There’s a lot to take in from David Geiger’s yard at the top of Provincetown’s Telegraph Hill. The place has sweeping views of the bay. Moored boats dot the harbor, and you can see a stretch of Wellfleet beyond that. But the more you look around, the more you notice things nearby.
David Geiger in the garden at the house on Telegraph Hill that he shares with his husband, John Lamb. (Photos by Chet Domitz)
A garden bed wraps all the way around the house. In one section of the garden are three varieties of Solomon’s seal: one very tall and arching, another short and dense, the third somewhere in between. A row of trees grows along the property line, each one different from the next: apricot, pawpaw, beetlebung, Korean dogwood. Closer to the ground, a Lilliputian rose bush has blooms no bigger than half an inch across. This yard is not landscaped in the traditional sense, nor does it adhere to a particular style. It’s more like a laboratory reflecting Geiger’s horticultural interests and knowledge.
Geiger grew up outside Buffalo, N.Y. and went to Cornell University, where he earned both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in plant sciences — he specialized in ornamental horticulture and floriculture. In Ithaca, he had his own greenhouse where he grew orchids and rare tropicals along with a lot of uncommon varieties in the garden.
When he and his husband, John Lamb, moved from there to Martha’s Vineyard, where Lamb is an internist, they brought many plants with them. Some in Geiger’s collection have been with him for decades. “The plant I’ve been dragging around the longest is a prickly pear cactus, Opuntia humifusa,” he says. It’s one he brought to Provincetown when the couple moved here in 2014. “It’s native to this area,” Geiger says. “I’ve been moving this thing around, pieces of it, for 50-some years.”
A Japanese maple with yellow leaves that retain their color all spring and summer.
On the Vineyard, Geiger worked at Heather Gardens in West Tisbury starting in 2006; he retired three years ago. (The nursery was sold in 2023 and is now Gayle Gardens Landscape Design.) Geiger still sends them plants that they sell. He has also provided stock to Bayberry Gardens in Truro and The Farm in Orleans.
He’s interested in the unusual. “They used to laugh at me at Heather Gardens,” Geiger says. Coming across plants that were “variegated, dwarfed, contorted, or something,” he says, “people would say, ‘Oh, this is David’s section.’ ”
Unique characteristics can happen to plants naturally, just as they can in people. “It’s just genetics,” he says. When a seedling shows up and is different in some way, Geiger takes an interest in it. To retain a unique trait he likes, Geiger will propagate the plant from cuttings or divisions rather than by its seeds. Otherwise, the trait is easily lost. After he’s produced enough clones for a small colony, he’ll pass some on to nurseries.
Mondo grass (Ophiopogon) is a popular groundcover commercially available in two colors, purple-black and deep green. The green is a dominant trait. If you reproduce the black plants from seed, roughly one out of four seedlings will have green instead of black leaves. Geiger is developing a third option: “I had one plant in all these years that came out in between the two in color. It’s kind of an olive or khaki green.”
Sometimes, the mutation Geiger is interested in doesn’t manifest visually. Fuchsias, for instance, are generally thought of as an annual in this growing zone — Geiger says Provincetown is Zone 7b. But 15 years ago, when he was living on the Vineyard, he ordered Fuchsia seeds from Chile of a variety that’s considered to be winter-hardy. He planted all the seeds, interested in how they would take. Most of the plants died, but five survived. He still has two of them. Since these particular plants have genes that make them especially hardy, they return each year as perennials. Geiger sends cuttings of them to nurseries.
Detail of a colony of mondo grass (Ophiopogon) in a rare color Geiger is propagating in Provincetown.
Geiger’s plant breeding facility in Provincetown is modest. Instead of a greenhouse, he has an alcove in his basement with a set of grow lights where he’ll start seeds in March. A retaining wall near his garage creates a sheltered area that gets full sun. Here, in the warmer months, Geiger keeps pots, plug trays, and tubs filled with cuttings, seedlings, and unusual varieties.
Though he does trials himself, he has a representative in Alabama, Plants Nouveau, that can do testing for him in different zones for hardiness, drought tolerance, and other traits. When they like something Geiger has sent them, they’ll put it into production, market it, and send it to wholesalers who then produce more of it for nurseries. It can take years for a plant to get to this stage commercially. This is much more involved than when Geiger hands over a tray of something to Bayberry Gardens, but theoretically, if he’s lucky, a plant that Plants Nouveau takes on gets trademarked or patented, which means Geiger eventually gets royalties.
The problem is that a lot has to be sold to make such a creation profitable. And Geiger specializes in varieties that typically don’t appeal to a wide audience.
The sheltered area along a retaining wall where Geiger keeps starting trays and young plants in the warmer months.
A genus he’s experimenting with that potentially has broader appeal is Hibiscus. In this instance, Geiger is hybridizing two species by cross-pollinating them. He pulled stamens from the Hibiscus syriacus and smeared the pollen from it on the pistils of Hibiscus sinosyriacus. Syriacus has big pink flowers but scrubby leaves, while sinosyriacus has smaller blue flowers but nicer leaves. “Once it bloomed and the flowers were blueish and everything about it was a little more delicate, I knew it was a good cross,” he says. A friend in Ithaca has been testing the hybrid there, and Plants Nouveau has been testing it in the South. According to Geiger, it’s doing well in both zones.
An occasional burst of wind blows across Geiger’s yard as we stand under the bright summer sun. Conditions here can be challenging for gardeners. “This is an ancient sand dune,” he says, and some plants just like more organic matter. There’s also airborne salt; it can pull moisture out of plant tissue. And there’s the possibility of damage caused by brackish irrigation water. Geiger says the ends of the leaves of his Korean dogwood are sometimes brown and crisp by end of summer. “That’s typical of salt damage,” he says.
The wind can pose a risk, too, especially in winter. When the ground is frozen, plants can’t pull up enough water, and they become susceptible to wind burn. It’s one of the reasons Geiger prefers mondo grass over other ground covers, such as Liriope, which he says would easily get wind burned on his property.
Examples of plants Geiger is testing can be seen at Suzanne’s Garden (608 Commercial St.), the former perennial garden of Suzanne Sinaiko that’s now town-owned and open to the public.
A hardy Alstroemeria in Suzanne’s Garden in Provincetown.
There’s a calla lily (Zantedeschia albomaculata) at Suzanne’s that Geiger grew from seed. This plant comes from a high-elevation population in South Africa, so it’s hardier than most. The calla lily has returned for several seasons. A hardy Alstroemeria has been growing on the back bank of the garden for three years now. These are common to South America and typically don’t grow here, although they’re popular with florists. The plant at Suzanne’s is an as-yet-unnamed hybrid Geiger is testing for another grower. Both the calla lily and the Alstroemeria are in bloom now.
Many popular plants we think of as annuals are actually tropical perennials, says Geiger. They’re just not frost tolerant. But Geiger is, in tiny increments, changing the landscape through his plant introductions. That’s not his aim exactly. What he’s looking for, he says, when he tries something new, is just one thing: “Survival.”
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