Get Growing with Mickey Rathbun: A blooming ribbon leads the eye: Landscape architect planted 1,500 daffodils in Amherst’s Orchard Arboretum
In the Orchard Arboretum, a little-known public garden in South Amherst, a living work of art is making its debut this spring. “I call it a daffodil ribbon,” explained Richard Waldman, a retired landscape architect from New York City who conceived of the project two years ago and has finally brought it to fruition.
Waldman moved to Amherst four years ago and said he chose to live in Upper Orchard partly because of its proximity to the Arboretum, a two-acre property that was established in 1994 on the site of a former apple orchard. “I wanted something going through the garden that would make it cohesive and tie things together so that people would not just see a collection of trees and shrubs,” he explained. “I wanted it to arc and meander; there’s never a straight line. I think of it as an unfurled ribbon.” Although on a much smaller scale, it has the same carefree flow of Christo’s “Running Fence,” the temporary installation of airy white fabric panels that the artist installed in Northern California in the 1970s.
For Waldman, who received a B.S. in landscape gardening from City College of New York in 1979, garden design is all about the visual experience of the viewer in the space. “As people walk through the garden their eye follows the curving lines of the daffodils,” he said. “The ribbon leads the eye through the garden.”
The planting begins at the kiosk, near one edge of the Arboretum, and weaves through the garden, jumping pathways here and there, and ends with a large circle of daffodils surrounding a cluster of white and blue alliums. “I wanted to make an exclamation point at the end,” he said. It’s important to him that people can see the ribbon from many different perspectives as they walk through the Arboretum. “When people enter from the other direction they see the circle first and it leads their eye into the garden.”
Visitors to the garden tell Waldman how much they’re enjoying the daffodils. He is often asked, “Did you have any idea what this would look like when you came up with the idea?” He answers, “Of course I did. I can’t design something if I don’t know how it will look.”
It took time and effort for Waldman to realize his dream. He said that two years ago, when he first proposed the idea of planting 2,000 daffodils in the Arboretum, the Arboretum committee rejected his proposal. Instead, they suggested that he might plant just a few bulbs here and there. “I rejected that,” he said. “For me, it was go big or go home.”
Then, late last summer a resident of the Applewood Retirement Community named Jack, who has donated several trees to the Arboretum, asked Waldman what had come of his proposal. He replied that it had been rejected, possibly for cost reasons, and that he was considering cutting the plan down to 1,500 bulbs. “Jack said, ‘I’ll pay for it,’” Waldman recalled.
A few days later, Diana, another Applewood resident who tends the shade garden area, offered to chip in $500. “I want this to happen!” she told Waldman.
With financing secured, Waldman set about choosing the daffodils to be planted. He explained that he didn’t want just one variety, so he chose a mixture of naturalizing bulbs — bulbs that gradually reproduce and spread on their own — in a range of sizes and colors and bloom times. The daffodil ribbon will be in bloom from four to six weeks. Besides being beautiful, Waldman noted that daffodils are not bothered by deer, rabbits or squirrels, an important consideration in the Arboretum, which backs up into woodland.
To map his design, Waldman collected a wheelbarrow full of pine needles and laid them out in a series of meandering curves, nudging the line this way and that with his foot until he was satisfied with the arrangement. The flow of the curves appears effortless but — as anyone who has tried to create artful bending lines in a garden knows — the process is anything but that.
One might think that it took weeks to plant the many cratefuls of daffodil bulbs, but Waldman, Diana, and Mari Ada Crosbie, the landscape steward for the Arboretum, spent just a day and a half. “People are always taught that bulbs need to be planted ‘just so,’ with the flat end at the bottom and the pointy head facing up,” said Waldman, “but you don’t need to do it that way.” Many years earlier, he explained, he had learned from an experienced landscape architect that there was a quicker way. “He told me, ‘Put your shovel in the ground, throw in a bunch of bulbs, cover up the hole and move on.’” To prove to skeptics that this more casual approach worked well, he deliberately planted several bulbs upside down in another spot in the garden. Sure enough, they came up and bloomed along with the others.
He admitted to a slight moment of doubt that the project would work. “One morning in early spring, I finally saw just one green shoot sticking up from the ground. I thought, oh no, where are the other 1,499?”
Waldman said that some people have expressed the wish that nothing in the Arboretum should change. He disagrees. “If nothing is changed, the Arboretum will slowly die,” he said. “A garden must be constantly evolving. There’s so much we could teach people here.” He’s imagining another such project, perhaps involving masses of muscari (grape hyacinth). He hopes that more people will come to the Arboretum and enjoy it. “It shouldn’t be just a secret garden,” he said.
Speaking of visiting beautiful gardens, don’t miss the opportunity to tour the spectacular Kinsey-Pope garden at 119 High St. in Amherst on May 31 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. There is a small fee for the tour, which will benefit the Frank Cabot Garden Conservancy, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving extraordinary private gardens. You can sign up in advance by going to gardenconservancy.org (click on open days) or sign up on the day of the visit and send in the small fee using a card that will be available at the tour.
Hilltown Seed Savers is having its annual plant swap on May 18 from 1 to 3 p.m. at Village Church in Cummington. People are invited to bring plants, cuttings, divisions, seeds or anything else garden related. Be sure these are properly labeled with relevant info. There will be two demonstrations at 2 p.m.: Soil Blocking, an innovative propagation method you might want to try; and Cleaning Pots, the importance in sanitation when reusing materials. Suggested donation is $5 to $10. Everyone is welcome; it’s not necessary to bring anything.
Mickey Rathbun is an Amherst-based writer whose new book, “The Real Gatsby: George Gordon Moore, A Granddaughter’s Memoir,” has recently been published by White River Press.
Daily Hampshire Gazette
