Garden Notes: Solstice time has arrived

Mid-June, solstice time: So special, so fleeting. It marks the height of the solar power that drives everything in the Northern Hemisphere that grows. Under the force of these photons, witnessing the spring flowering and growth all around us is a green marvel.

Even a ho-hum garden like mine is going to look pretty good right now. This year, though, the season is tempered by lack of rain and lots of drying wind. The drought we are under is a disappointment. It causes flowering to cycle through and finish far too soon.

Nonetheless, much was prolific. Rhododendrons and azaleas appeared to have enjoyed the harsh 2026 winter. In May and June, once the lupines, roses, Oriental poppies, and peonies open, almost any bed looks like something straight out of Gardens Illustrated.

Choose a flowering tree 

Polly Hill’s famous kousa dogwood alleé is justly admired and photographed; and all over the Island, kousa dogwoods are demonstrating that they, like the rhododendrons, were not fazed by the cold and snowy winter.            

However, not all of us have that sort of garden, or the conditions where we can pretend to be Gardens Illustrated for a minute, or a month. We plant and garden where we live, according to varying sets of constraints: personal predilection; the ‘genius loci’ (which means, what the site offers); time and expense; or maybe simply randomly planting, based on whim.

So I want to talk about trees that flower. Many good flowering trees require less water, once established, than flower gardens. Many also happen to be those whose habit fits a more intimate scale, the opposite of a towering shade tree. With flowering trees, take a bit of lawn or patio, add a flowering tree, and you have a garden!

And when a dry year such as this causes a doted-upon flower bed to speed through too fast, filling in with lots of annuals remains about all you can do. 

Pause a minute if thinking about choosing a flowering tree. Many looking for one make a typical choice, a pink flowering dogwood. However, there are some others to consider: Here are a few that are less commonly used and worthy of consideration.

(The spring-blooming crabapple, cherry, plum, and apricot are ornamental and festive, and whet appetites for the coming gardening season. These, however, compete for attention with all the spring-flowering bulbs.)

A white fringe-tree (Chionanthus virginicus) is like a mirage of mist and fog, scenting the whole garden. It is a native North American understory tree, with dioecious habit (males and females on separate trees). The form is spreading, wider than tall; nice yellow-colored fall foliage. Avoid chionanthus seedlings by choosing one sex or the other. 

Japanese styrax (Styrax japonicus) is another smaller tree that blooms in June, spreading rather than tall. The texture is fine, with small pointed leaves and pendant, heavily scented white or pink flowers lining the spreading branches. Nice yellow fall color. Named cultivars are grown.

Circuit Avenue in Oak Bluffs is beginning to reap the reward of the tree lilac (Syringa reticulata) planting that replaced the Bradford pears there. These spreading or vase-shaped members of the lilac family bloom late and have handsome, lustrous bark, in addition to the lacy white panicles and leaves shaped like common lilac’s. 

Native pagoda dogwood (now Benthamidia alternifolia) has a graceful, tiered growth habit and produces lacy white flowers in cymes and, later, berries, even in shade. I bought my three pagoda dogwood at very small size; they now knit with the surrounding woodland very compatibly. 

Laburnum x wateri, known as the golden chain tree, produces long, drooping flowers reminiscent of wisteria, but yellow instead. With the sculptural pendant growth habit, this small leguminous tree easily becomes a garden focal point. 

In the garden

Here is the link to the Astro-Seek biodynamic moon-planting calendar for June: bit.ly/AS_JuneMoon. Many will find it helpful in organizing garden activity.

Clean up and deadhead (compost it all) spring-flowering perennials and shrubs, such as lilac and rhododendron, noting that avoiding major pruning of lilac is advised to prevent attracting lilac borer wasp. 

Rake away overmulched areas of rhododendron and azalea crowns. Their fine roots are easily smothered. Scrape away mulch volcanoes from trees’ trunk flares.

Cut off and destroy fungal growths that occur on certain groups of azaleas, the exobasidium galls. Side-dress with compost around the root zones, which strengthens plants. 

Documenting perennials that need division is easy with ubiquitous cellphone cameras. For example, Siberian irises, so happy in Island gardens, need division when bloom is sparse and clumps look circular with empty centers. 

Clumping herbs such as oregano, chives, thyme, and marjoram need a trim of flowering growth to keep producing their culinary leaves. This is unnecessary if they are being grown for bee forage. Self-seeding chive can become a pest, however, if not deadheaded.  

Side-dress tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, cucumbers: Compost and low-number soil food are best. Hardneck garlic is scaping. Growers usually snip scapes off so plants direct all their energies into bulbing. Onions and garlic both benefit from an inch of water per week, plus weeding and good cultivation. A hoe design called the collinear hoe is good for the kind of weeding that requires this delicate touch.

Be water-wise. Prioritize newly planted trees, food gardens, then flowerbeds, and lawns lastly. Browned-out grass bounces back when rain comes or summer is over.  

As we enter summer, a critical growth point for many plants in and outside our gardens, water in the best form of rain seems scarce. All our water comes from the sky. In your gardening and landscaping, try to maximize infiltration, and minimize runoff. 

However, in a “careful what you wish for” sense, equally injurious to lack of rain is rain that comes as cloudburst or tropical-style downpour. Strategize how to capture what comes from the sky.

Tick check, every night, and at all hours.