As you may know, I’ve moved and am starting new gardens. As I took a few plants from my old house, I made a mental note of the things I was happy to leave behind. Ha! No more Adenophera! Goodbye bindweed! And that invasive bronze-colored plant with three leaflets that was a Sunny Border Gold plant one year and I now it pops up everywhere? Good riddance to bad rubbish. In the new garden I won’t have to deal with these thugs.

Right.

The new property has plenty of bindweed already in residence. There is Smilax and poison ivy everywhere. The bronze leaf plant just might be gone from my life if I am careful to watch every transplanted daylily for signs of it, but there are weeds galore on Poison Ivy Acres, and wasn’t I foolish to think that it might be otherwise.

We humans are always thinking that the next relationship or the next work place will be perfect. We imagine that someone else’s family/boss/life is problem free and that new gardens will be less work, more beautiful and have fewer weeds.

But here’s the thing: my new property is filled with wonders. The dragonflies are magnificent, there are toads on patrol in the gardens and so far, all of the trees we’ve put in are growing. There are a hundred small miracles for every weed. In our gardens and in our lives, grace grows with the poison ivy.

One of my new garden areas is a garden that features fragrant plants and those that rustle in the wind: a garden of scents and sounds. So far I’ve planted a witch hazel, a sweetbay magnolia, a mock orange, a lilac, some Cimicifuga ‘Brunette’ and three each of the “Lemon Drop” and “Lollipop” azaleas.  Oh…and a group of three “Hummingbird” clethera, a “Jacob Cline” monarda and a “Summer Ice” Daphne.  For sound, a Green Panda bamboo and some ‘Prairie Sky’ Panicum.  So the main plants are in, and if I plant more shrubs they have to be low to the ground.  I need more plants with purple and yellow foliage, and some that are evergreen….maybe sweet box once the other plants are large enough to provide some shade.  

And next year I’ll put in lavender, roses and annuals.  

But it’s the first of July tomorrow and there are still about 75 plants in pots near and on my driveway that still need to be planted.  I’m thinking that I need to stop buying plants. As of now, this minute. 

This is what gardeners are really good at: working on and appreciating the garden that they have at present while planning and looking forward to next year’s garden even before the current season is mid-way through. And so it is with my fragrant garden - as I’m planting I’m also planning ahead. 

Wishing you all regular rain through July and August, C.L.

Recently I helped a customer in the garden center. “How about this white Gaura?” she asked. I told her that it was a great perennial that bloomed over the summer and into the fall. And then, to be completely honest, I added “The pink forms don’t usually make it through the winter here, and the white ones are short-lived, they last two or three years in the garden. But both add that lightness and motion you’re looking for.” The customer wasn’t interested in a perennial that only lived two or three years.

I understand that many people want reliable plants. But frankly, with all plants there are no guarantees. And many of my customers won’t plant cosmos, ‘Blue Horizon’ Ageratum or other flowering plants that would extend the color in their perennial beds because they “Don’t want to bother with annuals.”  Many people regard annuals as more work than perennials, and shun them for that reason. But as any experienced gardener knows, a perennial garden can be the most high maintenance garden we can plant. And what is wrong with that? Why can’t we just acknowledge that life takes effort?

Gardening, like life itself, is a balance of working for the future and being in the moment, and sometimes we can be more attentive to the present, while at other times we need to put more attention on the future. 

I’m trying not to buy too many more plants this year, since I already have a nursery’s worth of shrubs and perennials that still need to get planted in the ground. But you can be sure that Gaura and other short-lived plants will be on my list for next year.

I Love the Colette Climbing rose. As I’ve mentioned in just about every post,  I’ve recently moved my gardens to a new property, and part of that move was deciding which plants that I HAVE to have again, and which ones I’m happy to leave behind. Well one that I had to immediately buy again was the Colette climbing rose.

Why do I love it? Well first of all, it is a reliable repeat bloomer…none of this namby-pamby routine like New Dawn, where the tag SAYS that it reblooms but it really doesn’t. NO, Colette keeps producing new flowers all summer AND they are a full, frilly old-fashioned rose form that is fragrant!  A beautiful peachy pink color. And did I mention that they are fragrant? 

Like all climbers, after the second or third year in the garden you should prune one of the oldest canes down to about six inches tall which will stimulate new canes growing from the base – this will help keep the plant covered with flowers from low to high. VERY disease resistant (I never spray to control blackspot – who has time?) and happy with only four hours of direct sun as long as that includes the noon hour. I do love this plant: the Colette Climbing Rose.

I’m planting like crazy in my new gardens…a front perennial bed is just about finished, and more shrubs and trees go in every day.  I’m trying to get the big stuff in first: specimen trees, screening plants and many shrubs. A few of these new plants I’m buying large, but many I’m buying small. I want to be able to look at the photos and say “Oh! Look at how small that Cotinus was when I planted it!”  

I am not as limber a gardener as I was when I started my last garden 15 years ago. After speaking to a woman’s group this afternoon I came home and planted the following: 15 Campanula poscharskyana (Serbian Bellflower), 3 “Lee’s Purple” Rhododendrons and 17 Geranium cantabrigiense ‘Bikovo’. Then I potted up 15 Calamintha nepetoides that were just too shrimpy to put directly into the perennial border. I watered a few newly planted trees and after that I was pooped. But such a feeling of satisfaction!

As I worked in the garden the wind finally died down and I watched the birds coming back and forth to the feeder. I get the biggest kick out of the crows - I think the best garden ornaments are a few shiny, black American crows strutting through the plants and generally showing themselves off. 

The garden is far from finished. It will take several years to get all the areas planted. It is such a perfect process, however, whether I’m limber or not. 

As we approach Mother’s Day I think, as always, that it seems a holiday that is promoted by the greeting card and cut flower industries. Are there special days for positions that we really respect after all?  Is there a “Doctor’s Day” or a “Movie Star Day”? Is there an “Oprah” day?  

This gets me wondering if there are any people who automatically get respect in this day and age, and I’m thinking perhaps not.  And then, being a gardener, I start to wonder about the plants that get no respect. The Oak trees, for example. These are the trees that built this country and yet people view them as large weeds that take up space that could be filled with a spring flowering crabapple or dogwood. In Oak - the frame of civilization by William Bryant Logan, he talks about the central place that the oak has played in this country. A good read.

And how about the weeds that hold the soil on roadsides?  Not to mention the scores of plants that clean air and soil without any fanfare at all. 

It is spring, and time to celebrate Mother’s Day… AND, I hope, the amazing world around us.  Let’s get out of the card shop or florist’s and into the outdoors. 

As I plant the gardens at our new house I’m reminded how tastes change. I take the weeping pear (Pyrus salicifolia) out of its pot and put site it so that it’s framed by the three Irish yews behind it, and remember that about 15 years ago I told my husband that “I don’t like weeping plants.”  And the yellow-foliaged plants that are repeated through my lakeside perennial border are reminders that I once thought all plants with yellow foliage looked sick…now I can’t get enough of them! 

I once planted the garden with my focus on the color of the flowers and their blooming period, aiming for a show of flowers from spring to fall.  Now I still include that range of flowering times, but I place plants according to their foliage color and texture, and the flowers are almost a secondary consideration. 

In the garden and in life we are constantly called on to change - to examine our opinions and occasionally change them. 

It is May - “Gifts from the Garden Month” - and one of the gifts that the garden gives me is to keep me flexible.
 

      In the spring it’s easy to get seduced by the wide selection of plants in the garden centers. The many pass-along plants available at garden club sales are also tempting, and there are shovelfuls of free offerings from friends and neighbors. But free or not, do you really want these plants?

       The best practice is to match the right plant for the right location; if a plant is happy where you’ve placed it, it will be more likely to grow well and be less work for you. A perennial or shrub that likes sun won’t do as well in deep shade, for example, and plants that get windburn won’t thrive in exposed locations.

       Those offerings at plant sales are likely to be perennials that either self-seed or need frequent dividing. They might be fine if you’re the type who likes to work in the garden, but if you want a low-maintenance landscape there are better choices for you.

       And beware of falling for a plant based on flowering alone. Most plants in this region are in blossom for a short period of time, and may or may not look good before or after bloom. So what’s a home-landscaper to do?  Research.

       A trip to the local garden center, library or bookstore can help you make the right choice.  So when someone asks “Do you want this plant?” the answer should be, “Maybe…let me look into it.”

When I was in the 5th grade in Muncie, Indiana, we had a television in the classroom. This was a big deal back then…a pilot program. There were educational programs broadcast from a plane - early satellite television I guess.  In any case, the program that I remember 45 years later is one that showed how to take a cutting of a geranium.  You could grow more plants from a stem! I was impressed. Later that year we had to pick a science fair project, and I decided to do something with plants - I grew beans and covered each pot with a different color film to see if the color made a difference in how the plants grew. 

What I wonder now is how much the geranium cutting program influenced my choice of science fair project, and how much these activities contributed to my love of plants today. 

When you expose kids to information about plants and gardening, you never know what seeds you are planting. What are you doing to create future gardeners?