FEBRUARY
Wine Feasts and Pom Shillingford's garden planning
Wine Feasts Coming up in March and April, we invite you to taste classic wines from some pioneer American importers alongside a feast. Keep an eye on our social media for ticket and menu announcements.
A feast with Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant — Saturday, March 22nd
Tickets on sale, February 27th
A feast with Rosenthal Wine Merchant — Saturday, April 12th
Tickets on sale, March 20th
Spit-Roasted Rabbit Ducks are being replaced with rabbits on our spit. We’re stuffing them with pancetta and herbs, and cooking fennel in their drippings.
Pom Shillingford’s Winter Garden Planning
For our very first newsletter in October ‘22, we introduced our Salisbury, CT based floral “supplier” who, since we opened, had been dropping off buckets of flowering branches, incredible varieties of tulips and peonies, and cow parsley. You’re by now very familiar with the lovely and talented Pom Shillingford of English Garden Grown. Over the past few years, she has gone from ‘dropping off’ to creating all of our floral arrangements, designing and planting our front garden, and creating floral designs for weddings and events at Stissing House.
As if that wasn’t enough, alongside planting and maintaining her 3 acre home garden and offering cut flowers, Pom recently launched a Substack, has a brand new website and now offers garden design services (preferably for the “get your hands dirty” type).
It’s winter bulb season and after reading Pom’s latest Substack, we vowed to mark our calendars in May (when we’ll buy our supply of amaryllis, paperwhite and hyacinth bulbs) and October (when we’ll pot them), until this time next year (when we’ll plant them in beautiful vessels, or an old bowl in our pantry). Unless you want to trudge to the supermarket to buy the not-so-interesting pre-potted varieties, Pom generously shares her resources for cultivating your own indoor winter bulb garden, in our conversation below. After all, “Flowers bring much-needed joy!” she says.
Pom’s midlife success with English Garden Grown has not been without its trials and tribulations. If you’re not familiar with said trials, the Silver Fox, middle child, Mowgli and Togo, we suggest you follow Pom on IG @english_garden_grown. She posts religiously at the crack of dawn most days, and her words are the perfect companion to your first cup of coffee. Prepare to laugh out loud, sometimes shed a tear, and often just feel seen.
How has the adventure and evolution of your home garden shaped or changed who you are?
Aside from giving me the foundation of my business AND my emotional roots here in the US? I know having three children here should have done the latter, but in truth it has been my garden that has me connected most here and banishes any creeping thoughts I might have now of ever going ‘home.’
My husband and I started the garden 13 years ago from a completely blank slate when we moved out of Manhattan when those three small kids were very young. I had a wild ten-year plan as to how to turn it into my utopia. Unfortunately–or not as it turned out–we lacked three crucial things: time, knowledge and money.
We are now well past the ten-year mark and still not there. (Spoiler: we never will be, something that gives me great joy but fills him with despair.) But lacking in both time and funds to create an instant garden meant it has evolved far more organically, at a pace we could install and maintain ourselves, and in a way that has allowed us to grow as gardeners as much as the garden itself has.
Having a much higher ratio of enthusiasm to knowledge has led to the biggest surprise of how much I actually like learning. I thought I had given that up after college. On this, the garden is the gift that just keeps on giving. I read, Google, listen and–biggest shocker of all–am happy to admit my ignorance and ask for help. That’s a lesson I have learned that works really well in the rest of life.
As an English Excel spreadsheet-loving Capricorn, I long believed that being creative was for other people. It wasn’t until I began to garden that I realized a complete inability to trace, let alone draw, did not exclude me from that world. My medium is just half gallon pots of perennials, bulbs and flats of seedlings rather than paint, clay or film. Nor did I think that after nearly two decades of being a stay-at-home mother, I would start a mid-life business that had nothing to do with my previous career in publishing. This garden has given me both of those opportunities.
I could never have imagined when we lived in NYC that my days, weeks and months would one day play out as they do now. Or that I would be lucky enough to spend all my time doing something that I absolutely love. And now to share that with other people. There are not many people who don’t love flowers so it’s a very gratifying way to spend my time.
It has also been a huge surprise to learn I had unwittingly married an undercover master topiarist. Not so joyous has been seeing first hand that climate change is real. The former has been incredibly fortuitous, the latter is enough to make me cry for my children every day.
You must listen to a lot of music, podcasts and/or audiobooks while you’re hauling buckets of soil and bulbs. What’s top of your list right now?
I actually don’t listen to anything when I am outside. I probably could be fluent in seven languages by now if I did! I either need to concentrate completely on what I am doing, or if I’m doing something less cerebral and more physical, I use that time to trawl my brain for thoughts, ideas, problems and worries, and most importantly, win all those imaginary arguments with perfect timed zingers that irritatingly I know I’m never going to come up with in real life! Having sometimes hours at a stretch of uninterrupted time to put my thoughts back in order, to solve those world problems and to win those arguments is invaluable. Plus after a couple of mental rounds with whoever it is who has irked me, I find the desire to have a show down in person tends to fizzle out. To have all this time for actual thought is one of the many reasons I love gardening.
I do however listen to a lot of podcasts when I’m inside, sowing seeds, dividing tubers or arranging flowers. My all-time favorite is the BBC’s Desert Island Discs. Every week a guest is asked to pick the eight soundtracks they would take if stranded on a desert island, along with a book and a luxury item. It’s been running since the 1940s and the back catalogue of guests from every field of life is phenomenal. (If you are new to it, start with the episode with surgeon David Knott.) I also love the Goalhanger stable of podcasts – The Rest is History, The Rest is Politics, and The Rest is Entertainment. Garden-wise I listen to Sarah Raven’s Grow, Cook, Eat, Arrange, Talking Gardens, Garden People and the new daily dose of gardening wisdom from Scribehound Gardening.
Any winter rituals that are keeping you sane and grounded?
It’s so hypocritical of me to say this as I was once its biggest detractor, but I now think winter is such a maligned season! Mother Nature knows exactly what she’s doing in enforcing some down time on us all. I’ve learned to fully embrace the time between Christmas and whenever it is that spring chooses to grace us here in New England. Even as a skier, one of the things I used to hate about winter was being stuck inside for too much of the day. I have discovered the truth in the adage that there is no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothes. It turns out that if you are appropriately dressed for 20-degree weather, it can still be quite delightful out there. Even when there’s no outside gardening to be had, having four dogs now helps/compels me to be outside every day. Rather than resent and complain about the cold, I’ve learned to appreciate the value and beauty of having the time and opportunity for a long winter walk every day.
I also would absolutely not make it through the winter without a constant flow of home-grown, forced bulbs filling the house with color life and scent.
You’ve taken ‘potting bulbs’ to a whole new level and we obsess over the pots you use. Where are the best places to find vessels for potting?
The one thing you don’t have to worry about with forced bulbs is your vessel having a drainage hole. So, you can use absolutely anything as long as it’s deep enough to support the bulbs. I love planting up any antique vessels but I will use anything: serving bowls, glass hurricanes, kitchen mixing bowls, terracotta pots, vintage cake tins. So don’t think you have to buy anything specifically for your bulbs. I’m fairly confident all of us have something, if not many things, at home already that we could use.
I’m lucky enough to have my grandmother’s beautiful old copper preserving pans which are perfect for bulbs. Now, with the opportunity to fill some of Stissing House’s larger spaces through the winter, I have been on the active hunt for even more of these. I’ve had really good luck in Millerton, NY at the Antiques Market and Montage Antiques. I just bought a beautiful square copper pot from the Antiques Market that is currently filled with the first narcissi waiting to flower. I also have a huge copper bowl I found last summer which is now stuffed with hundreds of muscari which I am so excited to be putting out in the next week or two.
I am continually scouring eBay and Etsy for all of these. I cannot pass an antique or thrift store at any time of year without a quick trawl through to see if they have any gems. In a master stroke of good fortune, I’ve even once come up trumps at the local transfer station’s goody pile.
It's slightly embarrassing to admit to being obsessed with collecting antique chamber pots. I like to focus on what they can be used for now, and not what they once were. That and the number of times they have been scrubbed since they were last put to that use! These are the perfect size for displaying hyacinths – deep enough to support the bulbs and in proportion to the final stem height, as well as wide enough to fit seven bulbs in. In my mind, this is the perfect number to create that ‘wow’ of a display we are looking for. They work equally as well for narcissi and muscari. Along with the plain white ironstone, they are some really beautiful designs to be had.
Share a link to one stunner of a pot that someone should buy today:
THIS one!
In a world where people can order flowers online or pick them up at the local supermarket, even if they’re shipped thousands of miles, what’s the beauty of planting your own bulbs?
Forcing bulbs is one of the easiest forms of gardening there is. If you’ve ever seen boxes of unsold Christmas Amaryllis at the garden center bursting out of their boxes, still on the shelf, you will have witnessed truly how little help these bulbs need to grow. Which makes them almost fool proof for a nervous or first-time gardener.
You don’t need a garden. You don’t need a greenhouse. All it requires is a vessel, some potting soil, some bulbs and some patience while you leave these to root in a cool dark space for a few months. You can literally plant them at your kitchen counter in ten minutes and then do nothing but sit back and wait.
Even for the most experienced gardeners, having anything sprout, grow and bloom is immensely satisfying. Once you bring the hibernating bulbs out into the warmth of your home to actually ‘force;’ them into believing it’s spring and time to flower, you can watch the small green shoots grow by the day into stems, buds and finally the most gorgeous blooms. That you will be growing flowers, that will bloom when nothing else is, makes them an even bigger win.
The true bang for your buck though comes with the actual blooms. Spring bulbs are always such a welcome sight out in the garden each year but when grown up close, you gain a magical new appreciation for them. There are so many different varieties of bulbs to choose from, so many beautiful colors, shapes and sizes. And then there is the scent. Pity indeed the poor soul who is not bowled over by the scent of just a single hyacinth!
They are truly a joy to grow but there is a second, if not more, important side to planting and forcing your own bulbs. The environmental footprint of these is a fraction of that of imported fresh cut flowers. We can no longer claim ignorance to the cost of growing, harvesting, storing, flying and preserving out-of-season flowers from overseas. Our gardens may be bare but when there are flowers as beautiful as these forced bulbs to be grown at home requiring no extra resources, importing scentless, soulless poker-straight stems from abroad really is madness.
Any chance you’ll share your favorite bulb suppliers? For the people willing to mark their calendars in October!
Of course! Please remember to order early for shipping in the fall. Catalogues usually come out by the end of May. It’s always best to secure the varieties you want as popular varieties can sell out.
My top recommendation for dedicated bulb suppliers is John Scheepers or, for larger quantities, their partner company Van Engelen. They have the broadest selection of all varieties, top quality bulbs and brilliant customer service.
Flower and plant companies offering top quality bulb choices in smaller quantities are White Flower Farm and Johnny Selected Seeds. And there are an ever-growing number of wonderful smaller US-based flower farmers who now offer online bulb sales. Buying through them is a great way to support our homegrown cut flower industry. My current favorites, especially for tulips, are The Farmhouse Flower Farm, The Flower Hat and Hitchfoot Farm.
What a wonderful, informative interview - I've always admired the floral arrangements at Stissing House and as a Salisbury neighbor, I'd love to see your garden, Pom!
Such a trove of information and inspiration!