I always make it a point to attend Trade Secrets every spring. This past Saturday, a group of colleagues and friends accompanied me to the event in the picturesque town of Lakeville, Connecticut. The philanthropic sale draws growers, dealers, and artisans together to sell unusual plants, garden antiques, and other unique outdoor objects. Trade Secrets was developed by interior designer Bunny Williams in the year 2000 when she conducted the very first sale to downsize her collection of plants in her greenhouse. It was a success from the very beginning and the proceeds go to the Women’s Support Services in northwestern Connecticut.
It's a wonderful sale and a very important cause - here are some photos. Enjoy.
I always like to get to Trade Secrets bright and early. This year, the sale was held at its new home at nearby Lime Rock Park. We left my Bedford, New York farm promptly at 5:45am and pulled into the parking lot shortly after 7am.
Betsy Mauro, director of the Women’s Support Services in Sharon, Connecticut, greeted me when I arrived.
Lime Rock Park is a natural-terrain motorsport road racing venue located in Lakeville, Connecticut, a hamlet in the town of Salisbury. The views on this day were gorgeous.
At least 50-vendors from around the northeast region set-up under tents on the Lime Rock grounds.
One of my first stops was the Orangerie Garden + Home tent. The Orangerie is owned by my friends Anthony Bellomo and Christopher Spitzmiller. There were many beautiful plants and other garden objects to see. The Orangerie Garden + Home shop is located in Millbrook, New York – do stop in if you’re ever in the area.
Orangerie Garden + Home also had lots of cut flowers for sale.
Judy Milne always has many beautiful outdoor garden planting containers. Judy Milne has a shop called At Home Antiques and Design in Kingston, New York. She carries folk art, furniture, decorative accessories and garden antiques.
Dave and Bonnie Ferriss are dealers from Lake Luzerne, New York who specialize in art, prints, architectural pieces, and country furniture.
The Marston House is located in Wiscassett, Maine. On this day, they were selling these handsome copper containers.
Hammertown Barn is a longtime Trade Secrets vendor. This year, they sold many of these gardening aprons – so handy for holding tools, seed packets and other small items while gardening.
In another basket were these fun summer handheld fans.
Period to Mod was another tent featuring stone garden ornaments such as this whimsical squirrel.
And these indoor ceramic animal planters. There is a lot of energy and spirit at this sale – everyone always walks away with some kind of treasure.
This particular booth was run by Hillside Nursery, a small nursery, plant culture lab, and research facility in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts. I visit this tent every year. This is Cypripedium ‘Tilman’ – a rare orchid hybrid with a creamy ivory pouch and burgundy interior along with a striped yellow and red hood and tendrils.
You may be familiar with this if you follow my blog – I have many of these plants in my shade gardens. This is Syneilesis aconitifolia, the Shredded Umbrella Plant. Hillside Nursery sold all their umbrella plants this year.
River Song Antiques had this pretty find – and it was picked up quickly by my friend, Patsy Pollack, who collects fruit paintings.
Some of the vendors were from other states. Hoffman & Woodward is located in East Berlin, Pennsylvania. They displayed many interesting and more utilitarian objects for the home and garden, such as these copper and glass cloches. A cloche is a covering for protecting plants from cold temperatures.
There were also botanical themed glasses for sale.
Peony’s Envy sets up their tent every year at Trade Secrets – most if not all their peonies always get sold.
Glendale Botanicals from Glendale, Massachusetts also had some beautiful plants for sale.
Pergola is based in Litchfield County, Connecticut. On this day, they brought these flower presses to sell.
Trade Secrets has so many beautiful plant specimens from which to choose. Issima had flats of these – Eryngium avavifolium, a South American sea holly with apple green, serrated, elongated leaves rising from a central rosette.
One can always find some frogs at Trade Secrets. These frogs – used for keeping cut flowers upright in their containers were for sale.
And so were these frogs – charming garden ornaments.
I also admired this garden statue of a little boy on top of a frog.
Many displays mixed and matched plants with garden ornaments and supplies.
When buying items at Trade Secrets, everyone is assigned an ID number, which is then tagged on each purchase and taken to a holding area for pick-up at the end of the visit. This very organized system makes it convenient for patrons to continue shopping. It is always so nice to see how much people buy for this great cause. Trade Secrets benefits Women’s Support Services, an organization which offers free confidential assistance to victims of domestic violence.
All my plants and other purchases are ready to be loaded onto the trucks. Ryan carefully checks each item off the list to make sure we got everything we bought. Everything arrived safely back at the farm. It was another successful Trade Secrets event. Hope to see you all at Trade Secrets next year!
Did you see my Instagram page @MarthaStewart48? The sunken garden behind my Summer House is filled with spring growth.
I began this formal garden more than 10 years ago and have added many different kinds of plants and trees ever since. It is a kind of room walled by a tall hedge of boxwood. The focal point is the great old ginkgo tree at the back of the space that was original to the property. Here, I've planted both American and English boxwood, smaller ginkgo trees, smoke bushes, Siberian weeping pea shrubs, peonies, hostas, lilies, Leucojum vernum or spring snowflakes, Heuchera, and so much more. I am so pleased with how well it has grown.
Here are some photos of this beautiful garden taken this week, enjoy.
The former owner of my farm, Mrs. Sharp, occupied two houses on the property. She called this the Summer House, where she stayed during warm weather. Adjacent to it is the Winter House which had a better heating system and where Mrs. Sharp was comfortable during the colder season. Today, the Summer House is used both as a library and as a place for entertaining. And out back is this beautiful sunken garden.
Here is a view from the Summer House terrace. When I first designed this garden, I called it my Boxwood Room. It measures 60 by 120 feet. The garden’s focal point is the old Ginkgo tree at the back of the garden.
Most of the garden is surrounded by a tall American boxwood hedge. And because the Summer House faces a rather busy intersection, the wall of boxwood provides a good deal of privacy.
The smaller ginkgo trees are planted along both sides of the footpath. The ginkgo biloba is one of the most distinct and beautiful of all deciduous trees. It prefers a minimum of four hours of direct, unfiltered sunlight each day. The ginkgo has a cone-like shape when young, and becomes irregularly rounded as it ages.
The ginkgo leaves are unusually fan-shaped, up to three-inches long, with a petiole that is also up to three-inches long. This shape and the elongated petiole cause the foliage to flutter in the slightest breeze. Ginkgo leaves grow and deepen color in summer, then turn a brilliant yellow in autumn.
This year, I placed metal green garden furniture on the terrace, so guests can sit, relax, and enjoy all the beautiful plantings in this garden.
On the terrace, I also have a collection of eight of these gorgeous faux bois containers I acquired a few years ago.
Inside this container is a Norfolk Island pine, Araucaria heterophylla. It is not an actual pine tree, but rather a relative of the monkey puzzle tree, and is often cultivated as a landscape tree in subtropical climates in North America. It features soft foliage, vibrant greenery, and easy-to-care-for growth.
This is the top view of a young sago palm – also in a faux bois planter. The sago palm, Cycas revoluta, is a popular plant known for its feathery foliage and ease of care. Native to the southern islands of Japan, the sago palm goes by several common names, including Japanese palm, funeral palm, king sago or just plain sago palm. The plant is not a true palm, despite its common name, but a cycad, part of a prehistoric class of plants. It produces a whorl of dark green, feather-like fronds on its trunk. The pinnate leaves are typically about four to five feet long at maturity, and nine-inches wide, reaching their greatest length when grown in partial shade.
In this garden, I also have six weeping Siberian pea shrubs, Caragana arborescens, with cascading weeping branches. These are hardy, sun-loving, large shrubs which are tolerant of drought, wind, deer, and varying soil conditions.
The pea shrubs bear pinnately compound light green leaves.
And small, delicate yellow pea-like flowers. Flowers are bright yellow, and about ¾ inch long.
The boxwood shrubs down the center of the garden are carefully groomed with tapered tops. Boxwood is naturally a round or oval shaped shrub that can reach up to 15 feet in height.
This bed is filled with Leucojum vernum – the spring snowflake, a perennial plant that grows between six to 10 inches in height and blooms heavily in early spring.
The plant produces green, linear leaves and white, bell-shaped flowers with a green edge and green dots. Don’t confuse them with Snowdrops. The Snowflake is a much taller growing bulb which normally has more than one flower per stem. Snowdrops have helicopter-like propellers that are green only on the inner petals.
Ipheion uniflorum, commonly called spring starflower, is native to Argentina and Uruguay and features grass-like foliage and solitary star-shaped flowers on six inch tall stems. Flowers range in color from almost white to violet blue. Flowers have a mild spicy fragrance, and the foliage when bruised emits an oniony aroma.
This trout lily is ‘Pagoda Dogtooth,’ It produces up to 10 clustered, 12-inch arching stems that bear yellow, nodding flowers with reflexed petals.
And it’s a bit of a tease, but soon the tree peonies will all be blooming. Tree peonies are larger, woody relatives of the common herbaceous peony, growing up to five feet wide and tall in about 10 years. They are highly prized for their large, prolific blooms that can grow up to 10 inches in diameter.
All the hostas are also growing quickly. Hostas are a perennial favorite among gardeners. Their lush green foliage varying in leaf shape, size and texture, and their easy care requirements make them ideal for many areas. Hosta is a genus of plants commonly known as hostas, plantain lilies and occasionally by the Japanese name, giboshi. They are native to northeast Asia and include hundreds of different cultivars.
Look at the giant leaves of this hosta.
This is Heuchera. The glossy dark maroon, almost black, leaves keep their color all season – it adds a gorgeous accent to the beds.
The ferns are looking so vibrant this time of year and they grow taller every day. These graceful perennials are easy to grow, long-lived, and require very little care. They come in a variety of leaf colors, shapes, and sizes. I have many, many ferns here at the farm.
At the end of the footpath is this antique sundial. A sundial is any device that uses the sun’s altitude or azimuth to show the time. It consists of a flat plate, which is the dial, and a gnomon, which casts a shadow onto the dial.
Cotinus, also known as smoketree or smoke bush, is a genus of two species of flowering plants in the family Anacardiaceae, closely related to the sumacs. They are a great choice for massing or for hedges.
The stunning dark red-purple foliage turns scarlet in autumn and has plume-like seed clusters, which appear after the flowers and give a long-lasting, smoky haze to branch tips.
This is a view from the side entrance into the garden. Straight ahead is the tall American boxwood hedge that surrounds this area on three sides. Here, one can also see the low manicured boxwood hedges that provide the framing for the garden beds. I love this formal garden – it’s looking more lush every year.
For donkeys, there's nothing quite like rolling in a fresh patch of dirt. And, while rolling on the ground helps to scratch their backs, it's also a natural behavior for donkeys to cover themselves in dust, which provides great insulation and protection from extreme heat and cold.
Here at my farm, my five Sicilian donkeys, Rufus, Clive, Billie, Jude “JJ” Junior, and Truman “TJ” Junior, are no different - they "live to roll." But yesterday, with spring temperatures reaching 75 degrees Fahrenheit, it was the perfect day for a bath to get them all cleaned up. Each one was thoroughly washed, soaped, and rinsed.
Here are some photos, enjoy.
On this day, my donkeys got the full “spa treatment.” In the morning, my farrier, Linda Friedman, came by the stable to check the donkeys’ hooves and give them a good trim. After lunch, they all got baths. Donkeys are herd animals, so they don’t like being separated from other members of their pack. When it’s bath time, they all get cleaned together. First, the boys.
The donkeys are hosed down to get their coats thoroughly wet. Our hoses are hooked up to hot and cold water, so they are washed in lukewarm water. Clive doesn’t seem to mind getting wet.
The donkeys are then soaped up with an all-natural shampoo. First, their backs are all scrubbed…
And then their legs and bellies…
Here, Helen applies a whitening shampoo to Clive’s coat, so it comes out clean and bright. Helen also uses special washing gloves that loosen any dirt or debris. Helen scrubs in the shampoo until it lathers. Clive stays very still.
Donkey coats are very thick and hold lots of dust and dirt. These gloves have special scrubbing pads that help to clean and massage them.
Next, a good rinse – again with tepid water. Temperatures were in the 70s, so these outdoor baths were very refreshing.
It is important to get all the shampoo out of the coat, so it doesn’t irritate the skin. And don’t forget the tail – it can also get quite dirty.
All three male donkeys get along exceptionally well. They are also very friendly and love greeting anyone who visits – even during a bath.
Here is Rufus getting a good rinse.
Clive is almost done.
Now that it is spring, the donkeys and horses are all shedding their winter coats. Helen uses a shedding blade to help loosen the dead hairs and any debris that did not come out already. When using it, always follow the direction the hair grows. This tool has lacquered spring steel blades with sharp teeth on one side and rounded teeth on the other. When used properly, it also stimulates the coat and draws the oils in the skin to the surface.
And lastly, Helen uses a moist hand towel to gently clean Clive’s face. It is important not to get any soap, shampoo, or water in their eyes. I think they all appreciate a good face cleaning.
All done, my sweet donkeys – Rufus, Truman “TJ” Junior, and Clive are all very clean. As a treat, Dolma walks the trio over to some fresh grass to let them graze for a few minutes before returning to their stall.
Next are the girls. Billie and Jude “JJ” Junior are the only females in my stable. Here they are getting shampooed.
… and scrubbed. Look at all the hair that came off the girls’ coats with the scrubbing glove.
The baths are done as quickly as possible, so they don’t get chills. Fortunately, this day is very mild.
Helen rinses every leg thoroughly – so much dirt can accumulate in their coats.
And here is Helen using the shedding blade to remove those dead hairs. It is so much more comfortable for the donkeys to be groomed regularly.
Then it’s rinse time. The shampoo is very gentle and soothing to the skin. After they are completely lathered up, Helen and Dolma will wait a few minutes to allow the shampoo to soak into the coats. The donkeys are rinsed multiple times to be sure they are thoroughly clean and soap-free.
Helen cleans their faces with another damp cloth. As warmer weather sets in, the donkeys will be washed as much as once a week.
The donkeys are left to dry naturally on this warm spring day. Five donkeys are now washed and squeaky clean. They’re ready for the weekend.
That bath wasn’t so bad, was it Billie and “JJ”? Are you ready for a treat? Don’t tell them, but today all five donkeys are also scheduled for their warm weather haircuts. Stay tuned for more photos.
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