Arborvitaes failing to screen my view of the parking lot.
When I wrote last September that “I hate my arborvitaes” because several of them DIED during a drought (they’re not as drought-tolerant as I wished/hoped), commenter Marianne Willburn wrote, “I hate your arborvitae hedge too. And before some of it died. How about some medium grasses?”
I replied that in order to block my view of the parking lot, plants need to be at least 6 feet tall, and that space is very limited.
But a better, quicker solution to my screening problem seemed possible, as I wrote in that post:
Or how about just constructing a privacy screen and skip the plants altogether? Well, there’s good news on that front because the co-op has recently approved a process for custom-designing and approving screens!
Well, turns out that didn’t happen after all, and I won’t be allowed to build a privacy screen to replace the awful Arborvitaes.
Yes, I hate them, too, and not just because I have to water them more than I thought. I’ve never liked the look, and they really don’t block my view of cars, and never will.
But you know what WILL block the view?
Crossvine! It’s evergreen, a vigorous grower, native to this region, blooms like crazy and even has reblooms throughout the season.
And best of all – my coop doesn’t have any rules against using vines to create privacy or screening. (We have no rules against trees or shrubs used as screening, either. Makes no sense to severely restrict built screens but allow evergreen walls of any height to surround our tiny yards, but there you go.)
The crossvine will be just as happy trained along strong wires as it is in the photo above, trained along a wooden screen.
It’ll look like this spot in my back yard, where I recently had wire installed and where I’m betting that by the end of this season, the crossvine will just about block the view and provide the vertical element so needed for a sense of privacy and enclosure.
I look forward to showing you the before-and-after shots here and on the other side, where parked cars are my primary view and I’m sick of seeing them!
I’m also sick of obsessing over all the bad views and lack of privacy caused by our nonsensical rules, which some of us gardeners tried to change, to no avail.
Do I sometimes wish I weren’t the kind of gardener who obsesses over what’s wrong with her garden? Sure, but this year I’ll be channeling my obsession into training all that glorious vine. I’m going to LOVE it!
(By the way, I’ve offered my nine Arborvitaes free to anyone who’ll dig them up, and gotten NO TAKERS.)
Rose and I left our garden behind last week to go shelling and birding on Sanibel, Captiva and Cayo Costa. We follow a routine, repeated for a week or two every February. We patrol beaches for shells and the J.N. “Ding” Darling National Wildlife Refuge for birds.
We learn the names of an abundant variety of shells and birds and feel confident that our mental acuity may not be as bad as we thought. We feel good about ourselves for a little while.
It is only a mirage.
By the spring equinox, the names of much of what we saw a few weeks before will be forgotten, another robbery of the memory bank.
Rose and I are in our late 60s, not quite over the hill, but poised perilously at the top of a steep one.
The weather has been sunny, and the temperate mostly warm. Rose’s brother Milton joined us, along with Heather Spencer and Charles Murray, our good friends from Asheville, NC, who are great observers of life.
I have never found a four-leaf clover, and when I’m in the company of anyone with sharp eyes, I often ask, “What is it, what did you see?” Charles spotted more cat paw seashells than he’d seen before. At the Ding Darling, Rose got tipped off on a wood stork; Charles saw a yellow-crowned night heron, and Heather spotted a reddish egret.
I keep good company, and enjoy plenty of sightings, but out alone I would feel helpless, stuck in a metaphorical thicket of impenetrable mangroves without my gifted agents of nature.
White Ibis at the J.N. “Ding” Darling National Wildlife Refuge in Sanibel, Florida.
Then there are short-term memory lapses, plagued by random hard-to-recall nouns.
Nouns?
“Pass the thingy,” while pointing a finger toward your targeted object on the kitchen table, may be the best you can do when saltshaker is nowhere close to the tip of your tongue.
I’m not the only one in this floundering boat of nouns.
Poet Laureate Billy Collins riffed on a similar state of mind in his poem, Forgetfulness. Here’s a portion.
The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of,
as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.
And, thus, no phone apps.
Heather, Charles and I visited the Corkscrew Sanctuary last Friday. Heather introduced me to a remarkable phone app, Picture This, which identified the vining Aster carolinianus. (At last, I’ve found, if not the Fountain of Youth, at least a phone app that may save me from saying, “Oh, it’s that thingy.”
Heather held the Picture This phone app toward bark, flowers and leaves.
Eureka!
We saw a lot of spongy bald cypress stumps covered in Boston ferns, and rarely was the app stumped.
I hadn’t expected to see this oddball aster in a soggy woodland in Southwest Florida, growing with pond cypress (Taxodium ascendens), sabal palms and wax myrtle. (I’ve seen the vine in gardens farther north but never in the wild.) We also learned, through this app, that the Aster is a disaster—well, as far as botanical nomenclature goes. The name has been cruelly mutated to Ampelaster carolininanus. Other asters were re-anointed with clumsy genera names like Doellingeria, Eurybia and Symphyotrichum.
Don’t worry about it.
If you’re in the garden, or in the wild, and Aster carolinianus, climbing aster, or even aster, is all you can remember, it’s all right.
We’re not exactlyknown as “fly-over” states, but some of us in the Great Lakes areahave to try harder to convince out-of-towners we’re cool. It shouldn’t be necessary. Thanks to, in part, glacial activity, we’re blessed with spectacular scenery. Thanks to the inland seas we surround, we have abundant access to fresh water. Thanks also to those inland seas, as well as other factors, we have rich farmland and warm summers—in addition to lake effect snow in winter.
Grounds of Epic Systems
If you live in Buffalo, as I do, you’re all too familiar with this narrative. Buffalonians have managed to overcome it, to some degree, by defiantly redefining ourselves as a garden destination. Partly because of that struggle, we’re sympathetic to the other underdogs throughout the Great Lakes region. Cleveland is a great city, for example. Not only does it have one of the best art museums in the US and the more recent Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame, it’s enveloped in 23,000 acres of parkland.
Private garden
And then there is Madison. The nation’s eyes will be turned to what’s shaping up to be a bloodbath in Milwaukee, come July, but, before that, June 18–21, there is a kinder, gentler reason to visit Wisconsin. The Annual Garden Blogger’s Fling takes place in Madison, WI,this year, and I, for one, can’t wait. I have been hearing great things about Madison for years. Everyone I know who has visited Madison has loved it. Though located west of Lake Michigan, the city is embedded in four small lakes (or are the lakes embedded in the city?), so there must be water views everywhere. It has eight Frank Lloyd Wright structures (he grew up and studied here)and plenty of other spectacular architecture. Oh yes, and gardens.
Janesville Rotary Gardens
The Madison Fling will focus, as most flings do, on some public spaces and many private spaces, unavailable except for this tour. There is one space that, on the surface, sounds unremarkable, even banal, but once you actually hear it described, it’s jaw-drop time. Epic Systems is a healthcare software company. Its Madison corporate headquarters has an over-the-top landscape that must be seen to be believed. There’s a castle, a treehouse, a barn, gravel gardens, sculpture, and more. Can’t wait for this one.
Olbrich Botanical Gardens
Also pictured here are the Olbrich Botanical Gardens, the Janesville Rotary Gardens, and one of the private gardens on the tour.
If you blog, the Garden Bloggers Fling offers garden touring, socializing, and the ability to enjoy new destinations in the company of other gardeners, many of whom will become lifelong friends. That’s how it’s worked for me. Picture yourself in Madison this June.
What a treat it was to receive your letter dated January 22nd. And so publicly too! What fun.
Despite myself, I somehow got caught up in flights of fantasy borne from your descriptions of your bucolic existence in the benevolent hills far enough west of D.C. to be out of the gridlock and yet still within the outer rings of its wealth. You have a good life there by the fireside with your Yorkies, your garden (which I imagine to be picture perfect), and your former marine (whom I imagine is likewise).
Here’s our dog. He’s a spastic, old, not so smart and mostly blind mutt at the end of a long line of people handing him off to other people, but he has a heart of gold.
I couldn’t help but reminded of how different things are here in the bitter, gritty, gloomy, and surly Midwest. The temperature has been oscillating here so violently that it has cracked buildings. Even our six-story skyscrapers! Yet, it’s always gray. Gray, leaden, heavy, oppressive, American gray, English grey, depressing as hell, and a daily kick in the gut gray. And the rivers are all flooding. There’s worry the levy might break and wipe out the trailer park. Currently I’m cutoff from my nearest source of a Big Gulp by high water. Oh, and everyone I know, including me, is sick.
This weekend, Michele, who is never sick, got the flu. Started Saturday while she helped me move brush and branches from around the yard to the driveway. She’s usually such a good sport, but she was kind of lagging and losing focus. I was getting irritated, because I’d been pruning like a maniac and the yard was starting to look like a log jam. Eventually, we had gotten it all into a big pile by my old, rusty truck that won’t start, being sure to make it is as unsightly as we could and plainly visible to any county official that happens to drive by. Next thing I know, she’s practically passing out. And I had hoped she would cook that night.
As you mentioned, Michele has a sweet smile, an amazing smile. And she was so innocent when we got married that I had to instruct her on how to use it with police officers, bouncers, and the occasional asshole boss. But, when we both finally got in bed Saturday night, it was like that mouth had never smiled before ever. All it knew how to do was cough on me like I was in the first wave of liberators trying to come ashore and it was a germ machine gun.
A glimpse at that sweet smile. Taken last year during better times.
To my amazement, I awoke Sunday still feeling okay, but had to make an escape. It’s been a winter of working nights and weekends putting together PowerPoints, articles, and forever trying to get caught up at work. Michele’s mom died after a quick illness in December. My mom has pinged and ponged from home to hospital and now to a rehab center, and I too have been bouncing around between home and a dentist for a fourth try at a new crown and between various doctors trying to figure out why my left ear has been ringing off the hook. This included a horrible outpatient MRI, which required that I be totally still in an absolutely claustrophobic situation for what seemed like hours, even, as I’m quite sure, the staff were making fun of my crotch. Fortunately, the MRI didn’t find any of the tumors they were looking for in my noggin, so, yes, they examined my head and found nothing. Just chronic sinus infections. Two rounds of heavy antibiotics later, and my digestive system is so out of whack that I’m willing to promise anyone anything if it means I no longer have to live with myself. And now Michele had the flu and I was probably going to get it.
The garden beckoned, and I followed the call.
My mossy path brings me joy all through winter.As does Epimedium stellatum’s spectacular winter foliage. (BTW, I could have moved that stick and some of the leaves, but in the interest of journalistic integrity, I left them there.
So Sunday there I was, gardening again like a lunatic. Finished cutting down a Japanese Raisin Tree that was causing three of my own seed-grown Katsura to lean right and starting to shade out the Arborvitae that are screening my neighbor’s shed. A bit of a bitter pill, because I had also grown the Raisin Tree from seed. In fact, I had germinated this species, planted it out, and lost it over winter three times until a friend I won’t mention had—under potentially dubious circumstances—gotten me seed that was supposedly from a cold hardy provenance from somewhere out there in the world that best remains unnamed. Well, bingo, this seedling survived every winter, grew like a son of a bitch, started shading out other stuff, and, at best, could be described as boring. It was probably too big for me to take down myself, and I wound up actually proving that when it fell just off target and stripped about half the branches of my Halesia diptera ‘Magniflora.’ This was a favorite tree of mine. Such is the lot of the impulsive gardener with a chainsaw and not a lot of money.
A pile of brush ready to go to the County composting lot. This includes an entire Japanese Raisin Tree, and parts of various Katsura, Gingko, Yellowwood, Poliothysis, Chinese Lilac, several Viburnum, Halesia diptera ‘Magniflora,’ three or four Japanese Maples, Cucumber Magnolia, Bigleaf Magnolia, ‘Yellow Bird’ Magnolia, Dawn Redwood, Parrotia, various Hornbeams, and more. It’s like a freakin’ arboretum blew up.Aftermath of a massacre.
After bucking the Raisin Tree, I patched up the Halesia as best I could. The branching structure was about as squirrelly as they come without any help by me; now I feel I just sculpted in a way to empower it to show off its true self. Well, anyway, that’s what I’ll tell people.
But as the afternoon progressed, I reached that magical state where my entire existence became about the task at hand. No extraneous thoughts. Just focus. So insanely rare. The ringing in my ear was forgotten. My mother’s care plan, put aside. Michele suffering in the house somewhere, only strayed into my thoughts, when, on occasion, I would look up to see yellow wisps of coronavirus fog leaking out of small cracks in the siding of our house. Achieving this state of oblivion, this full immersion in my work, it was like an injection of jet fuel into my heart and soul!
By the time I had finished, I had greatly added to the pile in the driveway, I’d dug up a stump, and transplanted into that hole a tall, skinny, and surprisingly heavy Chamaecyparis of some species and selection I’ve long forgotten, lugging it clumsily but quickly across the yard like it was an 80 pound, 3’ x 12’ human organ that needed to go immediately into a patient.
The Chamaecyparis in its new home.
Then I replanted a couple patches of Epimedium and Corydalis which happened to get “outed” when the stump got grubbed out and the Chamaecyparis got moved. Eventually, I even found a little time to admire some blooms of hellebores, snowdrops, Iris reticulata, and a witchhazel.
Spring is just waiting to be unleashed! Sure sign of this is Iris reticulata coming into bloom.
Sedum and a Thyme chomping at the bit.
Monday, Michele’s doctor said she had the flu and by that evening I had a bad cough. Yesterday I got worse and woke up this morning with every nerve ending signaling that every cell in my body was at Defcon Five Crisis Mode and each of my many coughs felt like a demon carpenter was going at my throat with a rasp. An appointment with my doctor this afternoon put me on two new meds, including a new round of antibiotics. Great.
When I got home, it was almost sunny and relatively warm, so I visited the hellebores, snowdrops, Iris, and witchhazel. Sure, they are in a sea of mud with errant plastic plant tags, fresh stumps, a winter’s worth of dog poop, a pool cover full of dirty water and leaves, a plastic bucket or two, a rusty pickup, and a mile high pile of brush all trying to photo bomb every picture I take, but despite that frustration they sure are a much needed tonic. As much or more so than Tamiflu.
So anyway, thanks for the letter. I’ll pick up on some of your other themes next time. In particular, I want to go after those sourpus types you mentioned that throw shade on all the new gardeners who are not “pure” enough. But, for now, some chicken soup and bed.
Are you surprised to see ants in your home during the winter? Don’t be. It’s a common problem and it likely means that the ant colony is located somewhere inside the structure of your home. In fact, most ant activity that troubles people inside their homes, no matter what the season, is the result of a nest that has developed inside the structure itself. Ants are almost always inside coming in, not outside coming in. Read more about how to get rid of ants in your house!
Where ants live in your house
Different types of ants choose different places to nest. Odorous House Ants love to nest inside the walls of a hollow block foundation. The temperatures and moisture levels inside your foundation are nearly constant, and are ideal for supporting a developing ant colony.
House Ants, like Carpenter Ants, can also find a place within your walls where moisture penetrates the structure creating ideal living conditions.
Pavement Ants in your home are likely nesting beneath a concrete slab and entering your home through a crack. But to be clear, all of these types of ants can nest in any of the places mentioned above.
How ants in your house behave
Some homeowners see ants in their home for a few weeks in spring, and then the ants seem to go away. But, if the ants are living in the structure of your home, they aren’t going away.
These ants are likely foraging for food indoors when it’s cool (sometimes all winter). Then when it warms up, the ants forage for food outside. One clue to ants’ behavior is found in ant trails entering and exiting your home. These trails almost certainly mean the ants are nesting in the structure of your home.
Ignoring this “seasonal” ant activity can lead to future ant problems. Carpenter Ants may be doing damage to your home out of sight. Odorous House Ants will be growing stronger with each passing day as they develop more worker ants and egg-laying queens. The greater the numbers in any ant colony, the harder they can be to eliminate when you reach your breaking point (it WILL come) and you decide to take action – finally!
How to get rid of ants in your house
The first step in solving a home ant problem is identifying the exact species of ant. Next, the location of the ant nests need to be found. Lastly, based on the ant species and infestation level, an appropriate treatment strategy can be developed.
It’s important to remember that there are no short cuts to getting rid of ants in your home; doing the wrong things about the ants can lead to even more trouble. For example, spraying ants with repellant insecticides or aerosols can result in a phenomenon (known as “colony budding”) in which the ant colony splits into multiple colonies amplifying your problem. Sadly, some of the worst House Ant problems are ones where homeowners have been trying for years to solve the problem themselves.
Tomlinson Bomberger Pest Control specializes in getting rid of ants in your house. We identify what species of ant is the problem, then we find the source of the infestation. We’ve been doing this for years across Lancaster County and beyond and we’re ready to help you rid your house of ants once and for all. Contact us today!
The obvious answer is that NOT starting a garden club is less hassle than starting one, but my local gardening friends and I want to do SOMETHING. And we’ll only do it if we can avoid having officers, charging dues, hiring speakers and renting space for events. Done that, thanks!
I made a clean break from garden clubs when I moved to a town with NO garden club, but there’s one in the next town over that has meetings with speakers, dues, officers and holiday parties. I’m happy to drive even farther for a speaker I want to hear, and do it frequently.
But what we don’t have in my town are garden tours, or groups of gardeners working to beautify the town or help neighbors learn to garden. For a time we considered becoming a gardening committee within the bureaucracy of our co-op but that bureaucracy quickly proved to be TOO MUCH for people who just want to help people garden and not have to put up with crap to do it.
So we’re going rogue, baby! And informal, super-informal. No dues, officers or regular meetings. We even brag about that on our web page (still in draft):
The Old Greenbelt Gardening Boosters are an informal collection of gardeners who just want to help other people in Old Greenbelt learn to garden. (No dues, no officers, etc.)
We’re meeting soon to brainstorm these ideas for projects in 2020 – none of which will happen unless someone volunteers to take responsibility for them. (Not MY job to make them happen!)
Self-guided tours or “garden walks”.
Free garden consultations for lucky winners of drawings.
Free pruning demonstrations.
Plan improvements to common areas owned by the co-op.
Help newcomers identify the plants in their new yards.
Provide text and images online that answer common questions our neighbors are asking.
Advocate for gardening and gardeners in Old Greenbelt.
Promote fun and educational events of nearby garden clubs and public gardens, maybe arranging carpools to them. (Creating socializing opportunities without putting on events ourselves.)
Thanks to New Media
All this is made possible by the availability of free communication, of course. (Thus, no dues.) We’ll be using a combination of email, Facebook and the local blog I edit.
Other Ideas?
Readers, if you’ve been part of any local gardening group, official club or otherwise, what projects do you recommend for helping teach and energize local gardeners-to-be?
Photos of Our Work
Our group may not be official but already in 2019 we got to work, unofficially of course.
We organized a Garden Walk in early September that rated these three photos in the local paper!
Above, one of our free garden consultations.
Left, we brainstormed about landscape improvements at our co-op offices. On the right, we showed neighbors how to prune overgrown shrubs in a common area.
The I-Must-Have-This-Plant contest, that was begun a week ago, has been a huge success. There was not one clinker among 11 entries.
i asked my one and only Rose Bush to be the unbiased judge. I wanted to plant all of these wonderful real and make-believe plants in my Salvisa garden this year after reading the descriptions.
Linus had me early on. We are Comrades in Spurge, it turns out. Be proud and say it loud: “Submit to this spurge; purge the urge to exclude this spurge.” Here’s to more Allegheny spurges.
I will not be able to resist Teresa’s Ardisia japonica ‘Chrimen’ that grows into “a delightful ankle-high forest…” I’m going to find one…
I have no idea how Ann Rausch’s Hydrangea ‘Ruby Red Slippers’ escaped notice until now. Where have I been? I will be keeping my eyes peeled for the “large, cone-shaped blossoms that arrive white and advance to a dazzling ruby red.”
I had to stop for a minute when Beth wrote about “a charming Hazel.” I went out with Hazel one time, but she wasn’t a nut with “twisty-turn stems.” It has been a few years. Bravo for Corylus ‘Contorta’.
I’m in total agreement with Anne Young on the red buckeye. It is a perfectly wonderful small tree that “checks all the boxes.”
Jenny, of course, I want a “darling deciduous coral berry with a dash of pizzazz.”
Diane, you read my mind. I love the tall and elegant daylily ‘Autumn Minaret.’ The more the merrier.
Jennifer, how dare you write about promiscuous plant sluts on the wholesome family-oriented Garden Rant? (I’m glad you did!) Perilla…Oh, my god. “Thought it’d be a great filler. Now she’s struggling to find her hand tiller.”
My good friend, Guest Ranter and former Jelitto Perennial Seeds colleague had a good one, too. I feared a revolt if I showed any favoritism. “Growing in cracks… (a damn petunia) gone wild. A dry rocky slope… (or open meadow) can be trialed. Humilis humble…(submissive?) not a chance. Born in North America….. (not England) not France.” I immediately made a note to order seeds of Ruellia humilis from Jelitto.
The Japanese roof iris is one of my all-time favorite go-to perennials. Eric S. rode a sweet wave with the white blooming Iris tectorum ‘Alba’. “Its wide strappy leaf blades continue to grow with clumps forming arching fountains of celery green in places where deeper green foliage add contrast to make them pop.”
Dee Cee’s entry for hoary puccoon (Lithospermum canescens) was an impassioned plea for a lovely native that is seldom planted—and should be planted more. “Get ready to brighten up the border or that difficult spot with this cheerful yellow fellow!
Rose said it was a tough call to choose between the top two winners, but the contestants above shouldn’t be disappointed. All of the contestants have earned a catfish dinner with cole slaw and spicy fries at the Family Affair, in Salvisa, KY, whenever you’re passing this way. Let me know. Lunch is on my dime.”
Joe Schmitt is our esteemed runner-up. I don’t know anyone else who could have concocted a hybrid between a Penstemon and a Eucalyptus, but we never had a glimpse inside Joe’s tool shed until he cracked the door open this week. Heaven’s knows what else lurks inside there.
The grand winner was Anne’s “purple prose.” (Her grand prize is a copy of Planting in a Post-Wild World.) Rose and I blushed at Anne’s audacity to unleash the galloping spearmint, but then we like a good mint julep during the Kentucky Derby weekend, so there are exceptions. “I can’t walk past my spearmint without stroking his copious emerald, spear-headed leaves to inhale his refreshing, rejuvenating fragrance… He propagates wantonly, spreading his roots wherever he goes…I share a piece of him wherever friends are willing to take him into their beds. It’s hard to imagine a garden without him.”
Keeping your outside space looking great is essential if you want to make the most of your property. However, it isn’t always a simple task. If you want to cultivate a great looking garden with minimal hassle, take a look at these top tips to make your gardening life easier…
1. Group plants together
When people plan their gardens, they often choose locations for their plants based on color or size. However, this approach can make it more difficult to maintain the area and the plants. Instead of situating plants based on colors and sizes, group plants based on their needs. When you’re maintaining your garden, this will reduce the amount of time it takes to water, deadhead, prune and nourish your plant life.
2. Use the right fertilizer
It’s difficult for plants, shrubs, and grass to get all the nutrients they need, no matter what climate you live in. Fertilizer and plant food can be a great way to keep them in good shape, providing you use the right products. Many gardeners prefer organic options, as this helps to minimize the number of chemicals in your yard. Whatever products you choose, be sure they’re well-suited for your plants, trees or shrubs.
3. Switch to liquid aeration
If you want to keep your lawn looking lush, aeration is key. This enables nutrients to penetrate hard soil and removes thatch which prevents water from reaching the roots. However, you needn’t spend your time walking up and down with a core aerator. A liquid lawn aerator will enable you to do the job in a fraction of the time. What’s more – when you use a liquid aerator, you won’t have bits of thatch and mud clogging up your lawn for weeks to come.
4. Incorporate hard landscaping
If you have a large garden, keeping it well maintained may seem like a full-time job. If you don’t have the time or the budget to keep it looking pristine, why not incorporate some hard landscaping? Stone patios, decorative rocks, and manmade paths can enhance your garden design and offer low-maintenance features that need minimal care.
5. Used raised pots and beds
Instead of planting flowers and shrubs directly into the ground, opt for raised flowerbeds, containers and pots. By having a defined boundary, you can prevent overgrowth more easily. Furthermore, when your plants are in raised containers, you have more control over the amount of water and nourishment they receive. This makes it easier to keep them healthy and reduces the amount of work needed to keep your garden looking great.
Cultivating a Low-Maintenance Garden
If you’re unsure how to achieve a low-maintenance garden, don’t hesitate to seek professional advice. An experienced gardener or landscaper will be able to help you create a garden of your dreams that’s easy to maintain. As an integral part of your property, your outdoor space should be somewhere that you can enjoy. With the right design, your garden can become an outdoor oasis that complements your home.
I always have books around. I’ll be giving these to the beginning gardeners I know, except for Tom’s.
Beginning gardeners in the US are the focus of a variety of persuasive techniques. Last April, I posted about how dubious websites and silly memes try to convince people that they’re not just endangering their plants, they might be killing the world. Unfortunately, these often become viral, as people who have grown up depending on digital information spread this stuff without questioning it too much.
Gardeners who aren’t sure about mulching, garden clean-up, and other interventions would be well advised to put their devices down and go talk to a green industry professional. For the past ten years or so I’ve been trying to attend the yearly education days put on by our industry group, PlantWNY. Other than some master gardeners and a few longtime garden clubbers, this is mainly attended by the professionals and those in training who need CNLP (Certified Nursery and Landscape Professional) and other credits. It’s a very good event; speakers regularly travel in from all over; I have seen Michael Dirr, Tracy DiSabato-Aust, and many others talk at the event. This year, we benefited from the enthusiasm and knowledge of Susan Martin, who gave fun and insightful presentations on design and plant choice.
I wish more local gardeners came to these. If they had, however, some of them might have been taken aback by Martin’s characterization of the new generation of gardeners. She noted that gardeners coming into nurseries and garden centers for the first time these days come in without the inherited or partial knowledge and experience of their baby boomer predecessors, and you can see in their social media posts, where Japanese beetles might be labeled pollinators and fern spores as pests. They just don’t know.
In my view, the remedy for lack of knowledge is simple. Acquire knowledge, through classes, reading, talking to proven experts, whatever it takes. And then acquire experience. In the world of marketing, it’s a little different. There, one can’t assume that knowledge or the desire to acquire it is present. The strategy? Accept and encourage ignorance. First off, forget about using botanical names or maybe even any name—label plants for what they do, like “yellow flowers all summer in partial shade” or “grows to eight feet with white flowers in spring and orange berries in fall.” The idea is to talk people into gardening by implying they won’t need to know anything. In the trade, this is necessary; I am told would-be clients walk in saying they don’t know anything and don’t want to do anything.
But those who intend to maintain a garden without a weekly crew are going to have to learn something. I had to. Something’s going to happen in that garden full of foolproof plants and somebody will have to deal with it—probably by doing as little as possible. The more knowledge and experience, you have the less you have to do. It’s a big benefit! I have seen so many frantic Facebook posts with one brown leaf, leggy flowers, minor insect damage, or many other situations when the answer is “cut it off or ignore it.” Knowing the botanical names of plants can also be key.
Get a clue, beginning gardeners. Don’t let others dumb everything down. They may have taken the word “write” out of the garden writers professional organization, but books can still work, extension websites tend to have correct information, and the smart pros at the nursery can help more by giving real names and real info rather than pointing to the pretty yellow flowers.
I’ve held off ranting about the examples of sheared shrubs that I see in my town, but no more. Hey, I’m just agreeing with the experts. I Googled “shearing shrubs” and found:
If Mother Nature had intended shrubs to be square, she would have created them that way. Yet humans persist in trying to render a free-growing plant into geometric perfection.
So there’s the obvious aesthetic objection – the plants don’t LOOK as good, at least in the eyes of most plant-lovers. Correct pruning not only looks better but is much less work.
Maureen’s mentor taught her that “The shrub should never look as though it’s been pruned….And if done properly, you rarely have to prune at all,” adding that “he knew from 50 years in the field just how much work results when shrubs are sheared rather than pruned.” Exactly!
Many folks like the look of sheared plants but they lose their characteristic shapes and lateral buds along the stems are stimulated to produce even more new growth. It can also reduce flowering.
And they show how to do it correctly.
The late, awesome Cass Turnbull, founder of PlantAmnesty.org tackles the subject thoroughly in “Don’t Shear: Why Johnny Can’t Prune.” Starting with the point that shearing is “unhealthy for plants” and “subverts plant’s natural beauty,” she goes on to pose an interesting question – why the landscape industry has persisted in the practice of shearing.
The resulting maintenance costs [from shearing], when compared to those of selectively pruned shrubs, are high. This is the case with all pruning art, including pollarding, pleaching, cloud pruning, and espalier. They all require high maintenance, with specific species chosen purposely to create a formal garden or garden element… .
The problem with shearing most plants is that shearing stimulates watersprout regrowth that is unattractive and needs to be re-sheared frequently to keep the plant looking tidy—sometimes as often as eight times a year. But selectively pruned plants need to be pruned only once every one-to-five years.
She asks, “Why does shearing persist even among the larger, more successful companies? If it is wrong and it costs more, why does it continue to be the industry standard? Why, why, why?” The answer seems to be that “There is almost an instinctive affinity for shearing in the unenlightened” because shearing makes the “everything look tidy and under control.”
The solution she suggests is better marketing. “Selective pruning could be sold to new customers as an alternative to traditional shearing, saying that it costs less, is better for plant health, uses no carbon emissions (gasoline), and requires no noisy equipment. Selective pruning can be called natural target pruning, fine pruning, or aesthetic pruning. Brag on the company’s horticulturally knowledgeable staff and their ability to use the natural pruning technique. These are things that many customers are already seeking.” Brilliant!
Here are a few of the shrubs I see sheared in my neighborhood.
This photo of a sheared Nandina at an apartment building near me demonstrates an additional pruning no-no – making the top of the plant wider than the base (thereby limiting light that reaches the base). I should send them Southern Living’s “Pruning 101: How to Prune Nandina” for a healthier plant.
Some Support for Shearing
In fairness, not everyone online bashes shearing. C.L. Fornari writes about “The Beauty of Sheared Shrubs, focusing on the shrubs that can handle it: boxwood, Japanese holly and yews.
This Old House offers “5 Design Ideas for Sheared Shrubs that, in my experience, grossly underplays the expense and difficulty of using shrubs for screening: “A beautiful wall of greenery is less expensive to construct than a wall of brick or stone.”
Compared to brick or stone? Maybe. But I’ve wasted untold bucks on shrubs that failed to provide screening and finally resorted to having wooden screens constructed at a fraction of the cost, with no maintenance required (thanks to the use of colored stains, not paint).
Allegheny spurge (Pachysandra procumbens) on the High Line in New York City last month.
I have a soft spot for forsaken plants. The Allegheny spurge quickly comes to mind. Pachysandra procumbens should, without hesitation, be planted in more shady gardens.
Do not spurn this spurge.
There are hundreds of worthy plants and seeds, hidden in the shadows, of dozens of 2020 garden catalogs. These shy introverts may be lacking only a little sizzle.
Here’s your chance for an award-winning plant description. All you have to do is write a short, I-must-have-this-plant description about your favorite nowhere-near-loved-enough perennial, tree, shrub or edible plant. Leave your description in the reply box below.
I will judge entries and recognize the best two descriptions here on this post, next Wednesday. The winning entrant will have their choice of one of two grand prizes. The first option is a piece of Pachysandra procumbens ‘Angola’ dug from my garden. I’ll ship a small plant in April. The 2nd option is a copy of Planting in a Post-Wild World, a book full of provocative design ideas and substantive plant suggestions, written by Thomas Rainer and Claudia West. Author and entomologist Doug Tallamy described the book as the “universal how-to guide” and a “masterful accomplishment.”
Here are a few homework tips before you tackle the first Garden Rant Challenge of 2020.
Keep it short.
I wrote nursery and seed catalog copy for over 35 years. Advertising doctrine once suggested that a good photo might be worth a thousand words. I no longer think the word count part of that analogy holds. My impression is that readers these days seldom take time to read 200 words—for anything. Blame it on Digital Distraction Disorder. I should have focused on photography.
Be as cutesy as you want, but be careful.
In the mid-1980s I offered a tulip variety in the Holbrook Farm and Nursery fall catalog called ‘Clara Butt.’ I dreamed that thousands of customers would plant Ms. Butt in gardens across America. I felt confident that my customers would hang onto every word of my description. If they had, they would claim spring dominion by yelling across the garden fence: “Howdy neighbor…Guess what? Clara Butt’s up!”
Clara Butt did not come up and never caught on.
Don’t get hung up on the whole truth.
Planting in a Post-Wild World authors, Rainer and Wild, tell the truth about Pachysandra procumbens. ‘The Allegheny spurge adopts a conservative growth strategy, focusing on slowly spreading under limited light conditions.” This is code for: pokey in the shade.
Mark Twain wasn’t tied to the truth. He once said, “Never let the truth stand in the way of a good story.”
Plant nurseries and seed companies have to pay their light bills. A few plant details, a little storytelling and a good photograph—when coupled well together—will help keep the lights on.
Tony Avent of Plant Delights Nursery knows how to let loose with plant descriptions. You know immediately how passionately Tony feels toward the plants he writes about. The full truth may be withheld sometimes, but that’s OK.
Tony found an Allegheny spurge far from the Alleghenies near the gates of the notorious Angola prison in Louisiana. The cultivar is appropriately named ‘Angola’. Pachysandra procumbens has a natural range over a wide swath of Eastern North America.
Tony writes, “Most Pachysandra procumbens in the trade are from cooler climates, so when we stumbled across this attractive clone near the gates of Louisiana’s Angola Prison in spring 1999, we thought…well, we thought we’d better get the hell out of there, but not without a piece of this attractive heat-loving clone. After six years, this selection had made a stunning 4′ wide clump in our garden. The new foliage on Pachysandra procumbens ‘Angola’ is heavily patterned pewter against the olive-green base color, making an attractive combination. Starting in early March (NC), the patches are adorned with a stunning floral show of masses of sweetly fragrant 4″ tall stalks of white, bottlebrush-like flowers. This is hands down the earliest and best flowering clone of Pachysandra procumbens we’ve ever seen…great when used as a groundcover in the woodland garden.”
I claim pachysandra kinship through my late mother. She was the undisputed queen of homegrown pachysandra growers. Mom rooted cuttings of the common, evergreen Japanese spurge (Pachysandra terminalis) and stuck them in shady spots every chance she got. Mom would try any plant once, but she wasn’t crazy about the Allegheny spurge. (Admittedly, she never grew ‘Angola’.)
“What about the silver-gray mottled leaves in late winter and early spring?” I asked.
“The leaves are not shiny green like my pachysandra,” she said.
“Do you like the little white blooms?”
She rubbed her chin and said, “I guess they’re okay, if you like flowers that resemble a limp bottle cleaner brush, but they are fragrant. I’ll give you that.”
I had an ace in the hole: “But it’s native, mom!”
She answered, “Yeah, right. So is southern blight.”
Do me a favor. Ignore my mom’s comments.
Don’t let the truth, nothing but the truth, get in the way of your good plant descriptions.
“Fasten your horticultural seatbelts.” That was the gist of what Dr. Bethany Bradley told me when I interviewed her for my podcast last month. Dr. Bradley is an invasion ecologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She studies how ecosystems react to human-driven changes, in particular the interaction of invasive species (primarily plants) and climate change. Her point was that as serious as the impact of invasive plants have been on our natural areas to date, climate change is likely to bring far more profound problems.
That shouldn’t be surprising. Invasive cheatgrass has already increased the violence and frequency of wildfires in the American West; flourishing during wet seasons, it produces lots of biomass which dries to serve as fuel during droughts. Japanese stiltgrass could theoretically have a similar sort of effect in the East.
Another too-common woodland invasive, Japanese barberry, still sold in Connecticut nurseries (By OpioÅ‚a Jerzy (Poland) – Own work, CC BY 2.5, https://ift.tt/2uWZcVO)
Climate change enhances the impact of existing invasive plants by disrupting ecosystems that may already be struggling. A warming climate can impair the growth of cold-adapted native plants, opening opportunities for further infiltration by the current crop of invasives. What’s more, according to Dr. Bradley, it may also help to transform exotic plants that have been non-invasive up to this point into more aggressive spreaders. That’s because a large proportion of the foreign plants introduced into northern gardens come from warmer regions where the species diversity is greater and so the plant hunting is richer. Such southerners may have been held in check by a cooler climate when introduced into northern regions of North America. As the climate warms, however, that brake will be released.
Gardeners, who are responsible for introducing a disproportionate share of invasive plants, can, according to Dr. Bradley, play a role in ameliorating this situation. If we began to cultivate native plant species from our own southern regions, we could assist in what is likely to become a natural process, the migration of the southern native flora northward. Essentially, we would be spreading the seeds of a healthier ecosystem adaptation. Our focus on such southern species could also cause local nurseries in the north to stock such plants. That could lead even ecologically unconcerned gardeners to take them home and unwittingly do their part.
How about some medium grasses?”
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