Shovel Ready! Knot Garden Restoration Underway

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By Suzanne Bouchard, Director of Gardens & Grounds



Having progressed in the past year and a half from imagining to planning to scheduling, restoration of the formal English Knot Garden begins this month!  The project entails replacing the garden’s declining English boxwood with hardier varieties, improving the drainage system, and renovating soil beds. This ambitious restoration effort provides an opportunity to deepen our scholarship on the entire landscape feature and expand our commitment to sustainable gardening.

Tobacco blooms.

Phase one of the project requires: cutting back, digging up, and safely storing the rose bushes; removing the English boxwood, saving those that are still viable; and removing other plants growing within the beds such as the Cleome (common name: “spiderflower”) and flowering tobacco. Next, the soil will be removed down to ten inches and replaced with 3” of sand and fresh topsoil. At the same time, the drainage system will be restored to function effectively. In late October, we will plant new boxwood and replant the roses inside the new edged beds.


The restoration work has been generously funded by the Ruth S. Willoughby Foundation, and a donation from The Honorable Jane Sloat Ritchie and Mr. C. Jackson Ritchie will pay for replacement rose bushes. In fact, the question of which rose bushes to plant and which to replant poses questions both historic and botanical.

A copy of our knot garden, diagrammed and planted long ago at
Avenel in Virginia, offered insights into our garden’s history.


As we researched and documented the English Knot Garden, questions arose about the varieties of roses and their locations in the layout. We look to documentation of the grounds by Peter family members, in particular the last private owner, Armistead Peter 3rd.  The original Knot Garden design mentioned by Britannia Peter Kennon, his great-grandmother and the estate’s second owner, recalled a feature edged in boxwood and filled with a mixture of roses, perennials, bulbs, and annuals.  The Knot Garden was lost during the Civil War and the design “found” by Armistead Peter 3rd in 1926.  He and his father, Armistead Peter, Jr., replanted the box along with roses, sage, lavender, and ambrosia.


This 1984 photo shows the garden shortly after the property passed to
the Tudor Place Foundation.

Over time, more roses were added to the beds. The Knot Garden now holds a multitude of floribundas, hybrid teas, and several antique varieties. The Peters mentioned over 55 different rose varieties in writings that span 150 years.  However, when asked in 1982 to write an account of the garden’s evolution, Armistead Peter 3rd admitted he couldn’t identify all the varieties, because they had been replaced so often. In recent years, some have been identified with rosarian Nick Webber while others require further research.


Roses will be identified and
tagged before removal.

Tudor Place is committed to improving its maintenance program to incorporate more sustainable practices into daily routines.  The restoration project presents us with the challenge of maintaining rose beds surrounded by boxwood while using sustainable practices.  As our readers may know, rose cultivation can depend heavily on chemicals to control fungal diseases, mites, and a host of other insects.  We currently have a spray program that begins in March and ends in October. During spring, we spray the roses twice a week; in early summer up until fall, the schedule stretches to once every three weeks. For many varieties, this program is essential for healthy roses, preventing defoliation by June.


Cleome, or “spiderflower,” leaning in from the left, are among
several varieties of flowering plants growing alongside the roses.

New trials at the New York Botanical Garden and other public sites are testing which rose varieties best tolerate pests without chemical applications, while some public gardens have switched to an all-organic approach. When we reinstall the roses at the end of October, we will apply a new approach to caring for the Knot Garden. First, we will begin reducing the amount of pesticides we apply while monitoring the roses to see which ones can thrive with a less rigorous spraying schedule. We will stop the current spray program completely and replace it with an all-organic spray program. The boxwood hedges surrounding the rose beds will be added to the organic program to reduce the total amount of synthetic chemicals used in the garden.

As with any change in practice, it will take time to see what approach works best. Our goal is to continue showcasing the roses so loved by the Peter family while using sustainable practices. To retain aesthetic continuity in the historic garden, roses unable to thrive in the new environment will be replaced with hardier but similar varieties. The oldest and best-documented roses, such as ‘Old Blush,’ will receive special attention to support their continued presence. 

Watering in the Heat: Hands, Hoses and History

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I think the greatest measure of a gardener’s ability 
is the ability to water and feed plants correctly. 
A plant can be as easily killed by overwatering as by underwatering; in fact, possibly more easily. However, 
when a plant shows the need for water, don’t hesitate.

 

These are the words of Armistead Peter 3rd, Tudor Place’s last private owner.  Given the weather of recent days, we take to heart his remark, “Don’t hesitate.”
July’s heat wave, the mid-Atlantic’s worst since 1995, imposes excessive environmental stresses on designed landscapes like the historic garden at Tudor Place. Whether in containers or beds of various types, in conditions like these, all our plants need watering. While our aims are historic, maintaining plantings installed by the Peter family over two centuries, we turn to the most modern methods we can to conserve water and water only when necessary.

 

For a public garden, also hosting beautiful weddings
and other events, green lawns are a priority.
Our lawns are seeded with tall fescue, which needs watering all summer to prevent dormancy: As a public garden which hosts events, we do keep our lawns green as best we can. We are lucky to have automatic irrigation on the South Lawn, reaching almost an acre of turf, with runoff benefiting the  perimeter plantings and islands. But the formal garden rooms on the house’s north side are less fortunate. The North Garden must be watered by hand, sprinkler and, to minimize water loss through evaporation, soaker hose. We water in the early morning, to give foliage time to dry and thus reduce the spread of powdery mildew. With an older pipe system, only a few sprinklers can run at a time, so water pressure must be monitored.
Morning watering in the Bowling Green.

We water the garden in sections, as our diverse plantings each have their own requirements. Mature plants are watered less often than newly planted material, and established trees require less water than herbaceous beds. We concentrate on the container plants, which can dry out quickly, and new trees.

The latter we water weekly, except when rainfall has measured at least an inch. (As Armistead Peter 3rd noted, overwatering can be as harmful as underwatering.) Watering during extreme conditions

Herbaceous beds, like this one on our center walk, are
laid with an eye to plants’ native needs.
helps minimize heat stress, but we won’t know the full extent of any heat damage for another month or two, when stress symptoms might typically begin to appear.
Every generation has added improvements and applied new learning. Today, our emphasis is on finding suitable environments for our plantings, which reduces the need for human intervention later. As new arrivals are put in, we assess soil conditions in the design phase and embed each according to its “cultural” (soil, water and light) requirements. This helps them thrive.
As you walk through our gardens, you will see evidence of similar care and thoughtfulness, dating back 200 years.

More on the Garden

Garden Programs

Visit the Garden

To visit our gardens: Tudor Place grounds are open Tuesdays through Saturdays, 10 to 4, and Sundays, noon to 4. Self-guided visits to the Garden are free; illustrated garden maps and smartphone audio garden tour information are available in the Visitor Center.

 

Originally posted July 2011; links updated March 2015.

Reviving the ‘Niagara:’ A Grapevine Story

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“Big Daddy:” For almost 50 years, this
Niagara grapevine held up the arbor.

Armistead Peter 3rd was a faithful steward of his family’s house and gardens at Tudor Place, but that doesn’t mean he never made changes. In the early 1960s, he built an arbor in which to sit and enjoy the North Garden. To its northeast corner, he added a ‘New Dawn’ climbing rose (roses being a specialty). In spring, he knew, the front would be covered in blush colored blossoms. For summer interest, he planted two grape vines to cover the back.


Mr. Peter chose his vines carefully. One of his father’s favorites had been a red variety, Vitis ‘Delaware’, so he added that to the southwest corner of the arbor and planted the northwest corner with a green variety, Vitis ‘Niagara.’ Both were and are popular table grapes also used in wine making. The vines stayed put for 50 years on what came to be called the Grape Arbor.


While the plants thrived, though, the arbor itself suffered from insect damage, rot, and the passage of time. Starting last fall and over the winter, we restored it to its original condition in Mr. Peter’s day. That required removing all the climbing plants in November, in order to dismantle the structure and pour new concrete footers. The climbing rose, unfortunately, had to be discarded after removal, as an infection of rose mosaic virus was causing it to lose canes without producing new strong ones. (We replaced it this spring.)


Next, the grape vines. After cutting them back and excavating the rooting areas, we found that the Delaware grape had just one large and viable root. So, rather than remove it, we gently propped it on a nearby viburnum for the duration of the project. The Niagara, by contrast, we discovered was actually holding up the arbor’s entire northwest corner, where the wooden base had rotted. It was carefully removed to a protected location and heeled in. Beforehand, though, we took cuttings – four stems, each 12-15 inches long with at least 2 sets of buds each — and refrigerated them, just in case.

Out of the fridge: heirloom Niagara cuttings repotted.
The next generation.
Well, “just in case” came to pass: The Niagara didn’t survive its replanting, so two months ago, the cuttings came out of the refrigerator and were repotted. We placed the pots in a sunny location and watered them faithfully. All four rooted within the month! Today, we are happy to say that the healthiest was installed in the northwest corner of the Grape Arbor, replacing the parent vine.

Just as Tudor Place passed from generation to generation, now this arbor has passed to a descendant, too. It will take some time before it grows to cover the northwest corner, but we can now take confidence that a Niagara grape vine will always be at Tudor Place.