The Greenhouse Diaries are back with new inspirations and a whole new year of growing adventures to explore and discover. Like last year, these new diary entries center around what can be grown in a petite 4×6 greenhouse in our four-season New England climate, but starting this month there is a brand new theme, different from last year, that is guiding our gardening goals in 2024.
Last year, our first year as greenhouse owners and New England residents, we focused on winter gardening from December through May and all the possibilities that a warm greenhouse could offer in a cold landscape. We drew inspiration from Katharine Sergeant Angell White, a lifelong lover of the natural world who also happened to be a marvelous writer, a founding editor of the New Yorker magazine, and the beloved wife of E.B White.
Her 1977 book Onward & Upward in the Garden, featured a collection of horticultural essays that highlighted her ability to embrace challenges by finding joy and solace in the certain uncertainties. Something that all gardeners must face when it comes to designing a pleasing landscape, in Katharine’s case, it was the long Maine winters that were a struggle for her spirit which yearned to be out in the garden digging and clipping, pruning, and propagating. She also had much to say about the confusing advice of garden experts and her own thoughtful attempts of trying to create the garden of her dreams. Her writing was full of spirit, humor and opinion when it came to detailing plans, recommending books and seed catalogs, and offering advice on growing plants and flowers both indoors and out. She was inspiration enough for us to start experimenting with our first winter growing season. Cold weather aside, we had Katharine on our side, lending a unique empathy and encouragement that fueled our desire to get out and grow things regardless of the weather, our experience level or the unseasonability of what we most wanted to achieve.
Our plan last year was to get a head start on establishing garden beds for 1750 House, so we focused mainly on forcing seeds and plants to sprout, bud and bloom early. Using 33 different plants, flowers and herbs as trial-run guinea pigs, we accomplished our goals with a fair amount of success and a few setbacks as we tested the physical capabilities of the greenhouse and grew our garden knowledge.
This time, a year wiser, we are reducing the number of overall plants in the greenhouse to just focus on the proven winners that grew well both in the greenhouse and in the garden beds last spring, summer and fall. And to keep things interesting, we are launching a new experiment. This year, we are leaving extra room in the greenhouse to try our hand at growing a new type of perennial garden for year-round enjoyment… a landscape full of plants, flowers and trees that carry a scent.
When we lived in the South, we were surrounded by a wide variety of aromatic flowers that made our time there all the more memorable because of the beautiful perfume that continuously lingered in the air. The scent of night-blooming gardenias and fragrant magnolias swirled around our dinner parties. The heat of summer brought heavy humidity but also the delicate, sweet aromas of climbing Carolina jessamine. Roses in every scent and shade toppled and tumbled over hedgerows and brick walls. It was a lovely layer of landscape design that I had never really thought about until we had experienced it firsthand. Of course, we won’t be able to recreate an exact aromatic Southern garden here in New England since it’s a very different climate from there to here, but there are plenty of other options in the Northeast to explore for similar effect thanks to our new inspiration.
Here to guide the 2024 Greenhouse Diaries in our aromatic endeavors is the 1967 book, The Fragrant Year by Helen Van Pelt Wilson and Leonie Bell. Month by month, in words and drawings this book details how to grow specific types of plants and flowers that will continuously unfold new scents in the garden season by season, even in the winter months.
Praised for being the first of its modern kind, The Fragrant Year was lauded both for its scope and its practical application, as well as its healthful benefits. In the opening chapter Helen writes… “if our gardens today were more often planned as fragrant retreats and our rooms were frequently perfumed with bowls of spicy pinks, bunches of aromatic herbs, vases of fragrant roses, and jars of potpourri, perhaps we would not have to depend so much on tranquilizers to hold us together in this frantic, fast-paced world.”
Helen wrote that in 1967 but it is still so applicable today. The world is still frantic and fast-paced. People still look to medicine to calm their nerves. But we think Helen’s theory is pretty wise – there is something much more natural, more gentle, more joyful in tackling frantic nerves and fast paces with this sort of approach instead. It is lovely to think that by selecting a few handfuls of scented botanicals and thoughtfully adding them to the landscape we might not only help create a more calm environment for ourselves but also for the community around us. Who knows what sort of impact that small gesture could have on a greater world.
A prolific writer of gardening books throughout the 20th century, Helen was no stranger to the power of plants. Along with penning a newspaper column titled Our Gardens Within and Without during the 1920s and 1930s, she also wrote for all the well-known women’s magazines including House & Garden, Cosmopolitan, Better Homes & Gardens, and House Beautiful. In between all that she wrote/edited over fifty books on various gardening topics throughout her long and lengthy career.
Born in New Jersey, Helen spent the majority of her life in Philadelphia, PA and Westport, CT where she experimented with gardening projects of all sorts both indoors and out. Her most well-known book was one on caring for African violets published in the 1940s but she was a beloved and trusted authority on a variety of horticultural topics throughout her life. Working with Leonie on several different projects, it was in the 1950s that they learned they shared a mutual love of aromatic botanicals. Upon discovering this, the idea for The Fragrant Year was quick to spark but it took Helen and Leonie ten years of dedicated research and trial-and-error gardening experiments before their book was finally published.
Like Helen, Leonie Bell (1924-1996) lived and gardened in suburban Philadelphia. In addition to being a well-respected botanical illustrator, she was also known as a rose expert. Contributing her expertise to several rose garden books published during the 20th century, Leonie was often referred to as a rose genealogist since she had a knack for discovering/uncovering heirloom roses from the past that had been misnamed or believed to be no longer in existence. At one point, her own personal garden contained over 200 different types of roses, most of them old-fashioned heirloom varieties.
If you are ever in Virginia, you can see the impact Leonie made at the Leonie Bell Rose Garden at Thomas Jeffferson’s Tufton Farm, which features a tribute to both Leonie’s legacy and the history of North American rose breeding.
Much sought after in the world of botanical illustration, what’s interesting about Leonie’s art is that she was self-taught. Her intrinsic knowledge of the anatomy of plants combined with her studies at the School of Horticulture in Ambler, PA led her to closely look at botanical subjects from all angles. That well-rounded vantage point carried through to her drawings which shine with scientific detail but also personality.
Excited to share a year full of fragrance here on the blog, each month we’ll feature a new scented flower or plant recommended by Helen and Leonie and detail our gardening experiences as we incorporate twelve new aromatic additions into the landscape at 1750 House. Hopefully, you’ll find this information equally inspiring and insightful too. It would be lovely if we could all experience the calming nature of a scented garden together.
Our next Greenhouse Diaries post will introduce our first fragrant botanical, but in the meantime, here’s a quick update on improvements we made to the greenhouse over the summer and a current list of what’s growing in the greenhouse now…
Current Occupants
As of mid-January, the greenhouse is halfway full with overwintering geraniums, vinca vine, and dracaena spikes from the summer garden. Six different types of succulents, a coffee plant, a pineapple sage cutting from our summer plantings, and Liz Lemon (our six-year-old lemon tree) fill out the rest of the space alongside a batch of newly started seeds… collards, broccoli, beets and four different types of salad greens.
Winter Plastic Wrap
This isn’t a new improvement, but we are on Year No. 2 of dressing the greenhouse in a winter coat – aka wrapping it entirely in a layer of thick plastic – to keep the heat in and protect the plants from drafts during rain, sleet, and snowstorms. The plastic, a temporary solution for the coldest months gets removed in early spring, folded up, and stored in the basement. Once the temperatures drop below 45 in the fall, we put the plastic back on for the season. Aesthetically, it’s not the prettiest site but it gets the job done and keeps our overwintering plants and new seedlings happy and warm. We weren’t sure how the plastic was going to hold up from year to year, but so far it’s nice to see that it is still working just as well. To learn more about this winterization system, see last year’s post here.
New Electrical
Over the summer we added an electrical outlet inside the greenhouse and buried the wiring underground. This was a big (and much safer) improvement from running an extension cord across the yard between the greenhouse and the workshop, which is how we handled things last winter. This new addition is an outdoor-rated 110V 15 amp circuit box which is just what we need to power the heater and lights.
A New Heater
A new mini space heater replaced the tall radiator-style heater used last winter. This smaller size opens up more room to move around the greenhouse and fits nicely on a bottom shelf tucked out of the way when not in use. It has a safety feature that turns the heater off automatically if it tipples over or if any excess moisture drips inside. When the greenhouse reaches a certain temperature, it also automatically turns off to save energy and to keep the plants from overheating.
By using this smaller unit, we don’t have to run out and adjust the heat as the temperature changes over the course of the day, like we had to do last year. Also, we readjusted our required heat temperature in the greenhouse. Instead of keeping it in the mid-70s like last year, we lowered it to 55 degrees, in hopes that the cooler temp will keep spider mites at bay. We learned first-hand last winter how much they just adore a hot greenhouse. The new heater also blows warm air around the space instead of radiating it, so we have continual air movement swirling around inside this year, which I also hope will help with any pests. The final great benefit of this small little worker is that it has an additional fan option too, so in summer we’ll be able to grow our herbs inside the greenhouse without the temperature getting too hot or the air too stagnant.
New Lights
My most favorite new enhancement to the greenhouse came this fall when we added bulb lights to the interior roofline. The lights make it so much easier to work at night, especially in the winter when it can get dark as early as 3:30pm if we have an especially cloudy or rainy weather day.
These bulb lights are a tad too big for the space, so they’ll be swapped out for something a bit more petite this spring, but we had these already on hand and wanted to make sure we liked the light idea before we committed to several sets. At night it looks especially festive. Once all the landscaping is in place around the greenhouse, it will provide a nice light source for outdoor dining during the warm weather days. By then we’ll be at least five months into the fragrant year and the garden will hopefully be on its way to becoming a perfumed paradise. Just dreaming about it now, I can see and smell the summer already.
If you’d like to catch up on the trials and tribulations of our first year of greenhouse gardening start at entry #1 here. Otherwise, it’s on to 2024 and all the delightful aromas that await each new season.
Cheers to ever-evolving garden adventures, to a scent-sational year ahead and to Helen and Leonie for inspiring this new set of diary entries centered around the life and times of one mighty but mini New England greenhouse.
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