By Abby Jane Brody

The effects of high winds, northeasters, salt spray, and sand make gardening on the ocean or bay dramatically more difficult than only a mile or so inland.

Each of our gardens has a variety of different microhabitats. There’s an old wives’ tale that you should try a plant in three different locations before giving up on it. Gardens on the water undoubtedly have even more ecosystems. Properties facing the ocean or bay may be exposed to intense sun while those on our harbors and creeks can be in shaded woodland and subject to saltwater flooding during storms and tidal surges.

Gardeners must learn, for the most part, from experience since not much has been written about seaside gardening.

The classic book, “Gardening by the Sea from Coast to Coast” by Daniel J. Foley, (Parnassus Imprints/Chilton, 1965), is out of print. However, Abebooks.com recently had about 50 copies starting at $1. Barbara Macklowe, who gardens behind the ocean dunes, has found Foley’s book invaluable and notes that the Horticultural Alliance has a copy at its library in Bridgehampton.

“Gardening at the Shore,” written by the legendary garden editor Frances Tenenbaum, was published last fall by Timber Press. (Ms. Tenenbaum was the editor of Robert Dash’s “Notes from Madoo.”) She has gardened for decades on Martha’s Vineyard. Her book culls gardening techniques and advice from experienced seashore gardeners from both coasts. I think the book would have been stronger if it had focused on the East Coast, but such are the economics of today’s publishing world.

Ms. Tenenbaum refers to the Foley book, and I think her book would be a good companion to it. She also recommends participating in the online forums at Gardenweb.com, to find helpful information.

Jack Lenor Larsen of East Hampton’s LongHouse Reserve has been captivated by “A Garden by the Sea: A Practical Guide and Journal” by Leila Hadley (Rizzoli, 2005). In what sounds like a peripatetic life, she has gardened around the world. When she married Henry Luce in 1990, he presented her with a cliff-top house and five acres of beachfront on Fishers Island, where she set out to create her first garden by the sea. She is a passionate gardener and you may pick up some practical and design ideas from her.

The most interesting portion of the Tenenbaum book, I find, is about planting in sand. She advocates planting small rather than large plants. Small plants are easier to install and establish, and are more likely to survive, she points out. They stretch the budget and if they need to be replaced, are less expensive. Three years after planting six large and six small Rosa rugosa, Ms. Tenenbaum found they were all about the same size.

“Forget everything you ever learned about setting plants at their natural level and plant them deep, several times deeper than you ordinarily would,” Ms. Tenenbaum writes, especially for trees and shrubs, but also for long, stalked perennials. Astonishing! This defies everything I’ve ever learned.

She credits William Flemer III of Princeton Nurseries, in his book “Nature’s Guide to Successful Gardening and Landscaping” for this advice. Mr. Flemer explained that the poor water-retention of sand enables the oxygen necessary for root growth to penetrate deep into sand. This gives new plantings a cool, wet root run and reduces the need for watering as they are establishing. Mr. Flemer is one of our outstanding plantsmen so if you do garden on sand, I would give it a try.

Windbreaks are essential for most seaside gardens and the Tenenbaum book has very good information about what works and what doesn’t. Your house, for one, may provide protection for the garden. One of the experts recommends studying your site during a storm: Walk around the perimeter of the house with your back to the building during a storm to locate quiet spots for a garden. That’s terrific advice for inland gardeners on the East End, too. A good number of trees I experiment with are said to want wind protection.

Most property owners on the East End today plant a monoculture of conifers for privacy, not considering they also are windbreaks. A dense hedge of bushy shrubs interspersed with deciduous shrubs and trees may be the most effective. It may surprise you to know that deciduous shrubs and trees keep 60 percent of their wind-breaking ability even when leafless.

Dealing with the soil is perhaps the most confusing problem of gardening by the sea. Few here garden in pure sand by the water. It wasn’t that long ago that potato fields with good rich soil stretched nearly to the ocean dunes. Owners of most of the properties on the ocean that I’ve visited don’t even think about competing with the view; gardens are on the land-side where the soil is richer, or they hug the property lines to keep the view open.

Ms. Macklowe, a dedicated gardener on the ocean, adds compost to her beds every year. “Adding organic matter is a necessity with such sandy soil,” she said. Amending the soil at the surface, not digging nourishment into the soil, is also recommended by one of Ms. Tenenbaum’s sources. The nutrients leach down through sandy soils to the plant’s roots.

Ms. Macklowe also uses a complete organic liquid fertilizer, Bio-Bloom. It had been recommended by the American Rose Society and she has found it to be fabulous.

I was fascinated by Ms. Tenenbaum’s suggestion to mulch the bottom of planting holes as well as the surface to retain moisture. She uses crumpled up, soaking wet newspaper as bottom mulch, puts it in the hole and covers it with a layer of sand or a mixture of sand and organic matter. When it ultimately decomposes, it improves the soil.

Rabbits and deer compound the challenges for waterfront gardeners. One-third of the Tenenbaum book is devoted to plants. This is where she is weakest so use the descriptions as a launching pad for your own experiments. Gardening is a process, after all.

In the more than 10 years that Barbara Macklowe has worked with her oceanside garden, the plants have changed. “Many have had to be removed and others have simply outgrown their spaces,” she said. Still others don’t always return. The backbone of her garden contains roses, hydrangeas, salvia, iris, nepeta, hardy geraniums, rose of Sharon, butterfly bushes, and vitex.

A gardener’s lot is not an easy one. Waterfront gardeners need all the persistence and enthusiasm they can muster. If the challenges are greater, the pleasure from the successes is also greater.

source : www.easthamptonstar.com