Amazonian Wisdom: Look Up at the Branches

by Mary Jasch

Pollarded Blue Bird hibiscus decorate the entrances to Teo Gonzales's vegetable garden. A white picket fence encloses the garden of 10 rectangular beds that appear almost sunken with sharp, clean steel edging all around.
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French lavender borders two beds. It is hardier than the English, says Gonzales, administrator of a central New Jersey estate for 31 years, “because it grows in the hills where the snow comes.”

In other beds, teucrium surrounds 55 year-old espaliered apple trees and Irish tea roses. One rose is 50 years old; the others are 40ish. Demanding as the tea roses are, Gonzales can’t remove them because their roots are bound with the roots of the apple trees.

Gonzales’s repertoire of plant knowledge surpasses anything found in a book. For instance: plants don’t grow well near concrete because it’s too alkaline. They decline, just like the standard roses, currents and gooseberry that have before the tough Hibiscus syriacus 'Blue Bird', now 16 years old.

Gonzales fashions standards out of everything such as the rose with multiflora rootstock and grandiflora upper. The result? Floating layers of red flowers and white flowers. In September he lays the plant down and buries it in the soil.

Nearby, epimedium fills out containers of small, 38 year-old French lilac standards.

These are coddled plants in this two-season potager. In spring, Gonzales plants spinach, beans, arugula, carrots, beets and onions. In July, he plants for fall: cabbage family edibles, tomatoes, eggplant and peppers. ‘Early Frosty’ shelling peas are the best, he says. Their three-foot plants are full of pods with “seven or eight big ones.” They go into a special soup of chicken broth, potatoes, garlic, shells and peppermint leaves.

In the border between onions and white fence, giant columbine, foxgloves, heuchera, rudbeckia, white Japanese anemones and bleeding heart help create a picture-perfect veggie garden. Roses, peonies, veronica, geranium, English perennial hollyhocks, lily-of-the-valley and other flowers border other edges. Everything self-sows under Gonzales’s tutelage.

“The picture of the garden is the fence. If you don’t have those flowers, no matter what you have growing inside, you need a background,” he says.

Outside the fence live pink honeysuckle, Solomon seal, evening primrose, anemones, red peonies, annual mums that Gonzales crossed and will make standards with, a multi-colored bearded iris, and mountain ash from Maine which likes a long dormancy. “If you don’t rest your trees, it’s like you don’t sleep. If you have 70 degrees in January, then all the trees wake and say ‘what’s going on?’”

Confederate violets dot a wild border of red, white and blue cone flowers, reseeding lupines, and wild columbine. “I don’t mind the weeds because they’re entitled to grow here.” A bedful of raspberries grows nearby. One fence line sports astilbe and espaliered currants.

Close to the house, climbing hydrangea grows as foundation plants around the patio with a well tended standard wisteria.

Around front, an enclosed garden has early spring blossoms: a 35 year-old potted standard pyracantha, Japanese forget-me-nots, painted ferns, columbine, primula, epimedium, Johnny jumps ups, and white Virginia bluebells.

Gonzales adorns the house’s indoor sun room with pelargonium including scented geraniums and ‘Pandora’ with florets resembling tulips, miniature fuschia standards, maidenhair ferns, orchids and ivy. He trades them out for fresh ones that he grows in greenhouses he germinates herbs, variegated fuschia and pelargonium and grows camellia and buddleia standards.

“If I make a standard I make it clean. This is suffering,” he says as he points to a hibiscus with a braided trunk. “This is torturing Mother Nature. Everything we damage ourselves. We never respect our seasons. Let a plant live the way it wants to. The minute people, for money, torture plants, nature goes back to us and gives us big trouble: hurricanes, heat in winter. We are so greedy. You have to go with the weather. Take onions: if you don’t plant them with the fall mums, you’ll get only three or four flowers. The favorite food for onions is wood ashes. Same for parsley and string beans, squash, and cucumbers.” Ashes kill cutworms and sterilize the soil. It has phosphorous and iron.

In front of the house is an apple orchard, planted in 1968. Gonzales arrived in ‘79 and planted a row of crab apples because sheep grazed there in the expansive yard. He prunes the edible apples like umbrellas. “I like to make a shape for trees,” he says. “The whole thing is beautiful.”

But he lets crab apples grow how they will. “You cut once and they grow worse,” he says of the one crab he pruned, which has since pushed out wild growth and was the only one not flowering.

“If you let it grow and let the branches die as the tree needs it (by wind, ice or snow) and let the wind take them off, you end up with a lot of flowers. Let nature take over and there will be a beautiful tree.”

He prunes suckers that don’t flower when the trees are dormant. “Trees that wake up – if you cut them, they feel pain. Plants are part of our life. They breathe from us and we breathe from them. We are in this world full of beauty. The person who tries to communicate with plants, birds and animals – his life will change forever.”

Teo Gonzales, a native Brazilian Amazonian Indian, grew up in Castello Blanco (White Castle), Brazil. “We live in the jungle and we love everything growing,” he says. “When I see trees, I enjoy them because I was born in the middle of the jungle. If you are mad at something, get a chair and just look at the branches, the leaves, the flowers. Look at how strong they are growing and you’ll feel better in a minute. It’s better to be connected with nature.”

A shiver of white petals fall down around the visitor who sits awhile. He’s right. Under a shower of white, birds sing contentedly and shadows dapple Johnny jump ups and geranium, glorified with puffs of bright blue forget-me-nots and the first swords of Japanese painted ferns.


PHOTOS
Two cherry trees are pruned every August.
Greenhouse: this is where I grow everything. Begonia from Logee’s.

His goal: to completely cover the brick nook surrounding a fountain.

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published May 24, 2010