“With a few flowers in my garden, half a dozen pictures and some books, I live without envy.”

—Lope de Vega

If you’re driving behind Michael Ruggiero, you had better leave a healthy braking distance. It’s not that he’s a bad driver; it’s just that he’s likely to suddenly pull over to some roadside planting to take a photograph. It may be an elaborate corporate installation, some homeowner’s window boxes, even a gas-station island; to him, all offer gardening inspiration.

You see, Michael is a plantsman, in the most time-honored sense of the word. A long-time Senior Curator at The New York Botanical Garden, his knowledge is both broad and deep. He can discuss the merits of any tree or shrub, rattle off names of numerous deer resistant plants, offer a lengthy list of shade tolerant perennials that makes you wish you had no sun whatsoever in your yard. But the plants that cause him to veer off the road and reach for his camera are annuals.

By definition, an annual plant completes its life cycle in one year. Gardeners broaden the term to include other plants that don’t survive winter in our region. Over the years, the condescension of perennial plant snobs combined with one too many geranium displays to make the annual planta non grata. At a workshop at The Phantom Gardener, however, Michael shared wisdom and photographs that revealed endless, stylish possibilities for annuals in the landscape.

Play the field

Gardening with perennials is like marriage; with annuals, it’s like going steady for a few months. With this in mind, experiment. Pair up bold colors like orange and blue to see what punch it brings to your landscape. Try out a monochromatic garden, or an elegant black and white display. Go formal one year, casual the next. Worst case scenario: you find out he’s…it’s not for you, and say good riddance at the end of the semester. Er, season.

Mixed-perennial-and-annuals-border

Go wild

To create a garden that’s in harmony with nature, make native plants the backbone of your landscape. When using annuals, however, indulge your exotic side; go for whimsical, magical. Banana plants (Musa spp.) and Elephant’s ear (Colocasia esculenta) offer bold statements with their enormous leaves. Bougainvillea and Mandevilla climbing their way around porch posts can turn your home into a tropical paradise. Planting flowering tobacco (Nicotiana sylvestris) and other night-fragrant flowers beneath bedroom windows allows their heady perfume to waft into your home.

Don’t forget to eat your vegetables

Striking displays can be achieved by combining flowering annuals with vegetables and herbs. Start a spring bed with a tightly-planted mosaic of lettuces in various hues and shapes. Harvest and enjoy the outer leaves until the plants bolt, then pull and replace with other annuals. Plant vibrant hot peppers amid your petunias; edge a bed with parsley; use cardoon plants as other-worldly accents, then parboil, bread and fry their artichoke-flavored stems for a delicious taste of Italian heritage.

Try to contain yourself

Annuals are the darlings of container planting. Eminently versatile, containers can serve as movable screens, or enhance an otherwise untillable area. They can welcome visitors daily to your front door, then be relocated to the patio for a party. A low-growing dish of lobelia and one or two varieties of thyme can spend the daytime outdoors, then come to the dining room table each night as a centerpiece. Experiment boldly with plant combinations and containers (how about planting a wheelbarrow, or a pair of rubber boots?). Update containers each season for an affordable way to refresh your landscape.

A sea of petunias

Let’s be practical

Annuals lend themselves to all manner of garden fixes. Hide an unsightly air-conditioning unit with a trellis and a fast-growing hyacinth bean vine (Lablab purpureus). Underplant shrubs with portulacas to serve as a living weed barrier. Lose a perennial in mid-season to deer browsing? Fill in with a dramatic annual, and replace with a new perennial come fall. Love cut flowers, but can’t afford to purchase them often? Plant a cutting garden and harvest your own.

Because they provide more instant-gratification, annuals also are the perfect way to engage children in gardening. And, Michael emphasizes, don’t decide what you think is an attractive combination: let kids choose their own plants, and you might find that their open-mindedness leads to some amazing plantings.

Take care

Remember that perennials are tortoises and annuals are hares. Where the former mete out their energy into a brief floral display and store the rest for next year’s race, annuals sprint through the season, pouring themselves into ongoing bloom right up to the finish line. Give them the hydration and energy they need—especially those in planters—by watering often and feeding them every two weeks with an organic liquid fertilizer.

What are you waiting for?

Now, hurry to your favorite garden center and feast your eyes on the vast array of hues and textures available in their annuals section. But don’t tailgate; you just might be behind Michael Ruggiero.

To Learn More…

Books:
Annuals with Style by Michael A. Ruggiero and Tom Christopher; The Taunton Press

Classes:
There is no better way to learn than in the company of other gardeners. Botanical gardens, retail garden centers and your Cornell Cooperative Extension all offer informative workshops:

www.nybg.org/edu/conted/
(for The New York Botanical Garden programs, including some held at Bard College)

www.hort.cornell.edu/gardening/counties.html
(for info on the Master Gardener and other programs)

Or, find and join your local garden club:
gardencentral.org/fgcny/homepage/

Spring feels like the most fleeting of seasons. It often keeps one foot planted in winter through much of April, then leaps into summer sultriness as early as May. Don’t waste another moment: get outdoors and enjoy the transience of spring by discovering its transients—the wild plant and animal life that is flitting through our fields and forests, even as you read this sentence.

and it’s / spring / when the world is puddle-wonderful
— E. E. Cummings

Nodding Trilium

Spring Ephemerals
Once the ground thaws but before the leaves of deciduous trees unfurl, a unique group of native perennials emerge from our woodland floors. Known as spring ephemerals, they take advantage of this brief window of sunlit opportunity to sprout, flower, and reproduce. Some bloom for but a few days, then disappear completely until the following year. Fleeting and delicate, they slake our winter thirst with dainty sips of floral beauty.

Spring-Beauty

Spring ephemerals may be purchased from reputable suppliers (don’t collect them from the wild—you can harm habitat and endanger plant populations!) and incorporated into cultivated gardens, but are truly best when enjoyed in their natural setting. The earliest of the ephemerals to flower is Spring Beauty (Claytonia virginica); its sweet white blooms striped with dark pink cluster pertly among its grass-like leaves. The feathery, dusty green foliage of Dutchman’s Breeches (Dicentra cucullaria) dons charming pantaloon-shaped flowers that inspired the common name. The pristine blooms of Nodding Trillium (Trillium cernuum) bow reverently beneath a whorl of three leaves, while its funky cousin Purple Trillium (T. erectum) proudly displays its foul-smelling maroon flowers above the foliage—all the better to be seen and smelled by the carrion flies that act as its pollinators.

Vernal pools
Vernal pools are ephemeral wetlands that form in shallow depressions in the landscape. Fed by spring precipitation and snowmelt and generally dry by late summer, they provide critical breeding habitat for many amphibians and invertebrates. Search forests, meadows, even your own backyard for one of these fleeting aquatic nurseries—or just grab a flashlight and follow the chorus of serenading Spring Peepers, Grey Tree frogs and quacking Wood Frogs on a warm, rainy night. Like Spadefoot and American toads, they move from forest to pool to mate and lay their eggs. Mole salamanders such as the spotted, marbled and Jefferson (all of which are either threatened or of special concern in the Northeast) emerge from their below-ground winter hideaways and make their way—sometimes up to half a mile—to the pools as well.

Spotted Salamander

Return by day to look for the outcome of the noisy nights of amphibian passion: eggs, either in bead-like strings or massed around submerged vegetation, and the resulting tadpoles and larval salamanders. Gently plumb the pools with a dip net (being careful not to dislodge egg masses from their attachments) to find fairy shrimp, dragonfly and damselfly nymphs. You may even uncover the caterpillar-like larva of the caddis fly, which fashions protective tubular cases from twigs, leaves, tiny pebbles and other found materials.

Just passing through…
Of the more than 450 bird species seen in New York State, only about 245 actually nest here, meaning that many are just passing through on their way to other breeding grounds. Even those that do remain in the region, such as the vast variety of warblers, become much more difficult to spot once the trees leaf out. Now is the time to grab some binoculars and a field guide—or better yet, join a bird club and accompany some experienced birders—to catch a glimpse of our feathered vernal visitors.

Woodcock

In spring, even a young bird’s fancy turns to thoughts of love, and no bird displays its romantic side more dramatically than the American woodcock (Scolopax minor). This month, find a forest clearing or grassy field adjacent to a moist woodland, settle in quietly at dusk, and you may be lucky enough to witness the woodcock’s most unusual courtship ritual. After some vocalizations—a repetitive nasal peent—the male begins its flight, spiraling upward as high as 200–300 feet, its flight feathers producing a high-pitched twitter. Following an abrupt fluttery descent, the woodcock begins the process again and may continue the pattern for thirty minutes.

Now you see ’em, now you don’t
Spring is here, in all her ephemeral beauty! Unpack your child-like sense of wonder from the mothballs, and start exploring. And try not to blink.

To Learn More…

Books: Visit your local independent bookseller and get yourself some field guides; no household should be without them!

Online Resources:

www.projectnative.org
Native Knowledge Conference

www.vernalpool.org
Great info on the creatures you’ll find in
these ephemeral wetlands

www.nybirds.org
To locate your local bird club

www.birds.cornell.edu
A wealth of bird info and opportunities to participate from home in Cornell Lab of Ornithology research