Roy Boutard Day

This past Sunday, May 1st, was the grand opening of the Berkshire Botanic Garden for the 2011 season. Given that it was a beautifully sunny day, that I love botanical gardens, and that the event was free, I zig-zagged my way from South Egremont to West Stockbridge to see what all the fuss was about.

The fuss, it appears, was not only about the elegant and delightful gardens that are patiently awaiting their gardeners' vision for the Spring, but also about Roy Boutard, who led the Botanic Garden as its Director for an impressive thirty years. Roy Boutard shaped the lanscape and culture of the Botanic Garden from 1954 to 1984. After his death this past year, the Garden resolved to name each Spring Opening Day in his honor, such that his vision and incredible commitment to the Garden could live on and be remembered.

I never met Roy Boutard, but after the tour I took through the gardens with horticulturist David Burdick, I felt as if I understood just how significant a person he was to the garden, and how his infectious enthusiasm for plants lives on today through his colleagues. According to Burdick, Boutard lived by the philosophy that you can never have enough plants  - you can never have enough varieties, enough plantings, or enough new material to introduce to the gardens. Burdick took us around the grounds and pointed out areas that changed under Boutard's direction, as well as specific plantings that were significant to Boutard's career and vision. For example, a dense stand of conifers that Boutard planted when they were "kittens," as he had called them, had matured into "cats" and had been relocated throughout the grounds. In fact, everywhere you looked you could see a beautiful mature conifer from Boutard's original planting when they were mere saplings.

If anything, Burdick's talk about Roy Boutard's career with the Berkshire Botanic Garden inspired me to think about what's possible if you commit not only to the idea of a garden (or to any goal that one can pursue passionately), but to following its whims and meanderings to "completion." Just like with the farm work I'm doing now -- or any task anyone ever does, for that matter -- one step at a time will get you there. Realizing that an entire bed needs to be ripped up, fertilized, turned under, raked, planted, irrigated, covered...etc. can be utterly exhausting. But there is beauty in taking a deep breath and jumping whole-heartedly into each task. Once it's done (for the moment at least), it will feel glorious.

The colors, textures, and smells of the Berkshire Botanic Garden were inspiring in and of themselves:

Daffodil hill

 

  Hellabora in bloom

Brilliant forsythia

 Tulips - quaint New England style

Magnolia blossom

Our tour through the garden

Grafting Tomatoes

Today was an adventure in botany.

In an attempt to beat the looming storm coming from the tornadoes and such down South, we headed out to the fields first thing in the morning with scallions, kohl rabi, and bok choy seedlings to transplant. One whole bed of scallions (planted in bunches of ten), half a bed of bok choy and half a bed of kohl rabi. As interesting as that was, it doesn't compare to what we did next.

After having a light lunch and changing out of our wet clothes (because, of course, it started raining), we packed up a bunch of tomato seedlings and supplies to graft tomatoes in the barn. It was decided that the barn would be the best place to do this because we could control the environment much better than in the greenhouse -- keeping it at a steady temperature with little light and no wind to damage the fragile plants.

It has to be said that I love different plant propagation methods -- rarely do I ever not have a cutting or two rooting in a jar of water somewhere in my home. (That sounded just as dorky in my head before I typed it, but it's true so it stays in the blog!) Needless to say, this was totally up my alley.

The rootstock that we used is called "Maxifort." This tomato variety is solely used for grafting because of its ability to produce a better yield for weaker tomato varieties when grafted together. The varieties that we grafted to the Maxifort were Brandywine, Valencia, Green Zebra, and Purple Cherokee (heirlooms). For a step-by-step instruction on the exact method we used for grafting, check out the video below:

We followed all the steps of this method except for the stringent level of cleanliness used in the video's laboratory setting, which we found impossible to do on a farm...especially since our hands were covered in soil from potting up the tomatoes! We did what we could.