Gardeners should tap into magic offered by winter sky
The sky has yet to fall, but if it did, most folks these days would wait for their smartphone alerts to inform them of the event.
People don’t look at the sky anymore, a problem that predates even the chin-down screen age. This is odd, when you consider that the sky is the largest single natural element in our lives. Even within the concrete canyons of the city, there’s plenty of sky to go around. Grab it, I say. It’s mesmerizing, it’s beautiful, it’s free.
If you take a few minutes to study the heavens, you will see some amazing things: eagles, vultures, a formation of geese. Contrails are like wet lines of paint, intersecting, shifting and diffusing. Clouds, in all their variation, will tell you the direction of the next weather front and hint at its ferocity. I am amazed whenever I feel a slight breeze on the ground and look up to see a raging current aloft, the clouds pushed violently by strong rivers of air.
I’m thinking about the sky now because the next few weeks offer what I believe are the most dramatic, vivid and magical skies of the year. The truly thrilling times are around dawn and dusk, when you can get colours that are astonishing in themselves and mind-boggling in their combinations.
A few years ago, I witnessed a sunrise over the Potomac River that was a calico of indigo, purple, violet and orange and of such mystical intensity that I half expected to see Charlton Heston emerge in a winged chariot.
For the gardener, the subdued nature of the landscape in winter reinforces the aerial display, and, at special moments, the sky becomes a flower bed in the firmament.
Just as architects will orient a house to take in a view of the lake, the mountains or the ocean, the landscape designer can play to the winter sky. It helps to have a viewing point, indoors or out, and to be mindful that the winter sun rises in the southeast and sets in the southwest. An open meadow will hand you the sky on a plate, but some sort of frame will give the vista coherence. In a small urban backyard, that might be the 15-foot gap between a holly and a magnolia.
In a more horticultural context, the sky plays a key role in the vista from the Viewing Gallery of the museum’s main building, the Pavilions. Here, you look across an upswept meadow to a knoll topped with a grove of honey locust trees. The filigree of branches forms the winter tracery.
Planting evergreens such as pines, says Adam Greenspan, the project’s lead landscape architect, would have made the experience more static. “Having the black silhouette branching of the locusts is something that really makes the sky the most lively part of the composition,” says Greenspan.
The cluster of galleries in the main building is centred around a large-scale water garden that is wholly enclosed by the circle of connected galleries to form a frame for the sky. Without the aquatic plant coverage of summer, the water court mirrors the sky and amplifies its winter role, says Greenspan. “The colour of the air is different, and as clouds move across the sky, they move from one edge of the frame to the other,” he says. “The speed of the wind and the movement is something you see.”
You don’t need an entirely open space or an unfettered horizon to appreciate the value of the winter sky. Watching the waning afternoon light through a woodland demonstrates that this is at best a dance between the opalescent sky and the black-branched tree.
Gardening tip:
To maintain the blooms of a moth orchid, keep the plant away from drafts and heat sources, place it in bright but indirect light, and soak the roots in tepid water once a week. Take the pot to the sink. Do not use ice cubes. Leaves should be a medium green. Dark green leaves indicate too dark a perch.