Apple blossom on Greensleeves, a photo by stopwatchgardener on Flickr.

Very excited that this first-year espallier apple is stuffed with blossom.

In the background is my rose hedge (Rose de Rescht) and some wall-trained pears in a diamond shape: Williams Bon Chretien and Concorde (thanks Lia Leendertz for that idea).

I have a patient family. My sister and mother have agreed to devote our annual Girls’ Week holiday to visiting the gardens (and a few wineries) of the New York area – Stonecrop, Innisfree, The Mount and a few others. In practice this means they walk about with me a little bit, photographing a few tulips or touring the gardens’ adjacent historic properties, then they sit in the car reading and knitting and letting me ogle plants. I’ve promised we can do Munich next year, which may bring the alcohol-horticulture ratio into a fairer balance.

It is spring in New York, which is weeks ahead of where I live in Scotland. The cherry blossom and dogwoods are over-the-top beautiful, great clouds of perfume are rising off the lilacs and the hostas are well-unfurled. Wisteria – which grows as wild and indifferently as buddleia – has draped its grape-bunch flowers at roadsides and over derelict buildings and along the front porches of houses whose owners don’t really care about gardening.

Herb Gardens at Boscobel

In a country of 300 million, it isn’t easy to find people who really care
about gardening. A neighbour looking at another’s property is more likely to admire the giant gas barbecue or the new Prius in the driveway, or perhaps the most prized plant in American gardens, the well-watered lawn. But there is a passionate minority who care very much: like the 3,000 NGS-style gardens that open annually, or like the Philipstown Garden Club, who tend Boscobel House’s historic herb garden with only heritage varieties of fruit, herbs and flowers. The large but light-touch blossom of the Boscobel quinces has made me realise how much I need one in my garden near Edinburgh. You can see more Boscobel garden pictures here.

With so many municipally planted cherries and cornus and red-pink cercis, there is a magnificent show even without fanatical gardeners on every street. The flat-faced cups of the white dogwoods are my favourite, but I love the way all the cornus rise up towards the light in what is a heavily wooded landscape here: houses are all detached, unlike in Scotland, and trees crowd in everywhere, between houses and behind grassy back yards that trail off into the ever-present woods.

Herb Gardens at Boscobel

I grew up near Boston, and these wild, uncultivated woods are what strike me most when I come back. In Scotland, every scrap of roadside land looks to me to be farmed or inhabited. It’s a great contrast to the acres of idle scrubland along New England roadsides: thousands of trees grow upright or lean against each other from storms, or stand dead and bleached in the ponds that appear here and there. The wildlife must love this, I keep thinking: so much water, so much cover and wild food. Bill Bryson, another American who like me has an unusual perspective on the US as a long-term ex-pat, has noted this, too: there is a impressive amount of wild nothingness here in the New England woods.

Woodland wonders and the Hudson River Valley at Stonecrop

In such a landscape, hand-crafted spaces like Stonecrop Gardens have an altogether different feel: this isn’t the crowded UK, where hiving off a bit of land for ornamental gardens can seem almost indulgent. Stonecrop, which is the former home of Garden Conservancy founder Frank Cabot, is marked by a simple sign along the endless treescape of the main road through upstate New York. It feels like the woods have been forcibly pushed back to allow this stunning space to breathe in the landscape. The views over the Hudson River Valley are memorable, and frankly compete with the expert planting, which I think I photographed from every angle. I loved how emerging herbaceous plants were blended with generous swathes of tulips, and a great lawn dedicated in part to ferns and lily-of-the-valley help the garden blend well into the woods beyond. More Stonecrop Gardens pictures are here.

A separate woodland garden at one side of Stonecrop is the best I’ve ever seen. So many plants I didn’t know – caulophyllum thalictroides, mertensia virginica, glaucidim palmatum, plus simple, dark-stemmed adiantum ferns I fell in love with – in well-planned beds (I remember seeing one labelled “Woodland Bed 10”) that have been labelled with up-to-date Garden Tour markers.

I haven’t visited a garden that has such a well-planned Garden Tour – a printed list that’s given to every visitor. One of the head gardeners prepares the list by walking the garden every week or so, and figuring out the ideal route to take at the moment, moving numbered labels to mark current star plants. This walk is written up on the tour, with a numbered list of star plants, including the Latin and common names and plant family of each. Phew! “It’s a lot of work, but it’s worth it,” one of the nice ladies in the potting shed told me. I bet it’s worth it for them, too – they can get on with propagation and planting without identifying the same plant for thousands of visitors.

Open Days with the Garden Conservancy

We left Stonecrop, later to be given tea and biscuits by the wonderful Lisa-Ann and friends at the Garden Conservancy, which is like a cross between the National Trust and the NGS in the UK: the Conservancy both preserves historic gardens and encourages private home owners to open their gardens, a bit like the Yellow Book, but as 100% fundraiser for the Conservancy’s work.

Meeting the Conservancy folk and seeing jewels like Stonecrop convinced me that gardening isn’t a fringe activity here, there really do exist my kind of people, who would drive hours to peer at an interesting planting concept – like this cool idea at Innisfree Gardens below: flat stones interplanted with what I think is hakonechloa macra aureola. But I do get the sense that fanatical gardeners exist, much like that grass, in tiny, fertile pockets of land in an otherwise indifferent environment in America.

The television last night showed us a parade of intriguing things, including an advert for a steakhouse that promised to drape their bacon burgers with extra bacon nuggets (“At Longhorn Steak House, we don’t just do bacon, we do bacon-on-bacon”), and a food show that tours the greasiest diners in North America, serving dishes like butter-topped burgers and chicken that has been double deep-fried (don’t ask). But more memorable than the cuisine was how gardening is portrayed. Adverts lean heavily toward the chemical, advising which weed killer to pour on your flower beds, and which bedding plants to buy now so your garden will appear instantly full: I think it was an advert for a home store selling flower-towers of impatients and petunias. No waiting, no gardening, just add water – a bit like pot noodle, when all you want is that full feeling, and taste doesn’t matter.

A good way to garden

Today we’ll see something we haven’t experienced yet: two Open Gardens for the Garden Conservancy, both in New York, including the garden of Margaret Roach, who produces the A Way to Garden podcast that made my top 5 a few weeks ago. Margaret writes in her blog about her organic methods and grow-your-own ideas, and she is always careful to say that her methods aren’t the only way, but just “a way” to garden. I guess she’s trying to inspire, rather than dictate. Seeing the environment in which gardens are made here in the US, I think a little inspiration can go a very long way.

What were your impressions of the gardening culture when you’ve visited other countries?

You probably already know that Gertrude Jekyll was a terribly clever analyst of how leaf and flower colour affect the eye, particularly in combination, but what struck me most in reading her work was her conviction that she would never posess one of the gardens she most desired: a golden garden. She wrote: “Suddenly entering the Gold garden, even on the dullest day, will be like coming into sunshine” (from Gertrude Jekyll’s Colour Schemes for the Flower Garden).

In the lovely courtyard garden that Tracy McQue designed for me, I’m incorporating some of Gertrude’s ideas, attempting to ruthlessly limit flower colour to purple and yellow only. I was enchanted by Gertrude’s idea of a golden garden, and seeing as my late-flowering clematis Polish Spirit already clothes one of the enclosing walls in a complementary deep-purple carpet for four months of the year, the decision had already been half-made for me.

The choice to limit colours was partly because of how we use this space. This tiny courtyard is the only place my husband and I come outside to eat lunch or have a coffee, and while I didn’t favour the green-only scheme that’s sometimes recommended for such an area, I didn’t want it to be too busy with distracting plants, either. Part of Tracy’s design was aimed at squaring off this irregularly formed courtyard to give it a more restful feel, and I don’t want to ruin that.

Narcissus Sun Disc – a burst of sunshine

The picture above (you can click it to see a larger version) shows one of the most startlingly wonderful narcissus, which you must go and buy as soon as possible: Sun Disc, with flowers no bigger than a 2 pound coin (with apologies to my American readers…about the size of a half-dollar). The scent is remarkable, the flowering time for me near Edinburgh is April-May, and the overall effect is more attractive than other baby narcissus like Hawera or JetFire, because the face of the plant is so round and there is no gaudy horn: the central cup sits flat.

Also shown here are euphorbia characias (my first ever euphorbia…I swore I would not go another year without growing at least one kind), with some Washfield double hellebores going past in the background. Also planted in the tiny space you see here is chimonanthus praecox (January-February), crocus Ard Schenk (February), golden marjoram, and the fragrant Oriental Lily Cherbourg (August). Can you tell that scent is all-important to me? Flowers that don’t match the colour scheme are cut: the red-tipped tulips in this picture (tulip Clusiana Sheila) will be cut and brought into the house.

When I came out of the house this morning to pick some baby spinach, I was greeted with a crowd of sunny yellow faces: the effect was exactly as Gertrude had anticipated. It felt like a blast of sunshine, although the sun almost never touches this corner of the courtyard.

Clever lady.

Have you tried to limit your colour palette in parts of the garden, for example areas where you eat?

I was contacted by Jacques Vert, who has launched a competition to win a pair of tickets to the RHS Chelsea Flower Show for Friday 24th May. I’m posting this competition because, from the buzz on Twitter and Facebook, it seems a lot of folks may have missed their chance to pick up tickets for this year’s show.

If you’d like to be in with a chance to win two all-day tickets, you need to fill in your details on the Jacques Vert blog before the closing date at midnight on 7th May.

Apologies if you live abroad, because the competition is open only to UK entrants aged 18 and over. See the competition for more details.

Good luck! I’m attending my first-ever Chelsea this year and I’m positive I’ll find dozens of design and planting ideas for my own tiny space. If you or a friend still need tickets, don’t forget to enter before 7 May.

Main image: Chelsea Flower Show 2012 by Karen Roe

I promised you I would show a picture of this gorgeous species Crocus when it was in flower – I love it. Prins Claus has dark purple staining on the base outside of the white petals, with bright yellow stamens on the inside. Here, it’s growing in an old, weathered terracotta pot. If I forget, remind me to order dozens more of this bulb this coming autumn. Thanks to everyone who has suggested good gardens I could visit in lower and upstate New York. Do you know of any good ones in western Massachusetts? Some that I have looked at do not open until mid-May, and I will be in the area the week of the 7th through 14th May.