as an ingredient to create a meal around until many decades later.

Not the case across the pond though. There was nothing new about it in England, Europe and the Mediterranean. There, arugula has been enjoyed for centuries. Legend states that in Roman times it was considered an aphrodisiac and was even banned from some gardens for its love potion properties. So if you wanted to make a romantic Valentine’s dinner for your sweetheart this year, consider a big bowl of arugula along with your shellfish.

Back to the spicy atmosphere in the greenhouse, the Santaka Pepper – although pretty small in stature at just 8 inches – is getting ready to flower (above) and Liz Lemon is growing a baby (below)…

The loveliest surprise of all this week though was the bell pepper. If you have been following along with previous entries from The Greenhouse Diaries, you’ll recall that this was a mystery bell pepper plant that was either a California Wonder, producing peppers that would ripen to a deep red color, or it was the Orange Sun variety, which would turn, as it names suggests, to a warm shade of orange once mature. For weeks, we’ve been waiting to see which color it would turn.

Finally, last Wednesday, the pepper started to change. With great excitement, I’m so pleased to share for certainty now, both the color and the type of plant we’ve been growing all these months here in the greenhouse. The first blush gave it all away…

Orange Sun! Each day it gets brighter and brighter…

If bell pepper had a theme song, it would be this one…

Through wind and rain, snow and sleet, sun and clouds, the greenhouse experienced all the different types of weather possible in these past 14 days. Outside it was a rollercoaster of highs and lows, but inside the temperature held steady between 70-80 degrees, the most even stretch of well-regulated temperature all winter so far. Thanks to our trusty heater, that cozy warmth is now making it possible to start our next endeavor…

Seed starting! After late sowing in the garden in 2022, this year the plan is to get a head start so that by the time the last frost date passes in our area (typically mid-to-late April), they’ll be a collection of hearty transplants ready to make their way out to the garden beds.

Excited to get to work on what is perhaps the most optimistic of gardening pursuits, the first set of seed trays were filled with flowers… snapdragons, Mexican sunflowers and foxglove. Four days in and the Mexican sunflowers have already started popping up. Another joy!

The first time I ever grew Mexican sunflowers from seed was in 2012. I fell in love with their delicate, velvety soft stalks and their bright tangerine-colored petals. Blooming extensively throughout the season, they were a haven for bees and butterflies. That first year I was living in Georgia and they filled out into a 6′ foot by 5′ foot tall bush in a flash. That combination of heat, humidity, and full sun was a winning ticket. I haven’t had enough gardening space to try Mexican sunflowers again until this year, so I’m not sure if they will grow as large and as lush here in New England, but it will be an exciting experiment. This is how they turned out that first year (fingers crossed that we’ll get similar results and similar visitors)…

Right on track, the snapdragons and the foxglove started sprouting yesterday. As biennials, we started some in the garden last year too, along with hollyhocks, but they didn’t grow very much. It’s my first attempt growing all three from seed, so we’ll see what happens this year. Between these greenhouse seedlings and those planted in the garden last year, we’ll have two sets hopefully coming up more productively this year.

Next up on the seed starting list for this coming week are a new batch of peppers and herbs, salad greens, hollyhocks, milkweed, and pincushion flowers, which will get us set up through the month of February before more seeds get started in March. By that stage, we’ll be rounding the corner towards Spring and our one-year anniversary at 1750 House. We aren’t as far along in our renovations as we thought we’d be, but I learned a valuable lesson this week from the veggie burgers.

At one point in Jenny’s instructions, when it comes to the step about forming the actual veggie burger patties, she writes “they will probably look mushy and unappetizing, but press on.” I love that she was so candid with this insight. And I love that she uses the encouraging words “press on.” As we continue to get to know the greenhouse, the 1750 House and the landscape in which they both lay, it is such a good reminder that all worthwhile endeavors require a healthy dose of blind faith and pressing on. Without that, we’d never make it to the flowering and flourishing days. I can’t wait to see what this spring holds in terms of a kitchen and a kitchen garden. We may be in the middle of the mushy parts now, but something deliciously wonderful awaits.

Cheers to love that sprouts, to the sun’s coming out party in the greenhouse, and to Jenny for sharing recipes and reminders.