It is Better to Give and Receive

The lots on our side of the street are quite large, with good-sized front yards and nice, deep backyards. I have never understood the disparity, why ours are so much bigger than those across the street. Was it a slip of the draftsman's pen when the street was being laid out, a toss of the dice to decide who gets the big lots, or a bit of graft that gave us the property advantage? In any case we have a big city garden to fill.
The owners of our house for the past 34 years were great gardeners and bequeathed to us a formal garden in the backyard. But in our case it's not boxwood and gravel paths; hey it's Jersey City. We've got a garden grid that is laid out with anodized aluminum frames and old bluestone sidewalk pavers. The side beds are trimmed with cobblestones, probably saved from some of the old city streets that now lie beneath the paved Gold Coast development along the Hudson River. Our formal garden is therefore a curious mix of '70s mod and historic urban fabric. (The previous owners had a metalwork company, hence the slightly weird in-ground aluminum frames) The neglected gardens we acquired were a tangle of irises with huge patches of hostas of various colors. Spiderwort, an invasive plant to say the least, was poking up everywhere. The irises needed thinning so they would bloom again and, in my book, a little hosta goes a long way. So how to rework the garden and not spend too much money?

The answer lay to the south of us in Monmouth County at the annual spring plant swap. It's a quirky local event held each spring and fall at Deep Cut, a historic garden located in Middletown, New Jersey. The 54-acre garden is a lovely spot now dedicated to the home gardener. In the 1930s it was briefly owned by mob boss Vito Genovese. At Deep Cut, Genovese created an elaborate garden reminiscent of Naples, his Italian birthplace. Work suddenly stopped when Genovese had to leave the country...hmm...Italy beckoned. A suspicious...hmm...fire burned down the mansion the next year.

Last Saturday at Deep Cut this turbulent past was not immediately evident. Here's how the plant swap works: Gardeners pull up with their surplus plant stock, carefully potted in quart, one-gallon, or two-gallon containers. This is a great way to reuse those plastic garden pots that collect in the backyard or down in the basement. The plants are labeled and plant providers are handed colored-coded tickets, one for each one of each size plant they bring. We had a fistful of tickets because our home sellers had bequeathed us the aforementioned overgrown irises and hostas, and that pesky spiderwort. Here's where it can get just a little bit ugly (remember the place is called Deep Cut and it was owned by a mob boss)! Many of the arriving plants are common stuff, yes, lots of irises and hostas, but some gems appear as well. But the unusual plants go fast and there's a bit of pushing and elbowing to get the rare gems. A few frowns appear on those who lost out and wide grins form on those who snagged a choice echinacea or an unusual ground cover. All in all the mood is jolly and the people leave with carloads of plants. And not a penny is exchanged for the goods in question. This a nice retail model for the new recession economy where money is in such short supply these days.

I confess that we were feeling so proud of ourselves for getting a carload of free plants that we couldn't resist a quick stop at nearby RareFind Nursery in Jackson, NJ. Inspired by a beautiful specimen we saw last week in the botanical garden in Copenhagen, Rich and I were on the hunt for a fragrant white rhododendron with a pink blush in the center. (If I hadn't told you already, there are two gay men in charge of this Jersey City garden, that's us.) Right on the edge of the Pine Barrens, Princeton business man Henry "Hank" Shannen has created a monument to his passion for rhododendrons. Set on eleven acres, it has rows of greenhouses and a display garden with over 2,000 hardy rhododendron hybrids and species, one of the largest such collections in the United States. Hank gave us a special tour of the gardens and also a brief history of Rhododendron Fortunei, the beautiful and sweetly fragrant plant that we didn't know we were looking for. They don't call this the Garden State for nothing. Hank told us that the RareFind gardens are spectacular in mid May when the rhododendrons are all in bloom. Plan a visit and get a rare find for your garden.