April 11, 2008
by Christine Yeres
Dr. John Mickel, curator of ferns for the New York Botanical Gardens since 1969, comes to the Chappaqua Library next Wednesday, April 16, at 7:30, to speak about his lifelong love and expertise. Dr. Mickel allowed NewCastleNOW.org to search his gardens with him for signs of returning ferns. His Briarcliff home is surrounded by enormous ancient sycamore trees which offer shade-loving ferns conditions in which they thrive.
During this time of the year, there is very little about ferns that is green. We found the brown skeletal remains of the “fertile frond” of ostrich ferns, rising straight up from the center of the mounds where last year’s browned fronds lie matted and tangled, hiding the golden new nubs of this year’s crop, just barely above ground level. The cinnamon fern fiddle heads were two inches tall, pale green and furry, and curled just as they should be, like violin scrolls.
The underpinnings of his garden ecosystem are in plain view along the edge of the side yard under an old, twisted weeping beech: a large mound of composting leaves mixed in with 50% horse manure—Mickel’s preferred recipe—and three large composting compartments whose sidewalls are a gracefully sloping combination of split rails and logs held in place with pairs of green metal snow fence stakes pounded into the ground. Overhead towers a 100-foot Norway maple whose aggressive roots have risen up into these rich compost bins to feed.
The property’s oriental tea house and goldfish ponds are grand projects that have been undertaken over the years with his wife, Carol, and their three children, now grown, during vacations. Mickel descended two feet to the pond bed and crossed to the other side via a small isthmus between the two ponds to retrieve a beaded wood fern on the opposite wall for us to examine more closely. It was still green after wintering over. Though its “beads” were now empty of spores, they still thoroughly dotted the underside of each and every leaf blade. On his return, he crossed back over the pond bed and, without even looking, his foot found a familiar niche in the side of the pond wall and he stepped back up and out. We posed him with the beaded wood fern frond in the teahouse for the photo above.
Dr. Mickel’s talk has been arranged by the Garden Conservancy and the Friends of Rocky Hills. Visit the conservancy’s site at http://www.gardenconservancy.org.
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